Why do people connect with your brand? What compels them to buy from you?
Answering these questions can help you enhance the profitability of your ecommerce website. And building customer journey maps for your business is key to finding those answers.
This nifty little tool can help you make loyal customers out of visitors and keep old customers coming back for more.
That is why you need to understand your customers using a customer journey map. It helps you improve your products and services by understanding and connecting with potential and existing customers. So, it would be best to design customer journey maps to ensure the long-term success of your business.
What Is A Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a complete visual representation of how customers contact your brand while purchasing. It also shows online and offline customers’ experiences on your website.
Why Businesses Need Customer Journey Maps?
Customer journey maps help you understand your customer’s perspective while using your online services. When customers are satisfied with your services, it increases revenue, reduces marketing costs, and shortens the sales cycle. Additionally, you learn to stay consistent when providing a good customer experience and to gain customer loyalty.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map?
Creating a customer map is pretty easy by following these simple steps:
Set Clear Goals
Before creating the map, you must know the objectives behind making it. For this, get feedback from every employee directly in touch with your customers. You can also choose a digital platform to accumulate everyone’s perspective and study the results later.
Research Customer Persona
Now its time to know who your buyers are. Collect data through:
- Interviews
- Telephone or email Surveys
- Approaching existing customers
- Going through feedback and complaint logs
- Monitor social media
From all the collected data, find out:
- How did customers find your brand
- How many times and why do customers cancel an order
- Can they easily navigate through your website
- What problems your brand does and doesn’t solve
Determine Who Your Target Audience Is
The previous research should give you a good understanding of who likes your brand and buys from you online. Ideally, you should have more than one buyer personas to cater to.
You should know these people inside-out and then determine how you will sell to them. Make sure to build separate customer journey maps for all your buyer personas.
It is better to select the most common customer persona for your first map. Then, in the map, list down the best route for them when engaging with your business for the first time.
Map Out Customer Touchpoints
Customer touchpoints are the customers’ journey maps on your website. They show how customers interact on business site and their experience. You map out all the current touchpoints customers use and the ones you think they are using.
These touchpoints show whether customers are leaving your site early or not. Moreover, are they having trouble finding what they came looking for? With a customer journey map, you understand customers’ ease or difficulty while resolving their issues.
Customers’ Pain Points & Motivations
There are always emotions and motivations behind every customer purchase, and a successful purchase depends upon those emotions. Every purchase has a pain point that compels people to buy a product or service. Your brand needs to access that pain point. The customer journey map tells you why customers are not using your service despite relieving their pain points.
These obstacles can be cost, shipping charges, or wrong website design. Highlighting these issues leads you toward finding their solutions.
Gather Resources
When you are well-acquainted with every issue, you will move on to gathering resources to resolve them. But before acquiring new resources, check the previous ones you have. Then, after gathering all of them, predict their impact on your business.
Take Customer Journey
Before implementing the changes, go on the customer journey yourself and check if they are effective or not. Take every step your customers may take to determine whether the upgraded version resolves all issues or not.
Make Further Changes
After analyzing the website, note down in the map if some issues are persisting. Then find their solutions and implement them. Again, make sure to check their effectiveness.
A customer journey map is a constant work-in-progress. Therefore, you need to create one to ensure that previous issues get left in the past. Additionally, you will find any new problems affecting your customer’s buying experience.
Conclusion
A customer journey map visually represents the issues affecting your shopping experience. It helps in determining the obstacles and finding solutions to resolve them. That is why you should create a customer journey map after one or two months to stay well connected with your customers.
Moreover, it is better to use an online platform to make the customer journey map. This way, you can easily track all the steps while also sharing them with your team.
