And why you need to focus on it

You’ve heard of it before, but why customer journey mapping? What is it? And what benefits does it deliver?

Let’s find out.

Companies know that customers are their biggest asset; with no customers to buy products and services, there is no business. People who have a positive customer experience are more likely to be repetitive customers, pay more for products and services, and recommend that business to others.

In contrast, people who don’t have the best experience are more likely to leave and broadcast to others.

At first, a customer journey map might appear simple. The steps toward making a purchase might seem linear – you offer a product/service your customer wants or needs, they find it, and then buy it. In reality, however, it just doesn’t work that way most of the time.

Here are a few tips and tricks to help you better understand the basics and benefits of creating a customer journey map.

Why Is Customer Journey Mapping Important for Marketing and Sales?

With the right tools, marketing teams can gain insight into how they can enhance the customer experience and boost conversions.

Customer experience is crucial – consumers expect more from brands today. They expect a high level of personalization and relevancy. They believe their individualized needs should be known, understood, and addressed every step of the way.

That’s where a technology-backed customer journey process can help. With the power of a customer data platform, like Fulcrum, companies can leverage the Saas-based solution to do the following:

• Deploy real-time personalization
• Identify and enhance the customer journey and overall experience
• Boost conversion rates

Customer journey mapping is all about putting yourself in the mind of your customer and monitoring their experience (and modifying) for the best results and conversions. From inside the business, it can be difficult to see it the same way customers do on the outside.

That’s because we are typically too close to the operation to see it as it really is. You know how to navigate your website better than your customers because you see it daily, and perhaps you even built it yourself. This makes it difficult for you to see where any confusion may lie.

Why You Need to Focus on Developing Your Customer Journey:

Creating a customer journey map creates a more efficient experience. Imagine taking only 1-3 steps to get to your desired content/product instead of 3-5.

You can understand your customers better. To implement an effective customer journey, you need to understand your customers. This means you know how they behave, what they want, and more importantly, what they don’t want.

It helps you maximize your ROI. By taking a more scientific approach to your customer journey, you can sell more, create more engagement and speak to your customers in real-time. This will ultimately drive conversions and repetitive business.

Once you have a clear understanding of how the customer experiences your business, you will be able to successfully launch new products and services that yield immediate results.

It helps you identify customer pain points. You might not realize just how many pain points there are for your customers, but once you put yourself in their shoes, you can fix issues before they become issues.

Six Customer Journey Mapping Tips to Follow

Getting your customer journey right is crucial. Previously, businesses were focused and competing on products or price, today, businesses must focus and champion the experience.

With solutions like Fulcrum, businesses now have the tools to create seamless digital experiences for customers in a way that wasn’t possible in the past.

Additionally, customers now have a 1:1 relationship with the businesses they engage with and buy from.

Customers now understand their importance. They are extremely valuable to each business and have the power to choose where they spend their money and demand a more customized experience. Although this might have always been the case, now it is especially true today due to the increasingly global nature of business.

Before the internet, customers were restricted to choosing select products locally or maybe splurging on some national businesses. Today the whole world is available and making noise to grab customer’s attention.

Here’s how you can focus on elevating your customers’ experience with Fulcrum Journey Optimizer:

1. Understand Your Desired Journey: Do you want to create more real-time personalization to speak directly to your users? Do you want to convert more users buying through your website? Do you want to increase click-throughs from email marketing? Or more conversions from social media? Where are the areas that you can improve to deliver a better experience to your customer? Are you able to understand where all users are in the funnel and speak to them directly at each of those stages? These are all questions you should be asking.
2. Create Buyer Personas and Segmentation: You need to identify your specific users and create unique personas. By creating a profile on who your customers really are, you can accurately design your customer journey map by segmenting users and displaying relevant content. Remember, it is extremely unlikely that you will only have one profile of the buyer. It’s much more likely that your business has many types of buyers, and it’s your job to document, analyze, and understand these buyers and their motivations. Different types of buyers have different ways of doing the same thing, but they also have different goals. Without creating personas, you risk falling short of meeting the expectations of these groups.
3. Make Your Map into Sections: It’s great to have a high-level view of the whole customer journey, but you should also create more detailed maps of the different stages of the customer journey. For example, what happens before the customer comes to your website? Did their journey begin with a Google Ad or an Instagram post? What happens after they have completed a purchase? Do they get a confirmation email? What about other interactions in the future? How often will you engage and send marketing emails after a purchase?
4. Think About all Your Customer Touchpoints: Touchpoints are anywhere the customer might interact with your brand. This could be a physical store, a website, social media, online reviews, live chat, text messages, and more. Research has shown a direct correlation between the number of touchpoints and the likelihood of a customer buying from a business. The more touchpoints you have and have thought through, the more customers you will get in the long run.
5. Build the Content and Campaigns that Speak Directly to Your Customers: The more you are able to communicate with your customers in real-time, the better that will engage with your business and become loyal. Who wants to go to a website and see the same homepage banner each time? Customers yearn for simplicity. They expect to get to their desired destination quickly to make purchases. Mapping out the journey and developing targeted campaigns based on their frequency, interests, and paths will ultimately lead to more conversions.
6. Get the Right Tools for the Job: In order to create an accurate customer journey map, you need to think through the above steps as well as invest in the right technology. There are really three simple platforms you need in order to execute, monitor and modify your engagement with customers: an email service provider, a customer relationship management system, and then a customer data platform (such as Fulcrum). By adding the right tools to your marketing tech stalk, you will be able to create real-time personalization, enhance your user experience and convert more.

Get Started on Your Customer Journey Map

You now have a better understanding of the importance of customer journey mapping and how to start building the ultimate customer experience. Refer back to this blog as needed or reach out to Fulcrum’s dedicated team to get a demo around how our customer data platform can help make your job way easier.

We are here to help you on this journey.