The purpose of your website is to serve customers. It provides a way for them to interact with you, buy your products or services, and find answers to any questions they have about your company.
To design your website effectively, you need to understand your customer’s thought process and how they prefer to navigate the site.
That’s where customer journey mapping plays a key role.
It can be difficult to understand the minds of customers. You may think you have accounted for their wants and needs, but new technology, preferences, and buying trends can emerge.
Nearly 70% of online shoppers abandon their cart, according to Baymard Institute. A customer may spend hours adding products to their cart just to close the tab because it is taking them several steps to get from point A to point B. It should only take one step.
You probably don’t have a good understanding of the steps your customers take to purchase your product or service.
The customer journey is the process that customers go through when interacting with your company. It includes every touchpoint that a customer has with your brand, from awareness to purchase and beyond. Mapping the customer journey can help you understand what customers need and want, so you can give them a better experience. It can also help you identify problems and areas for improvement. To learn more about the customer journey, and how to map it, read on.
What Is a Customer Journey Map?
Mapping out the customer journey helps you to get a better understanding of the different touchpoints that customers have with your business, as well as how well those touchpoints are working.
This journey map is called the customer journey map. It visualizes all the different points of interaction between the customer and the company. This allows businesses to see things from their customer’s point of view in order to identify their needs, motivations, actions, and frustrations at every step.
You can map out a customer’s journey using something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet, but some companies prefer to use dedicated software to create more complex diagrams and tables.
In the broadest sense, customer journey mapping helps visualize the entire customer lifecycle, which can include:Â
- First hearing about your brandÂ
- Researching your productsÂ
- Visiting your siteÂ
- Comparison shoppingÂ
- Making a purchaseÂ
- Receiving a productÂ
- Contacting support for helpÂ
- Making a repeat purchaseÂ
- …and so onÂ
Using a broad approach, every touchpoint can be mapped, for example, in person, on social media, on a website, or via a phone call to customer service.
A customer journey map can be used for smaller, self-contained parts of the process, such as the shopping experience in one of your stores or your website.
A single website can have multiple customer journeys, each for a different purpose. For example, some visitors are there to buy a product, some need to find support, and others are looking to become your business partner.
This article will mainly focus on how to map a customer’s journey on your website.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a company. The map provides an understanding of the needs and concerns of potential customers which directly motivate or inhibit their actions. This information allows companies to boost customer experience leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer retention.
A company’s customer journey is the path that a customer takes as they interact with the company to achieve a goal. The journey can vary greatly from customer to customer, and it’s important for companies to remember that each customer’s experience is unique. A company shouldn’t make assumptions about the customer journey based on their own internal perspective.
The best way to understand the journeys of your customers is to ask them.
Why Is a Journey Map Important?
Although the customer journey may seem simple, companies offering products or services must take into account that 80% of customers consider their experience with the company to be just as important as the product itself. From the time a customer becomes aware of a product to the time of purchase, they go through the buyer’s journey, which is a more complex process than what is initially perceived.
The journey that customers take has different steps, or “stops”, that can influence their behavior. These include seeing ads, talking to customer service, or trying to check out. By understanding how each of these steps affects customer interactions, businesses can plan accordingly to increase the chances of making a sale.
A customer journey map is a way to visualize the customer journey. It can be helpful to refer to this map when discussing the customer journey with other employees.
The purpose of a customer journey map is to help you improve your website navigation and design a better user experience, not just to create a pretty chart.
There are several benefits to customer journey mapping for businesses, including:
-Gaining a better understanding of customer needs and expectations
-Improving customer satisfaction
-Increasing customer loyalty
-Reducing customer churn
-Improving marketing and sales effectiveness
-Increasing operational efficiency
Spot Drop-off Points and Navigation Issues
The most direct outcome of mapping your customer’s journey is that you can quickly see where they have problems on your site.
Is the visitor repeatedly clicking on multiple footer links in an attempt to find a specific file? This could be an indication that your website is not organized in a way that is easy for visitors to navigate. Do potential customers tend to quit your checkout process halfway through, because you don’t offer the right credit card payment options? If so, this could be losing you sales.
Customer journey maps can help you find places where customers are leaving your site, as well as any confusing internal links. Knowing this information can help you improve your site.
Evaluate Your Brand and Offers
Mapping your customer’s journey gives you valuable insights into what your brand, content, and offers are doing well and where they may need improvement. This, in turn, makes you better able to tailor your brand, content, and offers to the right visitors.
Let’s say you’ve designed your pricing page to get people to sign up for your premium plan. But after mapping your customer journey, you realize that most people actually use that page to start the free 10-day trial that’s included in your basic plan. You might want to restructure the page to highlight the free trial offer, with the option to upgrade to the premium plan after it expires.
You can figure out which products on your website are getting the most attention by looking at things like how many clicks they’re getting or what kind of content visitors are searching for. Once you know which items are popular, you can put them in a more prominent place on your website so they’re easier to find.
Uncover True Customer Intent
Customer journey mapping can help you understand why your customers visit your site, so you can fix any problems.
If you want to increase sales of the products featured on your website’s front page, you may need to re-evaluate your customer’s journey. Many website visitors only use the site to access firmware and prefer to buy products in person, using the website as more of an after-sales service.
If you are aware of what your customers want, you can design your website in a way that meets those needs. For example, if customer support is a priority, you might want to design your front page to include a chat widget that allows customers to communicate with support agents in real time.
Improve Customer Satisfaction and Retention
If you restructure your site to better align with what your visitors want, you can give them a much better experience that is free of stress. Customer journey mapping can help you figure out what they expect from you, so that you can give it to them instead of vice versa.
You’re likely to retain your customers if you listen to their needs–it’ll make them happy.
Increase Key Goals and Conversions
That way, you’re not just selling them something, you’re also making their lives a little bit better. In addition to benefiting your customers, customer journey mapping also has benefits for your business. If you know which offers are popular and what actions people intend to take, you can design the entire site experience around them. This way, you not only sell them something, but you also make their lives a little bit better.
Showing the right content at the right time makes people much more likely to interact with it. This results in more on-site engagement, less bouncing around between pages, more conversions, and other positive changes in key business metrics.
The Customer Journey Mapping Process
Mapping out a customer’s journey can help a company to see where there are potential problems or areas for improvement in the customer experience. By visualizing the customer experience, companies can more easily identify areas that need attention.
Through understanding the customer’s journey, businesses can adapt their practices to better serve their customers and ensure they are meeting their goals. A customer journey map allows businesses to see where improvements can be made to better support their customers.
Customer Journeys Are Not Linear
The customer journey usually cannot be represented as a straight line from one point to another because buyers often go back and forth, in a cycle, using multiple channels. This makes it hard to create a customer journey map that is accurate.
Business leaders use different methods to show the journey, from post-it notes to Excel Spreadsheets to infographics. The map should make sense to those who’ll be using it.
However, you can’t just start creating your customer journey map. You need to first collect data from your customers and prospects. The process of creating an effective customer journey map is extensive, but it’s worth it.
What’s Included in a Customer Journey Map?
The Buying Process
You’ll identify what actions the customer will take and how your business will interact with them during each stage. A customer journey map shows the steps that a customer takes to reach a goal, along with the interactions between the customer and the business at each stage.
User Actions
This element of the customer journey map explores the various ways your customers might achieve the goal of making a purchase, from speaking with friends and family about their needs in the awareness stage, to taking a demo on your website, to finally using cash or a debit card to make their purchase.
Emotions
It is important to remember that your customers are solving a problem and they are most likely feeling some emotion while doing so. If your process is long or complicated, they may feel a range of emotions at every stage. Adding these emotions to the journey map can help you mitigate negative emotions about the journey so that they do not become negative opinions about your brand.
Pain Points
If your customer is feeling negative emotions at any point during their journey, it’s likely because of a pain point. By mapping out where these pain points are, you can figure out which stage of the journey is causing frustration or dissatisfaction, and why.
Solutions
The last step in creating a customer journey map is to brainstorm ways to improve the buying process so that customers have a positive experience and fewer negative emotions.
What Is a Touchpoint in a Customer Journey Map?
Customer touchpoints are locations or instances where customers can form an opinion about your business. Touchpoints can be found in places where your business has direct contact with potential or existing customers, such as display ads, interactions with employees, or 404 errors.
Your brand is not just your website or marketing materials, so you need to consider all the different ways customers could interact with your brand (touchpoints) to identify opportunities to improve the customer journey.
You’ll need to use multiple analytics tools to create and improve your customer journey maps.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that does everything for you? That’s what Siteimprove Analytics is for. It provides insights to help you design, track, and improve your customer journeys.