Your client veers off course. Your clientele tend to zig. Your client will zigzag their way to a final purchase decision. Throughout almost every stage of the sales process, regardless of whether we are discussing business-to-business or business-to-consumer sales.
It does not matter whether the content is generated offline, online, using owned digital assets, third-party websites, or earned. media. From the perspective of your consumer, there are no longer any “channels.”
Their cognitive processes are not capable of distinguishing if they were exposed to your message in a newspaper, at a trade fair, or online. Every interaction with the brand should be treated as a touchpoint for the brand.
Every interaction with your brand and its goods or services leaves a customer feeling differently about you and what you provide. It is the accumulation of these many experiences that prompts them to either include you in their consideration set or remove you from it.
In the end, this also leads them to their ultimate choice on whether or not to buy from you, your rival, or to keep things as they are and not make any purchases at all. To help you reinforce your marketing along the way, acquire more consumers, and generate more revenue, let’s dig into the nuts and bolts of customer journey mapping. With this in mind, let’s go into the nuts and bolts of customer journey mapping.
It’s All About the Customer Experience These Days
The customer experience will supersede price and quality as the primary difference between brands by the year 2020, according to the Customers 2020 research that was compiled by the customer intelligence company Walker Information.
This differential results in actual income being generated. Forrester has undertaken a number of studies that indicate huge revenue gains (in some instances, exceeding one billion dollars in yearly additional revenue) that organizations obtain when they enhance the customer experience.
The gist of the matter is this. If you provide a terrible experience for your consumer at any stage along their trip, you will be in for a nasty awakening. If you provide an outstanding experience for a customer, not only will you likely keep that customer as a client for many years to come, but that client will likely persuade other people to become your clients for many years to come as well.
It is now absolutely necessary to provide an excellent client experience in order for a marketing plan to be successful, and what better approach is there to guarantee a wonderful experience than with a customer journey map?
How to Get Started With Mapping Out Your Customer Journey
Before making a purchase of your goods or services, the consumer completes a series of steps in your sales process. A customer journey map is an excellent tool for getting started in the process of comprehending the customer’s experience throughout the process.
You won’t be able to start enhancing the experience or better satisfying the desires and requirements of your clients unless you have a deep grasp of each of those things. What better approach is there to get into the head and heart of your consumer than to sketch out the experience they have with your company?
Maps of the customer journey provide a deeper understanding of the various stages of the sales funnel as well as of the thoughts that your customers have at each stage of the transaction. The process of visually mapping a customer’s connection with your company or product provides awareness to what the consumer sees, feels, and experiences while interacting with your company or product.
A map of the customer journey focuses on the experience from the point of view of the customer, while also defining user expectations and the needs of the company. This method generates transparency, which helps to prevent the harm to your company that may result from not recognizing a customer’s point of view in a clear and simple manner.
A Unique Quest for Each and Every Individual Client
For most firms, you don’t have just one target audience, but instead you have many audience groups. For instance, if you provide security software, you may divide your customer base according to the kind of business they are in or the size of your organization.
If you own a legal practice that specializes in real estate law, some of the people who may seek your services as clients include property developers, real estate agents, estate managers, companies, and individual house purchasers.
And even inside each target group, you can be dealing with many buyer personas at the same time. You may have younger customers vs older buyers in any certain group; you could have prospects from the United States against prospects from other countries; you could have Alpha Dogs versus followers; and so on.
If you do not intend to communicate with the various audience segments and personas in the same manner, there is no reason why your customer journey map should be the same for all of them. When it comes to customer journey maps, the paradigm that assumes one size fits all is ineffective.
Instead, design a unique map for each target. Your messaging is more likely to resonate with each potential customer and persuade them that you are the best option for them if it is tailored to the way each audience segment or persona thinks. The better, the more each map is aligned with the way each audience segment and/or persona thinks.
The process of mapping the customer journey is known as “experience design.”
The more a consumer engages with the sales process, the more emotionally engaged they will get in the transaction. You can’t say enough about how important it is to make sure that your clients get the right brain signals every time they interact with your brand.
According to Nielsen, the subconscious mind is responsible for making 90 percent of all purchasing decisions. Imagine “experience design” when you think of charting the consumer journey. It’s not easy to make a sale, so it’s important to plan, organize, and do things in a way that takes the whole picture into account.
You are a designer of experiences at every possible touchpoint, from making people aware of your product and getting them to think of new ways to use it to improving the after-sale process.
The Components That Make Up an Efficient Customer Journey Map
The following are some of the essential components that make up a customer journey map:
- Audience Subgroups and Characteristics. Understanding the ideas, aspirations, and expectations of each audience group as well as each distinct consumer persona is essential to the process of building your marketing and message in a manner that connects on a deeper, more subconscious level.
- Funnels. When trying to identify the drivers at the top of the funnel, it is essential to determine how the client was brought to a brand touchpoint. It is very useful to be aware of the exact marketing channels and messages that move a prospect from awareness to consideration, and then from serious consideration to purchase and love after the purchase.
- Emotions. Gain an understanding of the feelings that your consumer is experiencing as well as the feelings that you want to elicit in them at each level of the sales funnel. Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, conducted research on the human brain and found that it is difficult for a person to make a buying choice without emotion. In other words, the more positive emotional responses your potential consumers have to your marketing, the easier you make it for them to purchase from you.
- Obstacles in the Way of a Purchase. It is essential to your capacity to create sales that you discover the queries that are going through the heads of your prospective customers as well as the possible factors that led them to give up on the trip. To this aim, the common objections and obstacles to purchase that come up at each brand touchpoint should be included in your customer journey map.
- Facilitating Its Easy Digestion. The concept of mapping the customer journey is appealing in principle, but in practice, it may result in information overload if it is not carried out effectively. To this end, ensure that your customer journey map is straightforward, visually appealing, color coded for coherence, presented in a sequential flow, and kept uncomplicated. Doing so will make it easy to absorb the information contained within it, which in turn will make it simple to put into practice.
Summary
According to a report published by Forrester, we are now living in “The Age of the Customer,” which places an emphasis on the customer as the most important strategic element in propelling sales. Mapping the customer journey is the hands-on tool for understanding the customer experience.
It is a self-perpetuating machine that identifies ways at each stage of the process to remove barriers, answer the customers’ unspoken questions, and deliver an experience that is fulfilling on a subconscious level. Journey mapping is a visual solution that improves the total customer experience, which compels customers to make repeat purchases from a business and encourages them to persuade others to do the same.
Your client veers off course. Your clientele tend to zig. If you account for each of the audience groups and personalities that make up your target audience in your customer journey map, you will have a productive route that leads to happy customers and more income.
