Customer journey mapping

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Mapping your customer’s journey through the buying cycle is key to understanding their trajectory through the buying cycle. From the way clients find out about your company’s products and services, to how they consider their options, to how they decide to buy, you can’t really optimise your marketing unless you understand the nuances, milestones, and data required at each stage of their journey.

Getting an accurate picture of how your company interacts with leads is increasingly more difficult given the digital marketing landscape. Your customers are exposed to thousands of messages each day, across an ever-increasing range of channels. Some of the messages are crafted for their stage of preparedness to buy, but many are not. And no two leads or customers behave exactly the same: it can take two customers with exactly the same profile and level of interaction with your business a widely-varying amount of time (and touchpoints) to decide tom ake a purchase.

This is precisely why customer journey mapping is so important! The more clear your picture of how your customers interact with a page, the more likely you are to be able to optimise and improve that journey so that your leads turn into clients – and in less time.

Benefits to mapping your customer journey

By creating a customer journey map, you’ll be able to:

Learn about where leads discover your business
Understand how customers interact with your business and your messages across the marketing funnel
Improve the customer’s experience by providing optimum customer service across all your touch points (from email marketing to content marketing and social media) and enable lead nurture campaigns
Gather customer feedback on common pain points
Improve the experience for your leads and customer base
Find opportunities for cross-selling and upselling

Marketing automation and customer journey mapping

Marketing automation platforms enable marketers to get a clear, easy-to-understand visual representation of their user journey map. While no platform or tool can provide or capture 100% of the nuances in any customer journey, the visual and data-based mapping provided by marketing automation can provide the detail necessary to build personalised, detailed customer journeys across your marketing.

By mapping your customer journey with marketing automation, you’ll be able to:

Go beyond understanding how you acquire leads to how they move through the lead cycle
Define your lead qualification stages by understanding which leads move through the funnel, how quickly they move through the funnel
Automate processes to ensure that leads move through your funnel as smoothly and quickly as possible
Drive conversion rates by improving lead velocity and closing more sales

How to map your customer journey

Define your objectives – Make sure you understand the reason for mapping your customer journey: what goals are you basing the map on? Who will be included in this process? What kinds of experiences or actions are you tracking in this map? And who is your buyer persona – do you know their goals, objectives, fears, motivators and triggers?
List personas and identify their goals – Find out as much as you can about your user personas to inform the customer journey! Find out where they discovered your business, what drew them to you in the first place, how much time they spend on the website and what has made them decide to purchase from you, what has stopped them from purchasing from you, how easy is it to navigate the site, and how they feel you can improve.
Sketch out the touchpoints – Identify and list where your customers and leads are interacting with you (and, just as importantly, where they are NOT interacting with you). What social channels, paid ads, email marketing, or sites are driving interactions? Where are interactions dropping off? This will help you determine if you have enough touchpoints or too many touchpoints, or whether the user experience is clear and progresses your leads through the marketing funnel to your end goal.
Decide what you want to see in the map – Do you want to see the actions of your customers as they interact with your business, or do you want an overview of their daily activities so you can address any unmet needs? Do you want to set up a future state journey to predict a new user journey, or create a service map to examine the current experience of your customers with each of your departments or stakeholders?
Test your journey yourself – Put yourself in each buyer persona’s position and test how you progress from one stage to the next through each user journey you’ve crafted. Are there any pain points that need to be improved or addressed, or any optimisations that you can make?
Adjust – Customer journey mapping is a work in progress: adjust now, adjust later… and then prepare and plan to adjust some more. Keep testing your journeys on a regular basis and examine your analytics to obtain insight on how your maps need to be adjusted.

Get expert advice

Our certified and award-winning team of marketing automation consultants have experience building customer journeys across a range of B2B business models and industries. We’ll use marketing automation tools and your current martech stack to gather necessary data and:

Provide visibility of key stages– your customer journey mapping will allow you to see the key stages and milestones of each of your customers journeys with both general and granulary insights
Research and design possible journeys – depending on the marketing maturity of your strategy, you may or may not have an idea of what the journey should be. Our experts will help you research and design what your user journeys should be, regardless of your platform’s marketing maturity.
Provide marketing insights your entire team can use – customer journey mapping isn’t just about understanding what we can automate and deliver; we’ll also provide your marketing team with an action plan to improve personalisation – and the entire user experience – for your buyer personas across all channels and campaigns.
Enable conversion reporting – we can help you face the pressure of reporting on marketing ROI by enabling reporting to justify your marketing spend across the entire buyer journey.
Reduce cost per conversion – by focusing your efforts on an optimised customer journey, you’ll benefit from lower conversion costs, both at the point of acquisition and throughout the entire funnel