ShivaniDo you know what is a customer journey and why you need one? A customer journey is basically a story about knowing your users, how they respond when they visit your website, and what you can do to enhance their journey, so they keep coming back. Today, we all hear that B2B and B2C companies update relevant with excellent content using SEO. Still, in the method, many executives ignore the essential part of the equation—the customer.
This post will provide you with an in-depth look at everything you require to know about how your customers behave each time they connect with your brand.
What is a Customer Journey?
When you say “the customer journey,” you outline different behavioral scenarios employing existing data.
Designing a customer journey template may seem like a crazy idea. How can you probably know what a customer will behave once they set foot in your store or enter your website?
Believe it or not, this is a simple to use marketing tool anyone can design, and it can be valuable to your organization’s future strategy.
With continuous changes in technology and the new ways people purchase products or services online, it’s necessary to plan and anticipate how a customer will behave every step of the way.
The last thing you want to do is set your aims using outdated expectations.
The Importance of a Customer Journey Map
Employing a customer journey map to examine user behavior supports an organization to know how their customers travel through the complete sales process and how they feel during their time there.
This method provides two major benefits:
- It enables decision-makers to stay focused on customers.
- It helps make each step of the purchasing experience easier for potential leads.
You can have the best marketing team, but you won’t grow if your customers aren’t satisfied.
How to Map Out a Customer Journey Step-by-step
The most crucial aspect of designing a compelling user journey map is to look at the process from the customer’s aspect. You will require two types of research to achieve this goal:
Analytical research
Utilizing your website’s analytics will show you exactly where the consumers are, how much time they spend with you, and when they leave. We will explain later what tools you should use to track user-generated content and place the data into an easy-to-interpret stream of information.
Anecdotal research
Obtaining this data is tricky. How do you know what your customer is thinking?
Social media is beneficial for assessing how customers feel or think. When someone is happy or upset about their experience with a company, they could feel compelled to inform you on Facebook or Twitter.
Urging customers to fill out surveys about their experience can also assist you in collecting anecdotal research.
Moreover, having tools like a Sankey diagram to gauge customer behavior is a must for precise planning.
Step 1: Remember that your Customer is your priority.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and do all your preparation around that motto will take you a long way. The customer is the reason your business exists.
Several times, executives ignore this important aspect and focus on marketing, SEO, social media, and branding. Yes, these are all critical aspects for running a business, but you cannot forget about your customers and how they communicate with your brand.
Are they happy with the experience? Is your website easy to navigate, and does it have all the information a customer wants?
Step 2: Identify Customer Touch Points
Every time a buyer comes into contact with your brand, whether it’s before (an ad), during (visit to a store or website), or after (positive or negative feedback, return experience, newsletters), you have an opportunity to boost your sales.
These interactions are known as touchpoints.
With this information, you can recognize barriers that arise in the customer’s journey.
A seamless sales process where the customer is in and out in no time is just as important as giving high-quality products or services. Having happy customers translates into brand loyalty.
Step 3: Create a Graphic
This graph should not be too complex, but it must involve both analytical and anecdotal research data. It will showcase when customers stop communicating or get frustrated, so your team can improve its strategy.
There are countless possibilities in any given transaction, so it’s difficult to predict every possible scenario. But knowing where the blips are is crucial.
A graph is helpful for understanding customer behavior, fixing the problems, and recognizing successes as well.
Using emojis (sad, angry, neutral, happy, or excited) is helpful to instantly visualize the customer’s state of mind at any time.
Customer Journey Mapping Examples
Ensuring stellar customer service indicates that all your sales associates are on the same page. Also, their training must follow the policy that the customer always comes first.
To better understand your customer journey, we will look at three practical examples of experiences that can occur countless times in any given part of the world. They have probably happened to you at one time or another.
Example 1: Fantastic User Experience (UX)
A young woman is surfing the web for a dress, and your website catches her eye. She has never heard of your brand, but her attention is quickly grabbed by how neat everything looks.
The drop-down menu on the women’s clothing landing page is simple to click on and search.
There’s an option for price ranges (she doesn’t need to spend a fortune), and she also has the option to click on the clearance box. Every product is fully described and comprises measurements for different countries, materials used, and care instructions.
When the customer prefers the perfect dress, she immediately checks out and chooses to sign up with a new customer account because she liked the experience.
She bookmarks the website for future reference. It is the time when you collect her email address or zip code for marketing purposes. It would help if you also asked her to fill out an online survey once she’s got her first order.
The customer is so pleased with her first purchase that she shares photos with her friends on social media. In her post on Instagram, she mentions your store and how easy-to-use your website was.
In this case, there are various places in which your efforts paid off. From the moment the customer saw the layout (storefront) to checking out, every step mattered, and the UX was flawless. Keep up the good work!
Example 2: Slow Loading Times
A mom is buying online with her toddler in tow. She’s stressed out, and the child is misbehaving. She’s looking for a particular toy for a birthday party and is not sure if you carry it, but she learned about your site from a friend.
The customer clicks on toys, and the page takes forever to load.
She seeks the workaround of typing a keyword into the search bar. There are zero results for her search. Frustrated, the customer leaves and goes to Amazon, where she can order in two clicks and get her toy in plenty of time for the party.
You can almost bet this person will never come back to your website again. She may even leave a negative comment on social media.
Have you ever clicked on a website you learned about just to be stuck with slow loading times?
You don’t need to hear that your customers are having this experience. Enhancing your site’s loading times can help you diminish your bounce rates.
In 2018, people expected everything to happen quickly, and website speed optimization is critical. If a customer has to sit there and see the timer going around and around, they will go elsewhere. Seamless virtual machine hosting is pivotal in achieving the rapid response times users demand for an optimal online experience.
If you are not conscious of things like your bounce rate and the time spent on your page, you have a problem. In this instance, a customer experience map can be eye-opening for your team.
Example 3: The Failed Checkout
Your customer goes online and is eager to purchase a product from your website.
Your brand is quickly recognizable, and he’s viewed your ads on TV while watching football, so he decides to try it even though he is a senior citizen that rarely buys anything online.
The experience is smooth until he gets to the checkout.
The buyer keeps typing the wrong card number and has missed one or two numbers at least three times. He is not a computer person but thought it would be simpler to shop online than at the store.
Every time he types in the wrong credit card number, the screen clears out all the other fields, and he must start from scratch.
Even if your website works seamlessly through the buying process, having an extravagant checkout can kill a purchase. Your order forms need to be programmed so that if the user makes a mistake, they need to fill out only that field, and the page preserves the rest of the data.
Repeatedly inputting the information can improve your abandonment rates. The worst part is that, at that point, the customer is ready to purchase – and your website won’t let him.
These customer journey mapping illustrations show you how you can fix simple things to make your website UX better so you can eventually grow your revenue.
Using Free Customer Journey Templates
If you have a conventional business with a storefront, it’s easy to envision how your customers navigate your store during any given day. But how can you discover why a customer gets frustrated online?
Unless they specifically leave a comment expressing frustration, it’s tough to collect that data without the right tools.
Is it impossible to monitor each customer’s behavior and the reason why they may be exiting earlier than you want them to? Why aren’t the visitors converting into sales?
Optimizing your Buyer’s Journey By Understanding How They Navigate
By definition, the customer journey is a map of your UX at each touchpoint. Your goal is to increase the lead generation for your business. Optimizing how users navigate your website and making this process more efficient will keep them coming back and spending money with you.
The following is a checklist for understanding roadblocks where people may be getting frustrated or discouraged.
Answering the following questions will allow you to understand what happens each time someone enters your website:
- Is your main page attractive? Are users interested in staying and exploring multiple pages? Pages with good quality images and simple designs tend to do very well.
- Does the user know how to navigate your website? Do they give up at some point during their search, or can they easily click on the menu and find what they’re looking for?
- Do you have a strong CTA (Call to Action) at the end of your articles? Make sure your CTAs are moving visitors to take the next step down the sales funnel.
- Do your visitors scroll down to view more content? Are your articles enlightening and easy to understand? Do they include links to more relevant content on your site?
- What about your bounce rate? How quickly do visitors exit the website? If they leave after a few clicks, you have a problem. The longer a person stays on your site, the higher the chances for conversion.
- Is the time on the page long or short? If your visitor’s exit too quickly, it can mean that you have things to fix. When people leave right away, it’s because they don’t like what they see, or they can’t find what they’re looking for.
To optimize your buyer’s journey and better understand how they navigate, consider using a website click tracking tool on more than one page. Doing this will help you identify those with the most traffic.
You can also see which pages are responsible for the most conversions.
Wrapping Up
We hope that you find this guide on the customer journey informative. This guide will help you understand the customer journey and make it better to grab more customers’ attention.
