How to Map Your Customer Journeys
A huge advancement in marketing analysis and documentation is the emergence of customer journey maps to help document, measure, and improve your marketing effectiveness – especially online.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is how you visualize your customers’ experience with your brand. A customer journey map documents your customers’ touch points online and offline and documents how you measure each touchpoints effectiveness. This enables marketers to better understand how customers are interacting with you so that you can optimize the customer journey, remove gaps and roadblocks, in order to increase customer satisfaction, engagement, conversions and upsell opportunities.
Unlike customer funnels which are linear, customer journeys can show multiple paths on where customers are making decisions and reacting to the brand interactions. Customer journey maps can also help your marketing team to focus your advertising and content development for specific customer personas. While your customers may have unlimited twists and turns, there are generally similar paths you’ll find that customers are traveling down (or that you hope them to travel down).
85% of senior-level marketers believe it’s very important to create a cohesive customer journey, but only 40% actually use the term customer journey. Only 29% of enterprise companies rate themselves effective at creating a customer journey.
How to Map Your Customer Journeys
- Gather existing analytical data from your website analytics, marketing platform, CRM, sales data, and other sources.
- Gather anecdotal data from social media monitoring and customer feedback to overlay sentiment and importance to your analytical data.
- Combine the data points into stages within a timeline (spine) that incorporates the interactions like inquiries, comparisons, and decisions. Include your marketing efforts at each point.
- Interpret the data and analyze each stage or touchpoint to make the journey easier, faster, or more pleasant.
Salesforce produced this beautiful infographic, Customer Journey Maps: How to Guide Your Leads to Customers, to illustrate the process of documenting your customer journeys, defining each stage, and applying the appropriate metrics to each of those stages.
Experience Customer Journeys on Salesforce
