If you’re an experienced marketer, chances are you’ve created a customer journey map at some point. But if you’re new to marketing – or you haven’t created a customer journey map in a while – journey mapping is a simple marketing tactic worth revisiting.
Not only can it help you stay focused on creating a great customer experience, it can have a significant impact on your bottom line.
In fact, organizations that have a formal journey management program in place have much greater performance against a number of significant metrics than organizations that don’t, as you can see across the numerous metrics listed in the chart below.
The Benefits of Journey Mapping
Source: Aberdeen Group, November, 2016. Customer Journey Mapping: Lead the Way to Advocacy.
Aligning Customer Expectations and Experiences
The customer journey starts by understanding your customer’s complete experience with your organization. This is critical for delivering on your brand promise, particularly in the current era of on-demand, multi-channel options for engagement.
• 75% of customers say they expect a consistent experience wherever/however they engage with a brand (Source: Salesforce Research)
In order to deliver that consistent experience, you must be relentlessly focused on your customer’s needs. That’s where journey mapping becomes so valuable.
Illustrating the customer’s path towards her goal
A journey map will lay out a representative illustration of a customer’s interactions with your organization as that customer works to achieve a specific goal. Every interaction represents moment of engagement between you and your customer on his or her way towards achieving that goal.
At each moment of engagement, your customer needs something from you – information, a transaction, education, a product. Their need could be driven by any number of things – a life event, a goal they wish to achieve, or some other external trigger.
Your objective is to deliver exactly what the customer needs at that moment of engagement. The journey map will help you identify and define those elements, so that when your customer leans in you’re ready.
Voice of the customer information is always the most critical input into any journey map. And the voices of business partners across different functional areas around your organization including sales, operations, product development, are also critical for providing invaluable input into the process.
You need to know what you can deliver on internally when deciding how and where to meet your customers.
Let your customer be your guide
There are many different formats and models for journey maps. What is most important when you create a journey map, is that you keep your customer front and center.
One journey map model we like to use at Imprint is the “Trigger Model.” This illustrates a customer’s path starting from a point triggered by a particular event or situation, often a life event such as the birth of a child, marriage or divorce, or a component of a marketing campaign.
Another common journey map model is the “Day in the Life.” This follows the persona of a particular customer as they go through their daily routine. By mapping their daily activities – home, commute, work, thoughts, feelings, communication channels and devices, distractions – you have a very good sense of how little mind share your brand occupies in their daily lives. That gives you the right kind of visibility to make the most of every opportunity for engagement.
Put this technique to work for your business
When you have a complete view of all of the possible moments of engagement between your customers and your organization, you’ll be in the best position to deliver a great client experience.
And that means better, stickier relationships – and stronger revenue growth for your business.
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4 Essential Steps for Creating an Effective Journey Map
Imprint’s Kim Papa explains four key steps you should include when creating a journey map.
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