How many times do you look at a product before making a purchase?
If you only need one look before you make your decision, you’re in the minority. One study showed that 92% of customers visiting a website for the first time aren’t ready to make a decision. People need time to make a decision. They might even need additional marketing before they buy your product or service.
This is why customer journey mapping is so important. Customer journey mapping is the process of mapping out how your leads interact with your various marketing. It tells you how people go from stranger to customer.
The map is visual, and it allows companies to get a better idea of how customers interact with your brand. The mapping process can also include existing customers who reach out for customer support.
Mapping out the journey tells you if your marketing is efficiently turning prospects into customers. The article below outlines some of the benefits of customer journey mapping. Read on to learn if a customer journey map can help you boost customer satisfaction and convert more leads to customers.
Identify Gaps Where You May Be Losing Customers
Say you start mapping the customer journey and see that customers are viewing a lot of web pages before they convert. Maybe you don’t have a clear call-to-action on your homepage, which forces people to click around to other pages before they make a purchase.
You might also find that certain marketing channels are directing people to pages on your site that don’t convert well. Using tools like the ones at Decibel.com can help you understand where customers might be getting confused. It’s smart business to find out how you can streamline the conversion process. You might find that you end up converting people who were previously dropping off your website.
Resolve More Customer Service Issues
Customer journey mapping doesn’t have to focus entirely on new customers. It can also help you build brand loyalty by making existing customers more satisfied with their experience. If you’re able to track every touchpoint from stranger to customer and beyond, you can see which types of customers need the most support. You might see that customers who buy certain products need more support than others.
Some customer service teams send customers to help articles. If your business uses help articles, you can use customer journey mapping to see if the articles work. Customer emotions run high when they don’t get their questions answered right away. That’s why it’s important to make sure your service team is directing people to the right resources.
Do customers have to continue searching around your site for answers or do they get their issues resolved right away? Learning the answers will help your team identify ways to better serve your customers, which can boost both customer and employee satisfaction.
Help Your Team Understand the Big Picture
Businesses usually start customer journey mapping because they’re noticing a problem. It could be that their website has a higher bounce rate than normal. It could also be an increase in customers canceling their subscriptions or failing to make repeat purchases. Web analytics tools can tell you if your bounce rate is increasing, but these tools don’t explain why.
Customer journey mapping helps you and your team understand why your metrics are going in the wrong direction. Every business can benefit from a company culture that seeks to understand why things are happening, as opposed to just identifying problems with no path to a solution.
Find Out How Well Your Website Is Optimized for Mobile
In the first quarter of 2021, 54% of all website traffic came from mobile devices. With customers using both mobile and desktop browsers to find new products, your company success depends on your website working seamlessly on both types of devices.
A customer journey map can reveal whether or not customers use your site the same way on mobile and desktop. If they have difficulty navigating your mobile site, you’ll see it on the map. If customers aren’t using both sites the same way, you may have to make the calls-to-action more visible on the mobile site or cut down on the number of pages on your desktop site.
Customer Journey Mapping Helps Build Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a useful tool that can help both marketing and sales teams. It’s a profile of a typical customer, and it can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns and sales pitches. You can build a buyer persona by analyzing the customer journey map for your best customers. See how they found your business and interacted with your site, then create a persona based on their journey.
You can also do this for some of your less profitable customers. You can spend a lot of marketing dollars on targeting your best customers and find ways to spend less when targeting your less profitable customers.
Start Customer Journey Mapping Today to Better Understand Your Leads
The first step to creating a customer journey map is to make sure you can track every marketing touchpoint. You should also be able to track which pages each new customer visits on your website. Once you have this information, you can begin to look at individual customer journeys and put the data on a visual map.
These maps can then be distributed to sales and marketing teams. Your business will run more efficiently if everyone can put themselves in the shoes of the customer. Salespeople will be able to speak the customer’s language, and marketers will be able to tailor their campaigns to get leads from strangers to customers as quickly as possible.
Stay up to date with this blog page to learn more about customer journey mapping and other profitable business strategies.
