Customer experience mapping

In today’s day and age, we are dealing with informed customers that have unlimited access to information, expects to find this information very quickly and tends to be attracted to those who offer a personalized experience.

For that reason, every business needs to know everything about their audience such as, what they search for, how they seek, what motivates them, what turns them off and what an excellent experience looks like to them.

In this article, we will be exploring customers journeys, and will also go through the type of content required at every stage of these journeys.

Let’s take a simple scenario of when someone buys a pair of jeans. It is a product that one decides pretty quick that they need or want one, looks at different options, buys it, wears it, and when it wears out, he/she recycles it and buys another one.

If we break it down, the customer first realizes that he/she needs to buy a pair of jeans; usually, a few top-of-mind brands come up. He then looks at their latest collection, shortlists his favourites, purchases the favourite one, checks out, signs up to receive the new collection updates, gets a discount code which eventually tempts him to buy another in the future. And it goes on and on and on.

In order to maximize the potential of this customer and make this process as smooth as possible, the first thing that every business needs to create are what we call ‘target personas’. Typically, the majority of target personas follow a similar journey. However, they usually require different marketing messages as they might be interested in various products, have different purchase preferences and take decisions differently.

What is Customer Journey design?

It is a way of visualizing how your prospects become aware that you and your brand exist, then transforming them into potential customers, subscribers, initial purchasers, repeated customers and hopefully in the future they become raving fans. It is the most effective way to map out what they need at every stage and what moves them from one stage to the next. When done correctly, businesses will be able to provide a personalized experience and identify upselling opportunities.

With a well designed and optimized customer journeys, you can create different touchpoints at every stage. There are many different customer journey frameworks out there, and in this article, we are going to explore the one that Ryan Deiss from Digitalmarketer.com uses.

It is an 8 step framework, and the more granular one goes, the more successful this exercise can be. The best way to do this is to use a whiteboard and get team members from different departments to use post-it notes to add their insights and knowledge in every stage:

In the first three steps, your prospects are visitors; in stage 4, there is the conversion and turn into customers until stage 6. In the last two stages, they become advocates and raving fans.

Let’s explore the different stages in further detail to create awareness, engage more with prospects, and obtain and retain more customers.

Stage 1: The Awareness Stage:

In this stage, you will look into how prospects know your business exists. Awareness can be generated through paid advertising, organic search, social media branding, content marketing, participating in online forums, contributing as a guest writer on blogs, publication of infographics, referral marketing, podcasts, and influencer marketing, to name a few.