A customer journey is key to building a solid lead generation strategy. A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand, from awareness, consideration to purchasing decision and beyond.
The customer journey is a long and often unpredictable road for your potential and returning customers. Understanding it can be even more complicated. That’s why customer journey maps came into being, to understand the roadmap of a customer, from the very first touchpoint throughout the lasting life of their relationship with your business.
Customer journey maps can be an invaluable resource for companies, from marketing to sales to user interface, and have been known to help businesses increase their ROI by 13–22% when done correctly.
Customer journeys allow you to create personalized experiences across all touchpoints—for every individual—across all channels. Companies can use this shared understanding to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement. These maps can be simple or complex, depending on what you're looking to gain from them.
So why do you need to map out a customer journey for your business? For any company, a customer journey map helps to enhance the customer experience and increase customer loyalty.
A customer journey map can prove invaluable for optimizing across multiple departments—marketing, sales, product, and customer service.
By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience with your business, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter.
Customer journey maps help you find answers to the “How?” question. They are a concrete way to work towards creating a great experience, as they enable businesses to:
- Visualize customer motivations, drivers, and pain points
- Create cross-team alignment around the business
- Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership
- Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers
The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people in your company that need to be involved, how much data you can collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business.
If you’re new to customer journey mapping, you’ll benefit more by getting your feet wet creating these journey maps by starting from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint.
Here’s the beginner customer journey mapping framework that will help you go from zero to your first complete map
Step 1: Identify your main touchpoints from your customer’s point of view
Step 2: Preliminary customer journey mapping work which visually lays out each of the above touchpoints
Step 3: Execute your customer journey map into year lead generation structure