Understanding your customer is imperative and a key component of your marketing strategy. You will need to know your target audience’s shopping patterns, their needs, and communication styles. One incredible way of understanding your customers is to create a customer journey map as it helps visualize the entirety of their experiences.
One incredible way of getting started with customer journey mapping is understanding the essential parts of the map. These are the important components that will help create your map. Journey maps are a key tool for many businesses, small or big and they should have the best components that will ensure the whole process is a success.
Because customer journey maps are an essential component of the whole process you have to make them outstanding. This is because they help deepen their understanding of customers’ feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. With this in mind, here is what you need to include for an actionable, customer-focused and effective journey map.
- Customer Persona
A person is a semi-fictional representation of a group of customers and it is based on research and data you gather from your existing customers. It brings your customers to life and help you step into their shoes. Creating a customer persona should be a daunting task if you know where to start and what to do. It has to represent a large segment of your target audiences from the data you have gathered.
- Phases of the Purchase Journey
In this section, you have to include all the details that define pour customers from awareness to purchase and beyond. Other phases to put into consideration include retention and advocacy that make the customer journey stand out.
- Touchpoints
This is a section that lays out any point of interaction, contact or information gathering that a customer interacts with. The key touchpoints are owned by a company and include TV adverts, website and social media channels. They usually reflect the brand experience and will include social media comments and amazon reviews.
- Customer Actions and Thoughts
Customer thoughts are usually in the form of first-person quotes. They help a company better understand and articulate what customers are experiencing. They also help a company know where to start and improve the customer journey. Customer actions also make it easy to describe what customers are doing or trying to do at each stage. For instance, they may be looking for reviews about a product on a certain website clicking on a link to find out more about the product.
- Pain Points
Pain points are usually the challenges customers face when undertaking certain activities or during their experience. They are the key things that many companies work hard to eliminate in the creation of a journey map.
- Customer’s Emotional Journey
Looking at customers emotional journey helps make the whole process a success and the maps so useful. The whole journey helps track how customers feel during their experience. You have to understand the peaks and valleys in the customer journey to come with the best solutions.
To Sum Up
There are incredible components of good customer journey maps. You should put them to work if you understand how helpful they are to your business. Well-designed journey maps help empower people to solve most of the customer experience issues. But when done poorly, customer journey maps can do more harm than good as they can confuse and misalign your intentions.
