MODULE 5: Understanding Customer Journey

• It is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customerloyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

  Customer Journey
• This follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product.

  Buyer’s Journey
• It extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

  Customer Journey
• STAGES OF CUSTOMER JOURNEY:

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Purchase
  4. Retention
  5. Advocacy
• Your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand andproducts. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

  Awareness
• Customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to theirproblem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

  Consideration
• It is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers areready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

  Purchase
• The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

  Retention
• Customers are so delighted with your products and services thatthey spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

  Advocacy
• BENEFITS of Knowing the Customer Journey

  1. Understand customer behavior
  2. Identify touchpoints to reach the customer
  3. Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services
  4. Support your marketing efforts
  5. Increase customer engagement
  6. Achieve more conversions
  7. Generate more ROI
  8. Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.

  Understand customer behavior
• Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing ononly the most effective channels.

  Identify touchpoints to reach the customer
• If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.

  Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services
• Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.

  Support your marketing efforts
• Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% ofcustomers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.

  Increase customer engagement
• Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.

  Achieve more conversions
• You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7%.

  Generate more ROI
• Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

  Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
• It is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand.

  Customer Journey Map
• The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.
• To design the most effective customer journey map, YOUR BRAND NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMER'S:

  1. Actions
  2. Motivations
  3. Questions
  4. Pain Points
• Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look forcommon patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.

  Actions
• Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at everystage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.

  Motivations
• Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of thecustomer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.

  Questions
• Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by justgathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

  Pain Points
• They are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels.

  Customer Touchpoints
• Things to Consider in illustrating a Customer Journey Map:

  1. Customer journey stages
  2. Touchpoints
  3. The full customer experience
  4. Your brand's solutions
• Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.

  Customer journey stages
• The most common touchpoints customers have at every stage.For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.

  Touchpoints
• Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.

  The full customer experience
• Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content.

  Your brand’s solutions
• It is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

  Buyer Persona
• How to create a customer journey map

  1. Create buyer personas
  2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage
  3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint
• To create buyer persona, you will need to:

  1. Gather and analyze customer data
  2. Segment customers into specific buying groups
  3. Build the personas
• Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.

  Gather and analyze customer data
• Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.

  Segment customers into specific buying groups
• Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

  Build the personas
• Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

  List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage
• Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint.

  Map the customer experience at each touchpoint
• It is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions.

  Positive Customer Experience