Your relationship with your customers doesn’t end the moment they make a purchase. As a matter of fact, it starts from there.
In order to ensure high retention, it’s essential to establish a strong bond with your customers by offering them seamless experiences.
This can be done by facilitating them throughout their journey and helping them leverage your solutions to the fullest.
As a result, your customers will be highly satisfied with the solutions you offer and prefer you over other alternatives in your respective industry.
However, cultivating a strong relationship with your customers may be easier said than done. You have to carefully map their journey and optimize different touchpoints to ensure that you don’t lose your customers.
Here are the 7 easy steps to map your customer journey:
1. Set Clear Goals
To get started with mapping your customer journey, it’s essential to come up with clear goals first. The standard objectives for businesses here are to generate more traction, boost conversions, and ensure a higher retention rate.
Still, it’s important to clearly list your goals before mapping your customer journey, as they will help you come up with high-performing strategies and enable you to optimize your processes in the right way.
Without knowing where you have to go, it’s impossible for you to hack growth and provide a seamless experience to your customers. You become clear on the insights you need to optimize different touchpoints and are able to maximize your efficiency.
2. Do Your Research
Once you’ve identified your goals, you should focus on getting acquainted with the needs and preferences of your target audience. This requires thorough research where you leverage quantitative and qualitative data to get to know your customers.
You can use surveys to collect relevant information. Around 83% of customers are comfortable sharing the required information to acknowledge personalized experiences.
Plus, you can access industry insights from relevant sources and keep an eye on the latest trends to gather information about buying preferences representing diverse audience segments.
The goal here is to explore the problems of the intended audience, alternative solutions available in the market, factors influencing the purchase decision, relevant sources that help customers discover certain solutions, and things that will make customers happy with their purchase.
3. Identify Buyer Personas
To map your customer journey, it’s important to identify the buyer personas. Whether you offer a single solution or multiple, there may be a variety of use-cases applicable, representing different customer profiles.
You will need this information to decide whether you want to map your journey to reflect multiple buyer personas or create one for each of them separately.
Identifying your buyer personas makes it easier for you to promote your solutions. You can effortlessly create relevant content to generate brand awareness and ensure high engagement.
This helps you capture quality leads for your sales funnel and acknowledge a higher conversion rate.
Identifying the buyer personas accurately also facilitates your access to relevant customer insights, which paves the way for you to grow your business and acknowledge lasting customer relationships.
4. Define Stages of the Journey
The stages of your customer journey are generally dictated by your set goals. However, a standard customer journey comprises four different stages: awareness stage, consideration stage, decision-making stage, and retention stage.
Customers are at the awareness stage when they have come across a problem and are exploring viable solutions.
Customers reach the consideration stage when they have shortlisted a few viable solutions and are learning more about them to find which one is the bang for for their buck.
Customers at the decision-making stage have gathered enough information about alternative solutions and are ready to make a purchase.
Customers reach the retention stage when they have preferred you over other alternatives in your respective industry and are assessing the experience you offer to decide if they should stick around.
To keep your customers engaged across different stages, you may have to deploy different strategies. For example, creating relevant content may be your best bet to attract a relevant audience, representing awareness and consideration stages.
Around 70% of marketers say that content marketing helps educate the intended audience. So, it’s considered an effective way to generate leads.
For later stages, you can consider leveraging social proof, as 90% of people say that user-generated content such as reviews greatly influences their purchase decisions.
5. Identify the Touchpoints
After defining the stages of your customer journey, the next step is identifying the touchpoints. Each stage in your customer journey may contain different touchpoints. This is where customers interact with your brand to access relevant information.
Throughout different stages of the journey, a customer may require your guidance to make certain decisions. You are the most authentic source of information for them. So, it’s best to be there for them in their time of need.
To identify the touchpoints, think of different ways customers may likely interact with your brand. Think about the questions they may ask or information they may need to make informed decisions.
6. Explore Potential Areas of Friction
Once you’ve identified the touchpoints, the next step is exploring the potential areas of friction. This means you should identify the pain points of your customers that may prevent them from transitioning from one stage of the journey to the next.
The goal here is to explore if there are any points where you are unable to cater to the queries of the intended audience. This helps you identify the gaps in customer journey or factors hindering the transition of your customers from one stage to the next.
Carefully identifying potential areas of friction enables you to come up with efficient countermeasures and engage concerned stakeholders to solve the problem at hand.
7. Ensure Continuous Improvement
Once you’ve designed your customer journey and mapped the data, your goal should be to refine it constantly.
No matter how well-thought-out your journey is, it may require some tweaks every now and then because there’s always room for improvement. To ensure high retention and lasting relationships with your customers, it’s important that you offer seamless experiences.
To make it happen, you should come up with viable remedies that cater to the pain points of your customers and make necessary improvements to your customer journey proactively to avoid such concerns in the future.
Final Words
There you have it: the seven steps to mapping your customer journey. Whether you’ve just gotten started or want to refine your customer journey, the steps recommended in this article may make it easier for you to ensure lasting relationships with your customers.
