How do I create a Customer Journey Map? – 5 easy steps!
Only by understanding the motivation of your customers you can structure your touchpoints to create an effective and promising buying process for your prospects. The tool of choice is a Customer Journey Map, which shows you the current process from the first to the last checkpoint. In this way you can see whether marketing strategies lead to success and how they can be adapted if necessary.
1. Set clear goals
Please ask yourself first why you create this map at all? Define clear goals, choose a target group and include already known experiences from your customer relationship software.
Create a fictional buyer based on your collected customer data. This will give you an average customer and allow you to align every relevant aspect of your customer journey map with him.
2. Define the goals of your average customer
Get in contact with your already known clients and ask for constructive feedback. Also offer a questionnaire to conduct a more detailed research. This is also a very good way to intensify customer relations and to show that the opinion of your buyers is important to you!
Ask the following questions:
- How did you hear about our product?
- How did you find us? By Internet, advertising or possibly by recommendations?
- How can WE help you with our products or services? What do YOU want to achieve?
- What do you particularly like about our website? What can we do better?
- What have you already acquired with us and what are your experiences with it?
- What led you to make a purchase?
- Have you already decided against purchasing our products one or more times and what has led to this?
- On a scale of 1-10, how easy is it to find your way around our website?
- Can we support you in any way in your purchasing process?
This allows you to collect even more valuable data about the interests and thoughts of your customers. Use it to expand the extensive database of your CRM system. It will be very useful for future projects.
3. Determine contact points
Touchpoints are the points at which your customers and prospects come into contact with you online and offline. List all known and potential touchpoints. SugarCRM, for example, can help you a lot.
Please consider this step when creating your individual Customer Journey Map. It is very easy to conclude from this whether you are likely to be ignored by your prospects due to fewer touchpoints, or whether you confuse your customers with complicated processes due to too many contact points.
The following contact points may exist:
- Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Google, etc.)
- Paid advertisements on the Internet and everyday life
- Personalized email marketing
- Recessions, Reviews and Product Presentations
With Google Analytics in conjunction with your CRM program, you can easily find out where your most touchpoints come from. Focus your marketing strategies primarily on the most lucrative touchpoints. But don’t lose sight of the less used points.
4. What should your Customer Journey Map represent?
There are different ways to display your Customer Journey Map. Choose the ones with the right benefits for your purpose.
Current status
This Customer Journey Map is the most frequently used. It displays thoughts, emotions and current actions of your customers while you get in touch with your company via touchpoints. With the help of this Customer Journey Map you can continuously and easily improve the customer journey of your consumers.
A day in life
This gives you a broader view of your customers’ everyday lives and all their fulfilled and unfulfilled needs. You visualize particularly effectively all thoughts, emotions and actions which your prospective customers experience during your activities. It doesn’t matter whether your company is part of it or not.
Future status
This allows you to meet your customers’ anticipated interactions, feelings, thoughts and actions with your company. Based on your experience and the complete database of your CRM system, you can set clearly defined goals and pursue them effectively.
The service blueprint
With the Service Blueprint you can clearly illustrate the causes of your customer journey. This allows you to define the steps that need to be taken to successfully reach profitable customer trips.
5. Go on a Customer Journey by yourself
Analyze your results. Go back to point 2 and ask your customer base for their opinion. Did your strategy have the planned success? What else do you have to adapt? With this experience, you are now feeding your CRM system to develop better and more promising marketing strategies in the medium and long term. Realize several customer journeys for different target groups. Recapitulate your results and optimize your processes profitably. Involve all business areas and discuss goals and results with each other at regular intervals.