Consumer journey map: Strategic ways to create it effectively with examples

Nowadays, while consumers have various options about one product, attracting consumers to your online store becomes more and more difficult. So marketers should find ways to understand consumers more thoroughly. One approach is to visualize a consumer journey map during their purchase. Hence, our blog will figure out what a consumer journey map is and how to create it effectively with clear examples. 

What is a consumer journey map?

First of all, it is important to understand the definition of a consumer journey map. A consumer journey map describes the behaviours of consumers when action to achieve a goal related to your firm. A customer journey divides an action process into small periods and analyzes them clearly. For example, a customer journey to make a purchase, or to subscribe to your firm’s new letters. So a consumer journey map helps businesses understand deeply customer’s behaviours.

Besides, businesses often present a consumer journey as a diagram or images to follow easily. The more visual the consumer journey is, the easier the business can take advantage of it. So businessmen often map out all the behaviours of consumers when achieving a goal to visualize their experience with your business. To do it, businessmen will list all the key events, touchpoints and reactions of consumers during a process. After that, store owners will summarize all the data into a comprehensive graph. This graph illustrates a typical experience of a consumer when interacting with your brand.

However, a consumer journey isn’t straightforward from point A to point B. It is more complicated. Hence, mapping a customer journey is not easy. The first thing you need to do is to collect data from your own customers. It seems hard but valuable.

What does a consumer journey map have?

Next, you need to know all the items in a journey map. Normally, a consumer journey map will have the following items:

• Activities in the buying process
• Consumer’s actions
• Consumer’s feelings
• Paint Points
• Solution

1. Activities in the buying process

Firstly, you have to name all the stages for consumers to achieve their goals. For example, a consumer wants to purchase a product from your store. You have to list all the activities during the buying process. For example, a typical buying process will include searching, browsing the sites, evaluating products, paying and receiving products. You can do similarly with other processes.

2. Consumer’s actions

Secondly, consumer’s actions describe what a consumer performs at each step of the purchasing process. In the awareness stage, they may talk to friends about their wants and possible solutions to meet those needs. Then, they may watch a demo on your website before making a purchase with cash or a debit card. This section displays many ways for consumers to satisfy their needs.

3. Consumer’s feelings

Thirdly, whatever consumers need, they are trying to solve an issue. So it is very important to record all the consumer’s feelings during their purchase. If your process is lengthy, consumers tend to have more emotions. They may experience happiness, anger, enthusiasm and so on. Hence, listing all the emotions of consumers during the buying process helps you to prevent negative emotions from your brand.

4. Paint Points

Fourthly, after understanding the consumer’s feelings, it is important to figure out why negative emotion happens. It means you need to identify the consumer’s paint point. Adding paint points on the consumer journey allows businessmen to know the unsatisfied stage of customers and its reasons.

5. Solution

At last, the most important part of the customer journey is to find out the solutions. Businessmen should implement plans to minimize the negative experience. Also, you should try to gain more consumer’s positive emotions when working with your business.

Advantages of consumer journey map

Although many store owners think that they just identify the paint points of customers, it is not at all. As all businesses try to maximize profits, they have to maximize the customer’s satisfaction first. Consumer journey maps divide the action process into specific stages to serve the customers better. So consumer journey maps will bring many benefits as mentioned below.

1. Focus on inbound marketing instead of outbound marketing

Instead of finding your consumers through outbound marketing, you can try a new approach to inbound marketing. Outbound marketing uses marketing tools to reach mass users. For example, it uses emails to attract as many users as possible. So it may disrupt consumer’s lives or uninterested groups. Besides, outbound marketing will cost you a lot of money and resources to access a large number of users. 

On the other hand, inbound marketing focuses on potential consumers. It creates useful and attractive content to approach consumers who have already searched for our products. 

Hence, the consumer journey map helps inbound marketing to identify helpful topics for customers. From that, marketers can develop websites for selected consumers.

2. Narrow down customer segmentation

Rather than trying to access mass users, you can select one or some suitable customer segments to serve. So you can save money and time for your company. To create a suitable segment for your business, it is very important to understand the customer journey map. Because it shows you the needs and pain points of typical consumers. Hence, you can visualize the persona of potential customers. From that, you can allocate resources to do marketing more effectively. So your marketing strategy aims at people who truly need your products.

3. Build a proactive customer service based on the consumer journey map

A customer journey map is a visual map for the customer’s experience. It allows you to know when customers are happy or annoyed. Understanding the emotional changes helps you build a proactive customer service strategy. So you can intervene at the most advantageous periods to optimize the value of your brand to the buyer.

Additionally, proactive customer service helps you build a more trustworthy brand image among your customers. For example, during sales periods, your staff may reply to customers at a slower speed. You can actively send a sorry message to customers in advance. Hence, they will not be annoyed when they have to wait for a while. Besides, you can offer customers other alternatives for support such as emails, chatbots, and so on.

4. Increase customer retention rate

Customer retention is the rate at which customers stay with a business in a given period of time. As the cost for attracting a new customer is much more expensive than keeping an existing customer, businesses try to increase the customer retention rate. Since a customer journey map describes an overall view for you, it is easier to improve customer’s satisfaction. Then, it keeps the existing customers loyal to your brand.

5. Create a seamless experience for customers

When your company grows larger, it is difficult to coordinate all divisions to create a unified experience for customers. The sales, marketing and customer service department may have different goals for each. So a customer journey map can form consistency among these divisions. Hence, customers’ experience can be seamless during all the stages whatever department is serving.

How to build a consumer journey map?

1. Set a goal for the consumer journey map

Before you start designing your map, you should consider why you’re making one in the first place. Which goals are you aiming towards with this map? What exactly is it about? What kind of experience has it been based on? After that, you need to construct a buyer persona based on your objective. This is a typical consumer who represents your average customer. From it, you can dig deeper into small aspects during the consumer journey.

2. Build personas of the consumer journey map

To build a persona, you need to research. The easiest way to get valuable insight is to ask your real consumers through questions and feedback. It is very important to ask the right person. You need to find people who used your products before or plan to buy in the near future. There are some examples that you can use.

• Through which channels do you know about our brand?
• What is the most impressive thing in our websise?
• What are you finding?
• How often do you access to our website?
• Rate our customer support from 1 to 10.
• Do you have any comments to improve our services?
• Which factors affect your buying decisions most?

To gain valuable personas, store owners should research with numerous attendants. Besides, it is recommended to quantify your outcome.

3. Focus on selected personas

After building many personas, it is critical to select one or some common persona to focus on. Remember that a customer journey map is a visual representation of one customer’s experience with your firm along a certain path. Your map will not truly reflect your customers’ experience if you mix too many personalities into one route.

If you’re making your first map, you should create the most common consumer profile. Then, you build a journey map for them with your company for the first time. Don’t worry if you have many personas as you can create a new one later.

4. Make a list of the touchpoints.

All of the places on your website where your clients can interact with you are known as touchpoints. Based on your study, make a list of all the touchpoints your customers are using now, as well as the ones you believe they should be using.

This is a crucial stage in constructing a customer journey map. Because it allows you to see what actions your consumers take. If there are so few touchpoints, it may result from an early quit from your website. On the other hand, if there are so many touchpoints, your website may be too complicated. Therefore, you need to analyze touchpoints in detail. You should consider all of the methods your customer could find you on the internet. These channels may be through email marketing, social media, paid advertising or third-party partners. One easy approach is to search your brand on Google to see all the pages that name your brand. Then you use Google Analytics to know where your traffic comes from. After that, you can make a list of touchpoints easily.

Consumer’s actions in the consumer journey

In addition, you need to combine touchpoints with actions. For example, consumers know your brand through a search for your website or a click into email marketing. Let’s list all the possible actions related to the touchpoints then keep selective options later.

It’s critical to notice when consumers perform too many actions in order to attain their goals. It may feel dangerous to reduce the number of actions, but it possibly increases the conversion rates.

Consumer’s emotions in the consumer journey

As each action of consumers is related to their emotions, you need to recognize the emotional changes among periods of the journey. A pain point is usually the emotional motivator behind each of your customer’s actions. Knowing this will assist you in providing the appropriate content at the appropriate moment to ensure that the customer’s emotional journey through your brand is as smooth as possible.

Painpoints in the consumer journey

Learn what obstacles are preventing your customer from taking the desired action. For example, the cost is a common pain point. One of your consumers may be interested in your goods but depart it after discovering unexpected delivery costs. These possible pain points in your customer journey can be identified by highlighting them. For instance, you could create a FAQ page that addresses all the concerns.

5. Determine the resources you have and which you will require.

Your client journey map will touch on almost every aspect of your company. This will draw attention to all of the resources used to create the customer experience. As a result, it’s critical to know your current resources as well as the ones you’ll need to improve the customer experience.

For instance, the customer journey map shows you a problem in the customer service part. Also, you realize that your staff doesn’t have enough tools to follow up with customers. Hence, you can recommend to the managers to invest in some customer service tools. In addition, by using the consumer map, you can persuade managers easier to make decisions.

6. Check the journey map

After making a consumer journey map, it’s important to check the results. You can ask yourself the following questions. How many people visit your website but then leave without purchasing anything? What can you do to improve your customer service? A complete map will answer clearly these questions.

Analyzing the data can help you identify points where customers feel dissatisfied. With this approach, you can ensure that you are giving a valuable experience. So consumers can solve their difficulties with your company’s assistance. After that, follow each of your characters’ journey from their social media activities to reading their emails and online searching.

7. Make neccessary adjustments

Your data analysis should help you to clarify your desired website. Hence, you can make the necessary changes to your website to meet the goal. For example, you can add more evidence to your product pages. So customers will feel more reliable.

Changes will be beneficial regardless of how big or tiny they are because they are directly tied to what customers mentioned as their pain concerns. Therefore, you can make sure that adjustments will better the customer experience. Besides, with the help of a consumer journey map, you can ensure to solve the pain points of consumers.

In addition, you should review your consumer journey map every month to improve the customer experience frequently.

In conclusion, Arrowtheme wishes you will successfully create and take advantage of the consumer journey map. If you have any technical problems, feel free to contact us. Besides, you can read more useful articles about eCommerce here.