Creating a Digital Customer Journey Map: Best Practices and Examples

Businesses are meant to sell products, so the assumption that the product is the single most important thing to the business comes naturally. But think about it, as business owners, where do most of your problems come from? Let me give you a hint, it is not your product. It’s people, the people you want to sell your product to. Because people are unpredictable, confused, and sometimes dishonest about what they really want. So, for a business to thrive in the current market, it is expected to have a map of how customers react from the moment they’re introduced to the product to the point where they become customers and product advocates. This map is called a digital customer journey map and it is one of the most important resources for a business.

Now, mapping customer journeys used to be easier before the eruption of websites and hand-held digital devices. Because back then, companies had no other option but to put physical ads on billboards and run ads on radio station. And then hope that people would choose their product on their next visit to their brick and mortar store. But things have changed, because the no of access points has increased exponentially, so businesses now have a lot of avenues to care about and track. That’s why we decided to offer you a quick run through of the importance and benefits of having a digital customer journey and how you can create one for your business from scratch.

Benefits of Having a Digital Customer Journey Map

The most natural benefit of digital customer journey mapping is that businesses have a wireframe upon which they can predict customer behaviour across all five levels of customer journey and optimise their existing systems and workflows to align more with what the customer expects. This will inevitably help boost conversions and make for a healthier overall business. Some additional benefits of having a digital customer journey map are-

1. Budget Optimisation-  With an outline of how the customer would behave, and what would it take for them to actually respond positively at a given stage in the customer lifecycle, businesses can focus their budget and resources towards crafting positive experiences for customers across channels without testing their hypothesis multiple times. 
2. Personalization Opportunities– With digital maps, organisations can create personalised customer journey experiences based on individual preferences, behaviours, and demographics. This level of personalization can enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
3. Better Multi-Channel Marketing- The digital map also contains a list of avernus or digital touchpoints where customers are likely to interact with a brand. This gives the marketing teams the exact blueprint for targeting customers across various platforms.
4. Higher Customer Retention– Customer retention is the fourth stage in the digital customer journey and a lot of preemptive research goes into mapping how to retain customers and what efforts it would require to do so. This helps boost customer retention and hence reduces churn.

Creating a Digital Customer Journey Map in 5 Simple Steps

1. Identify Your Customer Base

   Before you can go ahead and predict customer behaviour, you have to first identify who your ideal customer is. Because not everyone will buy from you. It’s only a percentage of people who have the same problem as the one you’re trying to solve and you need to concentrate your efforts on them. 

   First, you need to compare all the different personas and pick the one that resonates best with your product. Then, you need to go ahead and answer some questions like-

   • Where does my audience live?
   • What kind of content do they consume?
   • What are their spending habits?
   • How much disposable income do they have?
   • What digital devices do they primarily spend their time on?

2. Solidify the Sales Funnel

   It’s a long journey between when a customer hears about your product and when he/she finally decides to make the purchase. Therefore, you must have a good idea about what your buying process looks like and what efforts you should make in the intermediate steps to convince the customer that your product is the right one for them.

   There are multiple buying scenarios that can occur and if you’re aware about them and have the exact steps to manoeuvre your customer towards the conversion, then you have a concrete buying process.

3. Pick the Right Customer Touchpoints

   Your customers have preferences. They usually spend a lot of time on certain platforms and they (mostly) use a certain digital device, like a smartphone, a tab, or a laptop. Concentrating your marketing efforts on these platforms while optimising your content for these devices can yield a high conversion rate, because you can reach the right people, through the right channels, and offer a precise amount of stimulus to push them into further stages of the customer journey.

   Here are some examples of primary customer touchpoints-

   • Ads
   • Emails
   • Billboards
   • Social Media
   • Your Landing Page

4. Identify User Pain Points

   Once you have a digital journey map framework, you need to enrich this map with user pain points. These pain points are customer issues that they need a solution to and offer a direct way to communicate with the customer effectively.

   You can use these pain points to craft personalised content at every stage of the customer journey to satisfy their needs and present yourselves as an entity of value. 

   Note that the user pain points differ from one stage to another. For example- people at the awareness stage might not even be aware that your product offers a complete solution to their problem, while those at the consideration stage just need more information so they can  make the right decision.

5. Align Your Offer With Customer Pain Points

   The final and naturally the most important step of building a customer journey map is to craft your offer in a way that aligns with user pain points across all stages of customer journey. This will add true purpose to your customer journey map and guide your teams in a general direction, offering them purpose and conviction.

   Note that you can have multiple offers at multiple stages of the customer journey to address different user pain points.

Some Real Examples of Digital Customer Journey Maps 

1. Starbucks

   Here’s the customer journey map from Starbucks, and as you can see they’re very concerned about how the customer feels from the moment he/she enters the store to the moment they leave. They even ensure that the customer has something to think about and reflect after they’ve left the shop.

2. Lego

   Here’s the customer experience wheel from Lego and it is one of the perfect journey maps across all companies. This wheel shows a simplified experience of a flight to New York, where the centre wheel concerns itself with the characteristics of the persona while the outer wheel notes the experiences of the flyer before, during, and after the flight.

3. Automotive Purchase Journey Map

   This one is quite thorough and takes into account the factors that influence an automotive purchase. It also offers a lot of insights into the avenues customers use to gain information about the desired model and the prices.

4. B2B Purchase Journey

   You can clearly see how the customer journey has been broken down into steps and the goals of the business have been streamlined with the customer requirements. This one just like every other map in this blog assumes the perspective of the customer. It is pivotal to have a good grasp of how buyers engage with businesses to be able to break the ice with the customer and make them feel valued.

Conclusion

The most pivotal part of mapping a customer journey is to understand how they think, react, and respond to stimulus and while data analytics may help you with some of these thighs, tapping into the emotional response of customers is where things get a little tricky. That’s where emotional intelligence tools like Insights Pro step in and save the day. Coupling market research with emotional intelligence, you can use these tools to tap into the emotional heatmap of customers. 

This allows you to gauge their reaction to certain stimuli and identify areas that they respond to positively. You can later use this information to enrich your customer journey map with stimulus that elicit positive emotion and push users in the right direction.