Do you understand what your customers go through?
Creating a customer journey is a great way to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and find out what makes them tick.
Mapping your customer journey is all about visualising the steps a potential customer needs to go through to make a purchase from your business. Visualising this journey helps to better understand your customers’ experiences with your business and make said experience as pain-free as possible.
Whether your customers interact with you via email, social media, live chat, or any other number of customer support channels, mapping your customer journey will help you put their experience into perspective.
Typically, a customer journey will take you through five distinct steps: awareness, consideration, decision, experience, and advocacy.
Let’s take a closer look at these five steps.
1. Awareness
Think of the awareness stage like online dating. Your messaging should be clear, honest, and a reflection of where you’re at in your relationship. In this stage, you and your customers are just starting to get to know each other. Play it cool and put your best foot forward.
Pay close attention to marketing efforts like display ads, blogs, competitions, and traditional marketing.
2. Consideration
Deciding to hand over your hard-earned cash is a difficult decision for customers, especially in the competitive world we live in today. With so much variety to choose from, customers become more and more informed and make fewer impulse purchases.
You need to give your potential customers all the information they need to make a purchase. This includes reviews, customer testimonials, product demonstrations, discounts, returns policies, and so much more.
3. Decision
The decision stage is all about making the process of purchasing as seamless and easy as possible.
Common touchpoints here include:
- Product pages
- Checkout page
- Payment gateway
- Confirmations
- Post-purchase support
Once your customer has decided to buy, the last thing you want is to make that experience clunky, frustrating, unprofessional.
4. Experience
So, your customer has made a decision, and their purchase is complete. Your job is done, right? Wrong.
You don’t stop simply because a customer has made a purchase. Post-purchase support and experience are equally important as all the steps leading up to a customer making a purchase. You need to acknowledge your customer, offer support, and let them know you’re here for them whenever they might need you.
It’s much more difficult to find a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. Don’t let your customers slip away.
5. Retention & Advocacy
What can you do for your customers after they’ve made a purchase? More importantly, how can you keep them and make them sing your praises?
Consider how your customer support functions. Do you have a loyalty program or coupons in place? What is your returns policy? Do you have a customer database for future promotions?
Ready to start your own journey? Download our guide to planning your customer journey.
