Customer Journey Map Example

Don’t think customer, be the customer

Stop scratching your head, trying to understand what your customer wants. It’s time to connect with your customer on a deeper level to acquire, nurture and grow prospects into leads and leads into brand advocates. To get a sense of your customer’s motivations — their needs and pain points — you need to stop imagining who your ideal customer is and take a step back into reality.

A walk in their shoes

To proactively drive the customer experience, step out of your office, talk to your customers and live their experience. Shadow your customer’s interactions, whether they be digital, physical or a combination of both.

After diving into the mindset of your customer, it’s time to visualize their journey, and there’s no better way to do this than creating a customer journey map. This map details how your customer becomes aware of your brand, and looks at each touch point they have along the way.

To map the customer journey, apply these five steps:

Map your buyer’s journey
Diagram your acquire, nurture and grow system
Assemble your customer journey marketing tool stack
Identify your first must-have journeys
Track results and experiment

Paving the road

But don’t think of the customer journey as a straight and narrow road. This road has many twists and turns along the way. Some turns you may be able to predict, and others are off the map and will catch you by surprise.

According to Google, no two customer journeys are the same, and most journeys don’t resemble the traditional marketing funnel we’ve come to accept as the single source of truth. After six months of observing thousands of user’s clickstream data, Google found that people don’t make decisions in a linear or funnel-like format. Instead, consumers narrow and broaden their searches, jumping from keyword research to market comparisons, location and price. Marketers really need to know who their customers are and predict where they might search, what they might search for and what considerations will impact the ultimate purchase decision.

The customer journey template

To pave the road towards customer happiness, start with a customer journey template and expand from there. Take the following customer journey map as an example of proactively following up contacts that search your knowledge base.

With this map, you want to find out if your knowledge base is really solving your customers' problems. When someone searches your knowledge base, you can alert your team to contact your customer proactively to ensure they are able to find the resource they’re looking for.

Building a customer journey like the one mentioned above allows you to analyze all the touch points within a single scenario.

In conducting market research, we found that 71 percent of high performing marketers have defined a customer journey map. Of those marketers, 88 percent say this customer journey initiative has improved acquisition, satisfaction and retention.

Map your customer journey with Autopilot’s simple and visual marketing automation software. Whether customers are online, offline or mobile, personalize their experience with emails, in-app messaging, SMS, postcards, headsup messages and more!