3 Easy Steps to Optimize Your Customer Journey Map

What are customer journey maps and why does your business need one?

09:16 27 April 2020

Let’s say you have an e-commerce store and you sell your product on several online channels. You’re on a bunch of social media platforms, you send out weekly emails, you have organic traffic that comes through, and you work with a few affiliates.

How do you know which channel really brought you sales?


Online marketing is so much more about an omnichannel approach nowadays and it brings up a really serious issue of attribution. You might see that social media doesn’t report direct sales in your Google Analytics, but it does generate the most leads and those leads then convert on emails.

So you might want to minimize your social media budget and increase your email marketing but if you do that you would be cutting the very branch that those sales sit on. In reality, both channels are important for your business, but you would need a detailed customer journey map to know that.

A journey map is a visual representation of your customer’s journey through your sales or marketing funnel. And don’t worry if this sounds complicated. You don’t need to hire a customer journey optimization consultant to get this right.

Here are the three easy steps to create and optimize your journey map.

Let’s dive in.

1. Create a buyer persona

The first and most crucial step in creating and optimizing your customer journey map is to create a buyer persona. Use the data on your website’s customers and create several relevant buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer that’s based on a few assumptions.

You’re not going to be able to guess every single aspect of your customers but your data should give you a rough overview. Once you’ve created one or several buyer personas it’s time to start on your map.

2. Map out touchpoints and channels

In the second step of your customer journey map optimization, make a list of all of your marketing channels and possible customer touchpoints. There could be several touchpoints for a customer in each channel.

For example, someone could have clicked on a social media ad and then put in their email address. And finally converted through an email welcome sequence. So draw out all of these potential marketing channels and touchpoints and make it easy to read.

3. Draw some conclusions

The final step in your customer journey optimization is to draw some conclusions. Look at your map and see which channels are involved. Also, try to see where the main customer pain points are.

Think back of your customer persona or that ideal customer. Where would they find the most difficulty in moving forward? What are the best channels or touchpoints that would bring them back to your site?

Write down a few conclusions on this that you could present to your manager and team and then decide on a few A/B tests that you could conduct in the next few weeks. This is the most important step. This is where you take all of your data and conclusions and test out some changes to your store.

After you run your test come back to your journey map and see what happened. Was your test successful? Did it result in more conversions? Better conversion rates? Maybe more leads?

The more you test the better your customer journey map and your site will get.

Recap

We just discussed the three simple steps on how to create and optimize your customer journey map. Remember, if you are having any difficulty with any of these steps you could always hire a customer journey optimization consultant to help you out.