Do you know how your customers bet from your social media website to a full cart ready for online check out? How do they move from their emails to your sales page? Most importantly–do you know what may be keeping them from selecting that final “checkout” button? If you don’t know the answer to any of these questions, it’s time to delve into a Customer Journey Map.

What Exactly Is a Customer Journey Map?

A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the choices your customers make when interacting with your brand. It helps illustrate the interior minds of your clients to better understand their needs, desires, and issues as they traverse across your company’s touchpoints–which are your business’s website, social media channels, and any marketing or sales team member interactions (i.e. customer service providers). 

Customer Journey Maps allow a business to see their products and services from the customer’s perspective. This is invaluable information, because it can help you identify where any pain points are that could lead to you losing a customer, like a bad link or unclear website copy.

These maps generally start out pretty rudimentary. A business takes an excel sheet and fills it out with key events, customer motivations and needs, and any areas of tension within the customer experience. From this, a visual is created to better track a customer’s journey. This structural analysis can help a business organize their procedures and products in a more logical, optimized manner that can lead to more commerce. 

How Do You Create A Customer Journey Map?

As discussed previously, Customer Journey Maps visually communicate the ways a buyer persona may travel through the various touchpoints of a company to reach their end goal. The illustrative part of these maps is invaluable, since the buyer’s journey is no longer a linear one–it can be cyclical, multi-channeled, and go in several different directions. It helps translate all the moving parts of your commerce into one digestible whole.

The first step in creating these maps is collecting data from your current customers. This can be a lengthy process, but the information will inform your buyer personas as well as the map itself. 

Next is mapping out all the touchpoints of your company. This includes any websites, social media channels, and direct interactions with team members that a customer could have. It’s meant to cover all the potential paths a customer could go down, as well as the brand’s response. 

This map indicates if your customer is reaching their goals and, if not, how they can. It will also include customer sentiments, pain points, and actions, plotted in sequential order. An effective customer journey map is one that promotes empathy and provides a clear vision for improving customer interactions.

Why Is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

The answer to this question is multifaceted. As we’ve already talked about, a buyer’s journey in the modern age is a complicated one, it’s tough to narrow down how a client gets to their online cart, and why they may abandon it without checking out. 

Customer Journey Mapping takes all of this complicated information and turns it into something that informs not only the methods through which a business conducts business, but also how a product can be better.