To do this, you need to meet customer needs from the beginning of the buying process, through research and selection, through conversion, service and, ultimately, advocacy.
Today’s customers expect an engaging, consistent and connected digital list of azerbaijan whatsapp phone numbers experience at every touchpoint, whether they’re prospects visiting a brand’s website for the first time or existing customers.
This article examines the different phases of the digital customer journey and what smart businesses can do to meet customer expectations and demands at each stage. Together, we’ll explore the following topics:
customer-journey-mapping
Summary
What is a digital customer journey?
Why do you need it?
What are the stages of the customer journey?
How to Create a Customer Journey Map in 7 Steps
5 examples of customer journey maps
How to automate your digital customer journey
What is a digital customer journey?
No matter what industry or domain your business operates in, chances are it’s grappling with the challenges of continuous innovation. Competitive advantage is rapidly eroding as technology evolves and barriers to entry disappear.
One of the key factors to riding the digital wave is integrating a perfect digital customer journey. But first you need to understand what that means.
A customer journey typically identifies all interactions between the customer and your business from the customer's perspective.
The digital customer journey refers to all the different stages that the customer goes through and the interactions they have throughout their relationship with your brand, from browsing to purchasing and post-purchase. For marketing managers, the key is to be able to identify the stage a customer is at and to successfully adapt the content they receive based on this stage.
Customer journey mapping has therefore become essential for any type of business, regardless of its sector, whether it is retail, pharmaceutical or media for example. You need it without a doubt! But you will want it even more when we have mentioned the benefits it brings you.
Why do you need it?
First, let’s take a general look at the goals of using customer journey mapping. Then let’s dive into the details of its benefits.
1. The objectives of the digital customer journey
1. Optimize data collection
The digital customer journey combines all the digital touchpoints a customer has with a brand and aggregates the data collected such as: basic online consumer data, transaction information, browsing history across devices, and customer service interactions.
New digital tools expand information collection and help transform a flood of information into actionable knowledge.
For example, your retail locations can use data analytics to help predict demand or inventory requirements, as well as prevent service disruptions.
Besides online surveys and emails, you can also use an interactive landing page on your website to collect data.
More generally, companies can use social media to better communicate with their customers. They can also leverage data analytics to make faster decisions and improve operational efficiency.
2. Optimize your customer experience
Companies are leveraging their technology expertise to disrupt their industries while making life easier for users.
But digital transformation goes beyond simply simplifying the customer experience. It also aims to transform processes and interactions within a company, in order to optimize the marketing experience.
It simply allows you to optimize and modernize the customer experience.
This will be relevant once we mention the incredible benefits of customer journey mapping.
2. The benefits of customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping will help you:
1. Zoom out
First, customer journey mapping can help you step outside of your organization’s perspective. It helps you look at your product from multiple perspectives.
You can create a map of customer journeys but also external stakeholders. Today, in order to survive the market competition, companies need a customer centric approach.
No matter the perspective, taking a moment to zoom out can help you truly understand the problem you need to solve.
2. Predict customer behavior
Your goal is to predict and influence customer behavior. That means everything from personas to ads, landing pages to emails, has one primary goal: to persuade your visitors to take action while preparing them for their next move.
So you need to know what motivates your audience, both in the present and in the future.
Customer journey mapping helps you better understand your customers' needs, wants, goals, emotions, and actions.
As a visual, focused representation of a customer's experience with your brand—from their first interaction to a long-term customer relationship —you can predict and influence customer behavior, helping to optimize conversion rates.
By combining behavioral data with relationship marketing metrics , you'll gain a much more detailed understanding of your customers' needs, as well as insights that will help you make decisions.
3. Identify opportunities
It is not just about identifying the problem, but also identifying moments of opportunity and intervention.
For example, with a current state journey map, you can uncover and communicate areas that might not be working in a customer experience.
That said, it can also help you uncover larger market opportunities. You can also highlight what's going well and focus on it.
4. Have a competitive advantage
The journey mapping process gives you a competitive advantage: your employees will better understand the experiences your customers have, their needs but also their pain points and therefore will be able to improve service.
This is already important, but in the future, it will be the determining factor in why customers will prefer your product over all others. It's about who treats their customers best. If you get to know your customers truly, you're already halfway there.
5. Make your marketing strategy effective
When you finally understand your customer’s decision-making process, you can create marketing content that meets their desires. You also gain efficiency in terms of timing and platform.
Knowing which marketing strategies to use and which not helps reduce marketing costs. This will therefore lead to sales growth in the long run.
Now that you know why you need to focus on your customer journey, let's look at the steps to take.
What are the stages of the customer journey?
A standard customer journey is represented by a series of chronological actions performed by the customer. There can be 8 of them as shown in the graph below:
Highlight a need
Do some research
Select a company
Buy a product or service
Receipt of purchased products/service provided
Use of the product and benefit from the service
Keep in touch
Recommend by word of mouth if satisfied
customer-journey-steps
Between these main actions, a customer can encounter twice as many micro-moments.
Actito is the ultimate tool that helps you highlight and leverage every micro-moment of the process. In fact, it can help you break down the customer journey into specific actions and navigate it effectively and efficiently.
Why is this important?
Identifying each step in the process allows you to properly place marketing triggers so you can attract, obtain and nurture customers.
Here is an example of a customer journey created by Actito. It detects all the marketing triggers that will allow you to engage the customer throughout their journey, to keep in touch with them at the right time and on the right channel.
triggers-marketing-customer-journey
Now that we understand what the steps in a customer journey can be, let's look at how to effectively build a customer journey map.
