Preparation and Step-by-Step Tips for Building a Customer Journey Roadmap
The importance of delivering customer experience is on the rise and has become a crucial area of concern and focus for marketers and business owners. In this post, we will show you preparations you need to take to build a customer journey roadmap that will closely align with your “customer first” marketing objective, to guide your team of all the customer interactions and touchpoints, plan goals and other actions to take in step-by-step.
Start with this customer journey preparation checklist before you get started with the main actions of building a customer journey roadmap for your company –
Determine the metrics of measuring journey
Start with deciding key performance indicators (KPIs) rules such as lead scores, sales cycle targeting every touchpoint of customer journey to measure each journey more accurately. Set up lead score rules for every action and interaction from the first contact of a visiting website or in-person contact at an event to sales and post-sales activities that can turn your customers into brand advocates.
Research thoroughly well in advance to plan every step of the journey
Align with every customer serving and follow-up teams including customer service team, sales development team, and sales teams to collect insights on customers. Additionally, also focus on collecting data on your campaign performance to evaluate your marketing processes, offers, messages and channels implemented to target your customers. Identify how effective your personalization effects are, the length of your sales cycle, how useful your offers and discounts are, how your customers act on and react to your offers and messages among many others.
Decide the final output
Start your customer journey roadmap by clearly outlining the probable result from the journey. Outline all objectives from every touchpoint clearly by setting easy to follow instructions and activities to guide your team members. Work with the designer of your organization to pinpoint all the research findings, goals, objectives, touchpoints, channels and activities to formalize things to do and consider in every stage of customer journey roadmap.
Types of research to conduct
The most effectual and essential practice to build an effective customer journey roadmap is starting with listening to customers ang gaining insights. The best way to find out and learn about how your messaging, information, content and campaigns are impacting in leading your prospects and customers toward the sales funnel. The best medium and sources to use for conducting research are customer interviews, customer service staff, listening through social media channels, Google Analytics, CRM, message analytics and other sources of data. While doing the research, include points such as how long visitors spent on your website, how long prospects and customers take before arriving at a purchase decision, what messages and offers engaged with your prospects and customers the most and what could not work.
Understand your buyer persona
After collecting research findings and insights on your prospects and customers websites, surveys, team’s knowledge, social media and analytics, it is time to analyze those findings and understand your prospects and customers. Define your buyer persona by creating research-based presentations on buyers’ persona. The buyer persona must cover what drives their acts to click, sign up, attend webinars, ask questions, watch videos, download content, what they think when they make the purchase decisions.
Follow these steps to create the customer journey roadmap
Step 1: Define goal for customer journey
The most essential reason why you are creating a customer journey roadmap is itself the goal or objective of the journey. Make sure your customer journey is exactly focused toward the customer experience you want to deliver and the segment of audiences you want to follow. Focus on these goals will help your team remember the actions to plan, data points and insights to collect and track how those marketing efforts are impacting your audiences.
Step 2: Define Ideal Customer Personas
Most companies make this mistake of not defining their ideal customer profiles before getting started with the customer journey roadmap and eventually fail to plot the right campaigns that can connect with their customers. Thus, they fail to reap any benefit from the customer journey. Without identifying the customer profile, marketers will not be able to track who they are, what type of resources or information they want from your brand’s campaigns, their expectations from your products or services as well as their pain points, challenges and the type of similar products they are searching or already using.
The best way to pinpoint ideal customer personas is to conduct customer surveys, extend free product or service tests to see how and whom among your audiences are engaging with your products and services. Set a questionnaire ready for running surveys and free test kit campaigns to find out –
- How did they find out about your product or brand?
- Have they ever or earlier purchased anything from your brand?
- If they made any purchase, what motivated them to make the purchase?
- How easy is your company website to browse and navigate?
- Have they earlier made any contact with your brand via customer service?
- Have your customer service team solved their problem?
- What are the challenges and issues are they trying to solve with your products or services?
- What about your brand has attracted them?
- What are the ways and areas they think you need to improve customer experience?
These questionnaires can help you with information to categorize your customers into various segments and tailor your marketing campaigns to these segments to drive customer engagement.
Step 3: Plan all the touchpoints
Touchpoints refer to part of your company website, emails and newsletters, content, social media posts, adding items to the shopping carts and many others. Later you can track how long they have spent on your company website, why products they have left in the shopping carts, content and resources they have downloaded previously – find out if there are lesser or more touchpoints than you have anticipated and thereby, you can alter your website, your email campaigns, social media posts, tone and language of your messages or other actions to get more touchpoints.
Step 4: Select the type of roadmap
Select the type of customer journey roadmap you want to build based on your goals and objectives. Major types of customer journey roadmaps include:
- A Day in a life map: These journey roadmaps focus on how your every customer spends a day, including their daily chores, activities, habits, how they interact and respond with your brand on a daily basis.
- Current mode: This is the most commonly used customer journey roadmap that helps marketers plan their strategies and actions based on how the targeted audiences feel about the customer experience while receiving and interacting with the brand in real-time.
- Future roadmap state: These roadmaps allow marketers to anticipate customers’ thoughts, actions, and emotions while they will interact with brand communications in future.
Step 5: Plan thorough customer journey
After you have defined your customers, the customer segments and selecting the type of customer journey roadmap is right for your current marketing and overall business goals, it is time to plan your customer journey thoroughly in step-by-step. In this step of building a roadmap, you need to narrow down on actions, assets to use, messaging and content, offers that are most popular with your customers. After planning the actions and strategies, select the frequency, day of the week and time that are best to connect with your customers.
6. Set the Customer Journey into motion
This final step, focus on executing the actions you planned and gather data on how they respond to your efforts through every touchpoint to analyze customers’ reactions, whether positive or negative or no reactions at all, to find out the reason. You can also find out and focus on where and how customers’ expectations were not met to optimize your messages and offers to further improve the brand engagements.
By following these steps, you can build your customer journey roadmap and when it is planned and implemented effectively, your business can not only benefit from increased engagement and revenues, but long-term relation with your customers in future. In case you need our services to build customer journey roadmap – our certified marketing automation experts will guide you step by step, once you take the first step to have a chat via chat box at the right below, tell us your requirement via the contact us page, info@marrinadecisions.com or our social channels: Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
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