How to Create Customer Journey Maps That’ll Covert Visitors into Paying Customers

Once you’ve built comprehensive buyer personas, the next step you must follow to create a successful inbound marketing plan is to actually chart through your personas’ buyers journey.

As you may already know, a typical marketing and sales funnel looks something like this:

But, in fact, the journey towards making a purchase is quite different – and most of the time, it’s far more complex than what’s shown in the above example. This is when the customer (buyer) journey maps come in.

What do customer journey maps mean?

To put it briefly, your customer journey maps is a representation of all the points through which your customers come into contact with your offers.

A highly detailed customer journey map may also include your customer’s feelings, emotions, and thoughts.

Based on your product, service, and business model, each buyer personas may have different roads to purchase. That means no two customers follow the exact same journey to make a purchase.

Kerry Bodine, a customer experience consultant, says, “The main goal of the customer journey map is to get an overall view of what your customer is going through when they towards making a purchase.”

Why are customer journey maps crucial for inbound marketing?

Well, as you probably already know, digital marketing has completely transformed the buying process for just about every products and services you see in the market today. Despite this revolution, many organizations still consider inbound marketing as an add-on service to their current marketing and sales model.

But, you see, incorporating inbound marketing into your sales and marketing process is not just an improvement – but it’s an overall transformation.

It will help you identify areas that are not able to meet the needs of your customers. And although the marketing teams are often responsible for creating customer journey maps, however, this exercise will impact the whole organization.

What customer journey maps do is direct your entire team’s efforts on developing a marketing plan that is built around serving your customer selflessly, rather than selfishly focusing on your own products and services.

Here are few best customer journey maps examples:

And, here’s how you can develop your customized customer journey maps:

Kerry Bodine gives you killer tips on how to build your own customer journey maps.

In this video, Kerry defines what customer journey map is: it’s a description of all the steps your prospect go through as they become your customers over time.

So, if you consider the usual marketing funnel, you’ll notice most of your prospects start their journey from the top of the sales funnel (or “awareness” stage). At this early stage, the marketing guys will more likely have control over most customer points – but, they may also sometimes talk with other departments of the organization, such as shipping, sales, returns, customer support, or warranty claims.

In short, a customer journey map can help you find out appropriate times or events to send automated emails. And you may already have guessed, these emails may actually compel leads into becoming buying customers, motivate customers to make repeated purchases, and improve the overall customer’s buying experience.

Key Points You Just Learned

A customer journey map will help you understand your customer’s journey through the whole customer lifecycle.
Although marketing teams will often create customer journey maps, however, it will affect your whole organization.
Studying and optimizing customers touch points will help you tap into hidden/lost opportunities to apply marketing automation strategy to improve the overall customer experience, boost more sales, and encourage more repeated purchases.