Mapping your customer journey is one of the most cost-efficient ways to boost your business and turn prospective customers into loyal brand advocates. Focusing on the customer journey yields 55 percent more revenue from cross-sells and 250 percent more revenue from customer referrals, Aberdeen Group research shows. Motivated by these types of results, more companies are implementing customer mapping, with Gartner projecting that 60 percent of large companies will have in-house customer mapping capability by 2018.
These numbers build a compelling case for making mapping your customer journey a priority. Here are four steps to help you map your customers’ journey to satisfaction and your company’s road to more revenue.
Deploy Marketing That Matches Prospects
Your customer’s journey first crosses your company’s path when they encounter your marketing campaign. Landing page provider Instapage recommends taking a three-step approach to mapping out customer marketing journeys: attracting, retargeting and converting.
In the attracting stage, you focus on getting your audience’s attention through marketing campaigns on low-cost channels where you can precision-target audiences based on demographic, interest, behavioral or other variables. In the retargeting stage, you use cookies or tracking pixels to follow visitors who didn’t initially convert around the web, familiarizing them with your brand name and laying the foundation for them to convert when they’re ready. Retargeted customers are 70 percent more likely to convert, according to Instapage. Finally, in the third stage, you convert your prospect with a landing page that has been optimized through split-testing for a high conversion rate.
Create a User-Friendly Website Experience
When visitors from your marketing campaign arrive on your site’s landing page, their subsequent user experience with your site can have a major impact on whether or not they proceed to become customers. For optimal user experience, the U.S. government’s Usability.gov site recommends designing your site to deliver value by implementing six imperatives:
- Include useful, original content that fulfills visitor needs.
- Site should be easy to use, with a responsive design that accommodates all devices and screen sizes.
- Appeal to user desires through images and other graphic design elements that evoke emotions.
- Content should be easy to find through your navigational design.
- Content should also be accessible to users with disabilities.
- Site should be credible, building visitor trust through measures such as a secure URL, clear identifying and contact information, reviews of your products and guarantees against spam.
Make Purchases Easy
One of the most important parts of your customer’s journey is the checkout process. Mistakes here can be costly to your business. Optimizing your purchase process is crucial for avoiding revenue attrition during checkout. Make your checkout process as short and simple as possible, giving returning customers an option to log in instead of re-entering previously entered information, recommends TruConversion. Offer easy navigation options that make it easy for users to find their cart. Allow the option of saving cart items for later. Support a variety of payment methods, including credit cards, debit cards and PayPal. Offer free shipping as an incentive to avoid last-minute sticker shock.
Optimize Your Customer Service
Your customer’s experience after they make a purchase is a crucial part of their journey that determines whether they become repeat buyers and whether they refer your company to others. Sixty-seven percent of consumers cite a bad customer experience as a reason for abandoning a company, a survey by thinkJar LLC founder Sebastian Kolsky reports.
Using technology, like a virtual office platform, effectively is a key to delivering superior customer service. For instance, call center software with unified communications and analytics capability can enable you to track your customer service performance across all channels in order to make adjustments and improvements. Tools such as IVR and live chat can help you reduce customer wait time and boost service satisfaction.
