Building a website by guessing what your users want and then hoping for a high conversion rate is a sure way to waste a lot of time.

The customer’s online journey is more important than ever. Marketers need to get inside the heads of their ideal customers in order to understand how they would interact with particular platforms and when performing specific actions.

What is customer journey mapping?

When you map out your customer’s journey on your website or even your app, you’re looking to improve their overall experience by seeing things from their perspective.

It’s planning out how you’re going to get them from A to Paid in the most user friendly way possible.

You can create a customer journey map at any stage, whether you’re in the process of designing your website from scratch or you want to improve customer service and user experience in general.

The benefits of journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is important for the following reasons:

• Identify potential frustrations. Your goal is to make your customer’s journey as pleasant as possible in order to get them to convert. Creating a map will help you pinpoint any hindrances in terms of browsing your site on different devices or completing the conversion process.
• Prioritize projects. By gaining a better understanding of the possible problems areas across your online platforms you can decide how best to use your resources going forward and what your team needs to focus on in order to take your business to the next level.
• Grow your business. A customer journey map is one tool that can be used to identify potential gaps in your business and map out future growth plans.

Customer journey mapping basics

Your map should ideally include the following elements:

Personas

Creating personas for your ideal customers will help you better develop marketing messages and experiences that are relevant to them. When developing your persona you can include details such as age, location and gender but details such as goals, fears, values and challenges are even more important since your brand needs to help them meet their goals, conquer their fears and speak to their values.

Timeline

Your map should contain a timeline that highlights each step that a customer would take to reach the ideal end goal. This could be signing up for a newsletter or completing a purchase for webinar tickets. A timeline is generally represented on a horizontal axis and shows the various user touchpoints. In order to get an accurate representation, a timeline can be created by getting someone to actually go through the journey so that you can observe them.

Emotions

Keeping track of the emotions that a user is experiencing while using your online platforms will give you a better idea of whether you’re achieving your goals and objectives. Low points that customers might be experiencing are red flags and are areas that need to be improved.

Interactions

Analyzing how a user interacts with your platform will show you how the journey can be improved. Perhaps there is an unnecessary step in place that could be removed or there is a disconnect between what you want the customer to do and what they’re actually doing. Interactions offer excellent insights into the customer journey.

Creating a customer journey map is usually undertaken by a UX/UI expert but you can do it yourself too. Either way, this is a highly beneficial process that all website and app owners should undertake.