6 ways customer journey mapping improves marketing efforts

The secret to improving customer experience is in understanding that it is not a single event. It is, in actuality, a collection of interactions over the lifetime of the customer’s engagement with your brand, each with a different objective for the customer and (hopefully) a unique brand experience responding to it.  

How, then, do you ensure that you are making the most of each and every customer moment?  How do you guarantee that you are both answering your customer’s needs and delighting them in the process?

A strong solution is customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping involves mapping out the entire experience a customer goes through when engaging with your brand, from the first point of contact to post-purchase interactions to ongoing engagement.  

This helps companies visualize and understand their business from the customer's perspective, identify pain points, and find opportunities for improvement.

The benefits of mapping the customer journey

We’ll walk through how to develop a customer journey map in a moment, but let’s start with some specifics on why the exercise is worth the time. There are several ways it will help you optimize your marketing efforts. Here are six of the biggest:

1. Identify customer pain points and gaps

Customer journey mapping helps in identifying pain points and gaps in the customer experience. In fact, they will likely become apparent as soon as you start walking through the experience and cataloging steps and touchpoints. 

Don’t worry, every brand has these pain points. By understanding where customers face difficulties, you can develop targeted solutions to address these issues, leading to improved customer engagement, revenue and loyalty.

What’s more, if you extend the exercise cross-functionally, the journey map provides a structured approach for idea generation. It allows teams to brainstorm specific improvements at each touchpoint, leading to more focused and actionable ideas. 

2. Create a more consistent customer experience

As brands and companies grow, it is amazing how often messaging becomes disjointed across channels and customer life stages. Beyond simple messiness, this inconsistency weakens customers’ perception of the brand, eroding long-term engagement and loyalty. 

Customer journey mapping helps ensure that all channels within a life stage convey the same message and tone, reducing the risk of confusion and strengthening brand engagement. 

Once addressed, you can leverage your Customer Data Platform (CDP) to operationalize that consistency by centralizing and standardizing communication strategies for each customer segment and life stage.

3. Expand your multi-channel marketing strategy

Beyond driving consistency of messaging, journey mapping helps identify cross-channel opportunities and ensures that all channels and platforms are being brought to bear throughout the customer experience.

It highlights untapped channels that can be leveraged to reach and engage customers more effectively. This is true not just of digital channels such as paid media, email and SMS, but also channels such as direct mail and customer care.

In fact, if your brand includes physical products (rather than digital-only), one important touchpoint to remember is the physical delivery — the package that arrives at your customer’s home. 

You’ll have 100% open rate on that package, so thinking through the inserts, surprise-and-delight bonuses, and on-package messaging can be a big unlock for the customer experience.

4. Optimize all aspects of customer lifecycle

A key benefit of journey mapping is that it provides a holistic view of the customer lifecycle, from the user’s very first visit through long-term usage and loyalty. Consistency of voice and experience is important here also.  

While it’s crucial that customer communications evolve over time (as the customer learns more about the brand and the brand learns more about the customer), the user should never feel like they are suddenly engaging with a different company. A full journey map will highlight those inconsistencies with eye-opening clarity.

Similarly, by mapping out the entire customer journey, businesses can ensure that all aspects of the customer lifecycle receive focus for improvement. This includes often overlooked stages like gift-giving, and advocacy/referral. Investing a little time and attention in these stages can enhance revenue, base growth and loyalty. 

5. Increase “always on” marketing

An effective customer journey map will identify key moments for triggered and automated journeys, often referred to as "always on" marketing. These automated journeys can provide timely and personalized interactions that keep customers engaged and moving forward in their journey.  

For example, “win back” efforts can be triggered when someone hasn’t visited or purchased in three months, and can consist of a series of automated communications designed to re-engage the customer and get them purchasing again. A CDP enables automated journeys based on real-time customer data and behavior, creating greater efficiency than weekly campaign-based blasts.

6. Amplify personalization

Thinking like the customer allows businesses to spotlight key moments for personalization. This can include customized messaging, relevant content, and product recommendations based on the customer's behavior and preferences. 

Personalization enhances the customer experience and increases the likelihood of near-term conversion and long-term loyalty. In providing a detailed view of all the touchpoints in the customer experience, journey mapping is the perfect exercise to find and enhance the moments that deepen customer personalization throughout the customer experience. 

How to create a customer journey map

There are many approaches to customer journey mapping, and ultimately there is no right or wrong answer.  However, having led journey mapping exercises at a few different brands, I can share what I have found to be most effective, for both process and output.

Step 1: Choose a customer persona

To begin, choose the customer persona that represents your typical or ideal customer.  Depending on how expansive you are with your personas, you may be inclined to run this exercise with two or three of them, but I’d suggest starting with your primary target, to provide focus. The objective is to keep that customer top of mind to experience your brand from their perspective.  

Whenever possible, this persona should be based on real data and insights about your target audience. They should include demographic information, behavioral patterns, motivations, and goals. (Your CDP is indispensable here, as it collects and unifies data from various sources, enabling the creation of precise and dynamic personas that reflect actual customer behaviors and preferences.)

Step 2: Identify key life stages

Next, identify the key life stages your customer advances through. These life stages are significant phases in the customer's interaction with your brand, such as:

• Prospect
• First-time purchaser
• Repeat purchaser
• Brand advocate
• Lapsed user  

If your brand has a subscription component (as is often the case these days with direct-to-consumer brands), you’ll want to break out “subscription purchase” from “one-time purchase” (sometimes called “a la cart”) and also include “cancel subscription.”  

Lastly, you’ll want to identify any meaningful micro-journeys, such as “gift purchase” or “refer-a-friend”.  Understanding these stages helps in creating a detailed and accurate map.

Step 3: Build a catalog of all touchpoints

This is the heart of the exercise: you’ll want to walk through the user experience for each life stage and catalog (screengrab) each touchpoint along the way.  

Depending on the life stage, these can include paid ads, social media, website experience, app experience, emails, SMS, and even customer care and direct mail. Your CDP helps with this step by providing a centralized view of most interactions, making it easier to identify and document touchpoints.

This is also where you’ll want to represent the physical delivery experience, if that applies to your brand.  

Step 4: Create a visual map for each life stage

Now that you’ve got the touchpoints cataloged, it’s time to bring the customer journey to life with a visual mapping for each life stage. This comprehensive view is a crucial component of the journey mapping exercise since it illustrates both the evolution of the customer experience and its consistency (or, often, lack of consistency) between life stages and across channels.

There are many software tools available that can help create and manage customer journey maps. These tools can provide templates, data integration, and visualization capabilities, making the mapping process more efficient and accurate. Many of these tools integrate with CDPs, allowing for real-time data updates and insights.

However, for a more immersive experience, you can create a temporary “Customer Journey Room.” This is an actual physical room where the touchpoints are taped on the wall. (I like to use a conference room that I can temporarily block off for a week or two.)

This physical space allows team members to walk through the journey, engage with the touchpoints, and better understand the customer's perspective. It also serves as a collaborative environment for the next step.

Step 5: Brainstorm opportunities and prioritize initiatives

Invite cross-functional participants to review and brainstorm on the customer journey. What gaps do people see in the experience? What opportunities do people see to expand engagement or better connect with customers?  

These sessions benefit from multiple fresh perspectives, leading to more comprehensive insights and innovative solutions. Consider incorporating teams like growth marketing, lifecycle marketing, product management, customer care, creative, and product development into these meetings. Different departments will provide unique viewpoints that might not be considered otherwise. 

After identifying pain points and gaps during the review sessions, document and prioritize the opportunities. Determine which issues need immediate attention and which ones can be addressed later. 

This prioritized roadmap helps in creating a clear action plan for improving the customer journey and is critical for ensuring that the customer journey mapping will bear fruit in an improved customer experience. 

Your map to improved customer engagement

Customer journey mapping is at the heart of understanding and improving customers’ engagement with your brand. By taking the time to assess and refine the customer journey, you can ensure a thoughtful and evolving experience that resonates with users. 

Additionally, a well-executed journey map, empowered by a CDP, fosters cross-company alignment, driving interdepartmental collaboration and uncovering new opportunities for growth and improvement. 

Investing in a customer journey map not only benefits the customer but also strengthens the overall business strategy, leading to sustained success and competitive advantage.

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