3-Step Starter Guide: Mapping Your Customer Journey

Developing a comprehensive roadmap to the ideal customer journey is an intensive - but rewarding - undertaking. 

Get started by breaking down the process into three (achievable) tasks:

1. Gather the Right Team
2. Define Your Customer Journey
3. Complete a Customer Journey Assessment + SWOT Analysis

Step 1: Gather the Right Team

It’s critical to gather the right team to fully document your brand’s customer journey.

Once you’ve identified the key stakeholders who will represent each area of your business, you can collaborate on the next two steps.

Step 2: Define Your Customer Journey

The traditional customer journey is comprised of three stages: Pre-Sale, Sale, and Post-Sale. Customers move through these stages at various rates depending on the product, their own aptitude, and how easy brands make it on them.

For example, buying a piece of home exercise equipment is typically a significant purchase (i.e. expensive), so consumers are more likely to do a lot of upfront research before plunking down a few grand.

This is where your team needs to document your customer persona(s) for each stage of the customer journey.

• Pre-Sale Phase
  • Awareness: People are seeking answers to solve a problem or fulfill a need. Most customers start at the Awareness stage. During this period they are seeking educational content to solve their problem or meet their need.
    • What problem does your product solve?
    • What questions do most new customers have? This is a great indicator of what educational content people are seeking.
  • Consideration: People compare their options; your brand vs. the competition.
    • How do you stack up against your competition?
    • What are your key differentiators?
    • Price is typically a driving consideration. Do you offer coupons, discounts, or promotions?
    • Shipping and delivery timeframes can be dealbreakers for some industries. How important is this for your brand? And how prominently is this information displayed to customers pre-purchase?
• Sale Phase
  • Decision: Customer decides to purchase a specific product or service.
    • How do your customers buy your products? Are they in-store or online?
    • Is it easy for customers to buy from your brand? For online purchases count the clicks to purchase.
• Post-Sale Phase
  • Retention: A brand engages the customer through various channels (email, loyalty programs).
    • How does your brand communicate with customers?
    • Is your communication one-way or do you provide ways for customers to give feedback, write reviews, or otherwise be heard?
    • What is the engagement rate for each communication channel?
  • Loyalty: Customers with a positive brand experience can become advocates and repeat customers.
    • Does your brand see a lot of repeat customers?
    • Do you receive product reviews or customer feedback?
    • How do you ensure happy customers promote your brand? Are you doing enough to facilitate brand advocates?

Step 3: Customer Journey Assessment + SWOT Analysis

To create a foundation for your digital product strategy, you must assess several factors for each step in the customer journey: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty. 

Lumavate has developed a worksheet to guide your team through a working session. Consider the following as your team discusses each step of the customer journey.

• Feelings: How you want the customer to feel at each step of their journey.
• Expectations: Recognize the assumptions and needs customers have at each step. What will they expect? What criteria will they use to compare your brand to your competitors?
• Actions: What a customer does during that step of their journey. How will prospective customers seek out information about your brand or company?
• Touchpoints: Where your brand has opportunities to engage with the customer.
• Ownership: Based on the touchpoints, which internal team/department is responsible for engaging prospective customers in this stage?

While completing the Customer Journey Assessment, you and your team are likely to identify what’s working and not working within your existing customer journey. Conducting a formal SWOT analysis will help you see a clear picture of where your customer journey is today and how to improve it. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

When developing a digital product strategy, a SWOT analysis should be conducted for each step of the customer journey. Lumavate recommends that teams run a strategy session where they complete the Assessment and SWOT Analysis together.

Building Personalized Digital Experiences

Once you have a clear picture of your customer journey, you can develop a strategic engagement plan. In your Lumavate Studio you can quickly build and launch digital experiences that personalize your customer journey.

• Our Mobile Messaging Opt-In Template makes it easy for your customers to opt-in to receive text messages from your brand. One of the best ways to connect with your customers is via SMS messages. With an open rate of 98 percent, text messaging far surpasses the engagement rates of any other marketing channel. To drive revenue for your business, you need a simple way to drive text message opt-ins for your business to send real-time or scheduled texts to your subscribers without having to worry about handling the required double opt-in confirmation. This Template can be a standalone digital experience or incorporated into any other digital experience. Most customers can create and launch a mobile opt-in digital experience in less than five minutes using this Template.
  • Text SPARTANMOBILE to 586828* to see an example of how our best-in-class Mobile Opt-in Template can be used to capture opt-ins for your business.
• You’re not the only business reaching out to your target accounts. They’re hearing from your competitors on a regular basis plus a ton of other brands for unrelated products and services. You have to do something different to stand out to earn their time. A personalized microsite curated for their company is a major differentiator. Using our ABM: Prospecting Template, you can curate a highly-personalized experience for each of your target accounts to help stand out from the competition. This Template can be a standalone digital experience or incorporated into any other digital experience. Most customers can create and launch a customer survey digital experience in less than 15 minutes using this Template.
  • Text TARGET to 586828* to see an example of how our best-in-class ABM: Prospecting Template can be used to help your brand stand out from the competition.
• Every moment matters when you finally have a sales opportunity with one of your target accounts. This is heightened when a competitor is also being evaluated at the same time. Using our ABM: Deal Acceleration Template, you can curate a highly-personalized experience to help stand out from the competition and provide one location for all relevant information about your proposal. This Template can be a standalone digital experience or incorporated into any other digital experience. Most customers can create and launch a customer survey digital experience in less than 30 minutes using this Template.
  • Text ACCELERATE to 586828* to see an example of how our best-in-class ABM: Deal Acceleration Template can be used to help your brand stand out from the competition.
• First impressions and product adoption go hand-in-hand. Your new customers will make quick assumptions about your brand and products based on what they experience the first time using your product. That’s why a digital product onboarding experience that gives new customers step-by-step instructions for using their new product can ensure their first experience is an extremely positive one. Using our Product Onboarding Template, you can start the relationship with your new customers off on the right foot by providing all the information they need to use your product the first time at their fingertips. This Template can be a standalone digital experience or incorporated into any other digital experience. Most customers can create and launch a product onboarding digital experience in less than 30 minutes using this Template.
  • Text ONBOARD to 586828* to see an example of how our best-in-class Product Onboarding Template can be used to provide your new customers with an exceptional first-time experience.
• Your customers are constantly providing feedback on their experiences with your business and products. This can range from social media posts to online reviews to customer support calls and more. While all of these avenues are great ways for customers to share feedback, every company needs to measure its net promoter score (NPS) on a regular basis by quickly creating and launching an NPS customer survey that can be used at key moments in the customer journey. Using our NPS Customer Survey Template, you can start collecting customer feedback almost immediately. This Template can be a standalone digital experience or incorporated into any other digital experience. Most customers can create and launch a customer survey digital experience in less than five minutes using this Template.
  • Text NPS to 586828* to see an example of how our best-in-class NPS Customer Survey Template can be used to quickly capture customer feedback.

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