 Today on the journey, we're going to talk about how to use journey mapping to improve online sales helping visitors get through your sales funnel isn't a task you should take lightly. If you don't understand just the overall customer journey, you're not going to be able to guide them towards the action you inevitably want such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase or just contacting you about one of your products. Understand the customer journey involves a number of tasks. And for example, you'll actually run through the sales funnel yourself to get a first person look at the process. Also taking some time to document the exact customer journey that you want your leads to take will actually help you to refine your sales funnel. And today we'll show you how to understand the customer journey and we'll even discuss some techniques that you can take to help move your customers toward your all important conversion funnels. But before we jump in, let's begin by actually defining what that customer journey is. Well, it's a visualization of an individual's relationship with a product or brand over time across different channels. Describing the customer as going on a journey seems abstract and kind of weird, but it's actually a very useful comparison. Regardless of your product services, niche, whatever it might be, customers will go through a start, middle and endpoint along the road to making a purchase and becoming your customer. This timeline contains info about all the channels that the user uses to interact with one of your products. For example, a potential customer might see an ad or a promoted post on social media showcasing an offer. This might include a link to a dedicated sales page on your website. And after seeing this post, your leads can click on the call to action directing them to a sales or checkout page where they'll hopefully become a paying customer. That entire flow is a customer journey. Now, what problems does a journey map actually help us solve? Well, without knowing what your customer journey is, there's no way to actually improve it, right? So by actually putting yourself in your customers shoes, you can show them the consideration that they need. Now time for the meat and potatoes of this video, how to actually create a journey map. And I think that starts with choosing out what your scope is going to be. Before you can really dive into creating your map, you need to ask yourself why you're making one in the first place. What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it specifically about and what experience is it based upon? You also want to create a user persona. So that does require some research you'll need to conduct, but some great ways to get valuable customer feedback is through questionnaires and user testing. Now the important thing, don't forget, is you only want to reach out to actual customers or prospects. And you want the feedback of people who would be actually interested in purchasing your products and services and who have interacted with your company before or plan to do so. Then define scenario and use your expectations. Once you've learned about the different customer personas that interact with your business, you'll need to narrow your focus to one or two of them. And remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of one customer type who's taking a very specific path with your company. And if you group too many personas into just one journey, your map will accurately reflect your customer's experience. Now if you're creating your very first map, you'll want to pick the most common customer of yours and then consider the route that they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time. I mean, that makes sense, right? And then you can use an actual marketing dashboard to compare each one to determine, hey, which is the best fit for your journey map. And I would encourage you, you know, don't worry about the ones that you leave out as, you know, you can always go back and create a new map that's specific to these other customer types. Exactly. And then once you have all of that, you want to create a list of touch points. And these are basically just the places on your website that your customers can interact with you. Based on your research, you should list out all the touch points your customers and prospects are currently using, as well as some of the ones that you believe they should be using if there's no overlap. But this is a super important step in creating a customer journey map because it gives you insight into what actions your customers are performing. And if they're using fewer touch points than expected, does this mean they are quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? And if they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and it requires them several steps to get to the end goal? Whatever the case may be, understanding the touch points is a tool that can help you understand the ease of objectives of customer journeys. And hey, this doesn't just mean your website. You need to look at all the ways your customers might come across you online, whether it's through social media, paid ads, email marketing, or even third party review sites or mentions. So it's important to determine the resources that you currently have, but also the ones that you'll need. So your customer journey map is going to touch on nearly every part of your business. And this will actually highlight all of the resources that go into creating the customer experience. And which is important because you need to then take inventory of the resources that you have and the ones you'll need for that customer journey. So for example, your map might highlight the flaws in your customer service offer. Okay, what next? Well, then you can look into it further, see what your team does or doesn't have in order to properly follow up. And then from there, you make that decision of, okay, we're going to invest in some customer service tools that will then help your team manage the demand. And then by including these new tools in your map, now you can accurately predict how they'll impact your business and drive outsized value. Now, this makes it much easier to convince gatekeepers as well as DMs, decision makers to invest in your proposals. Probably one of the most important steps is to actually take the customer journey yourself. And just because you've designed your map doesn't mean your work is done. This is the most important process because it's all about analyzing the results. How many people are clicking to your website but then closing out before making the purchase? How can you better support customers? These are just some of the questions that you should be able to answer with your finished map. Analyzing these results can show where customers needs are being unmet. And by approaching this, you can ensure that you're providing a valuable experience and making it clear that people can find solutions to their problems with your company's help. The whole exercise of mapping a customer's journey remains hypothetical until you try it yourself. For each of your personas, just follow the journey and see where it takes you. Does it follow the right path and gets you to where you want them to go? Or does it not make sense one step of the way and you have to re-envision this? All in all, doing this is super important just to make sure what you think customers are going to do actually happens. And now it's time to make the necessary changes. You have the analysis. Now what that should do is give you a sense of where you want your website to be and then make the appropriate changes. Maybe that's going to your product descriptions and making them longer, adding more storytelling. Maybe it's making more distant call to action links. Just make sure you read that analysis so then you can achieve the goals that you set out for. No matter how big or small the changes are, they will be effective as because they're directly correlated with what the customer listed as, hey, these are our pain points. So rather than blindly making decisions or changes, use the customer map. It's so helpful and then you can feel certain, hey, I'm going to get what they need. And with the help of your visualized customer journey map that we've talked about extensively, you can ensure that those needs and pain points will be addressed. Your map should be a constant work in progress reviewing either monthly or quarterly. It really helps you identify where those gaps or opportunities are for your business. And what I like to do is really keep my stakeholders involved in this entire process using a tool like Miro to make sure that it's collaborative. Everyone can view it and just make sure that they can go through the journey themselves and pick out those gaps or opportunities that they see that's not in my point of view. All in all, just making sure that everyone is up to date on that journey map is super important and understanding how the customers move through your sales funnel is crucial for your business success. Just knowing the exact path they travel to become that conversion. So, fortunately doing this is relatively simple and it does a great thing. It actually forces you to look through the customer's point of view. By creating these customer journey maps, you're able to make sure your customers are on the right path becoming happy loyal customers with your business. Hey, if you're going to start your own journey mapping, let us know in the comments below and give this video a like. Also, don't forget to subscribe and ring that bell so you're the first to know when our next video comes out. This is The Journey.