How Customer Journey Mapping Can Increase Your Conversion Rate

One of the most important things a landing page does is give your visitors a portal to engage with your business. In some scenarios, this looks like a quick visit, but ideally, the end goal is to convert them into paying customers. With conversion as your end goal, how can you ensure that customers are reached and converted at an efficient rate?

In this article, we’ll demonstrate the importance of customer journey mapping to converting customers and we will walk through the three main strategies to use when optimizing your website through journey mapping. Before we begin, we should define customer journey mapping so we have a solid understanding of how it works.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey maps are defined on Fresco as “A customer journey map is the visualization of the experience or journey that a customer travels as they are exposed to your product/service. It can follow their tangible actions, assumptions, or motivations through each different step of their interaction.”

When using a customer journey map, the first step is often to brainstorm the journey that the customer takes and how they feel about it. This process is defined as a hypothesis map and is followed by the collection of customer data which can either confirm or deny the hypothesis laid out.

The main goal of customer journey mapping is to create a map of what customers do and how they feel about their interactions while mapping out the positives and negatives for each step. By breaking down their overall interaction into multiple different steps you can better understand the precise moments where their experience needs to improve.

Customer journey maps are typically a set of columns that easily break each step of their experience into its own element, helping differentiate the different parts of the journey.

Now that we have a solid vision of what customer journey mapping entails, let’s look at how they can help boost conversion rates on your website.

Develop Accurate Personas

The first step in creating a customer journey map is outlining your persona. This is a key part of the customer journey mapping process and sets the foundation for understanding how your consumers will experience a given journey.

A persona is a fictional user who represents a larger audience that you’re looking to target. By using them as an example to document their most common pain points and interests, you can create a template for the kind of person your business wants to convert.

Developing personas through a dedicated persona map is a fantastic way to target your key consumer groups and understand what clicks for them.

In order to build an accurate persona, you must conduct research on individuals and the market they operate in. This is the only way that you will know the truth behind what frustrates and motivates them. Another key way to gain information about your consumer base is simply through receiving feedback from them.

Developing a deeper understanding of your audience through creating personas gives you an optimization strategy that is more likely to gain attention and convert users into paying customers.

Persona mapping is just the first step in customer journey mapping, however, and we’ll proceed to show how it integrates into your larger content strategy.

Create a Customer Journey Map for Your Website

The next big step to increasing your conversion rate is creating a custom customer journey map for your website. This could look like mapping the journey that brings users to your site in the first place, the actions they perform while on your site, and their lasting impressions.

Your customer journey map will be unique because of a couple of different reasons. Firstly, you have specific goals that you want to represent in the journey and these goals will guide the final destination of the customer. 

For example, if your end goal is for them to create an account and use your product, your journey will look different than someone whose end goal is gaining a social media following.

Secondly, each persona that comes to your site will inherently interact in a different way. They all have different motivations and their journey will reflect this. This means you need to do your best to accommodate the multiple different personas that you’re targeting, and most customer journey maps are able to integrate these into your map.

When creating your journey map it’s critical that you have done research on how the customer experiences their journey and accurately reflect this in the different steps that you’ve laid out.

Once these items are done, you can begin outlining their journey and diagramming where exactly you can improve their experience. Each persona might have a different non-linear path so it’s important that you’re ready to ideate multiple different http://www.gulfportpharmacy.com solutions that bring together as many parties as possible.

Now that we know what customer journey mapping looks like on your site, it’s time to analyze this data.

Analyze Your Journey Map For Optimization Opportunities

After creating the customer journey map the next step is looking at the places where the customer experiences frustration or leaves your website entirely.

It’s important to not only analyze the surface-level frustrations that your users experience but how these surface-level frustrations relate to the core goals that bring them to your website. Yes, having a difficult interface might not seem like the biggest deal, but if the customer views this as getting directly in the way of their goals, then it might be something that needs to change.

Looking at the importance of issues is crucial when analyzing the customer’s journey because it highlights the things that are most important and essentially prioritizes your tasks for you.

Looking specifically at the highest priority issues your users are facing can help narrow your focus to find solutions that will improve their experience the most, essentially increasing their willingness to convert to a paying customer.

At the end of the day, people are much more likely to sign up for your product/service if their needs are fully met, so making sure that you help achieve their goals is one of the best conversion strategies.

This process might take a couple of different iterations to perfect and is bound to change over time, so make sure you keep your journey maps and personas handy so you can continue optimizing your site for future changes.

Conclusion

Creating a customer journey map is crucial to accurately fulfilling your customer’s needs, and if you look through it from a satisfaction lens, they’re also one of the best ways to increase the conversion rate for your website. If you liked this article, make sure you check out our other articles about lead generation and creating an effective landing page.