I often get asked to create effective marketing campaigns for businesses in tough markets. One of my clients is in the ‘high-ticket sales’ space – a saturated market which is over-flowing with salespeople all claiming they’re the best at what they do.
Despite how saturated the market is, the sales funnel I created for my client had a consistent average email open rate of 54%. For yet another one of my clients (a medical doctor serving other doctors in a tough niche), the campaign I created for him had an average email open rate of 73%.
How was this possible? Because I understood two critical things – who the ideal avatar is, and what the customer journey is.
The customer journey is the process by which prospects/customers interact with your business in order to achieve a particular goal.
Understanding this process is going to help you become better at marketing and better at creating a great experience for your audience – which ultimately will result in more sales.
That’s why in this post, we’ll explore the customer journey and the 8 steps you need to know to map this out for your business.
Understanding The Customer Journey
Many people confuse the customer journey with a sales funnel and falsely assume the two are the same thing.
The main difference between a customer journey and a sales funnel is that the customer journey is a representation of the entire overall path a person takes from interest all the way to making a purchase. A sales funnel however, is the specific process of turning visitors into leads and leads into customers.
For example, before someone purchases from you, they may have completed the following actions:
- Read a blog post
- Engaged with your social media posts
- Watched a YouTube video
- Joined your Facebook group
- Watched Facebook lives
- Listened to a podcast
- Seen one of your ads
- Opted into your list
- Read Google reviews
- Engaged with your emails…
And not necessarily in that order!
The key thing you need to understand is that the customer journey involves multiple touch points with prospects and customers.
An effective marketing campaign means to first understand what this journey looks like for a potential customer, and then optimising it so it fully supports the natural progression from a visitor to a lead, and then from a lead to a customer and repeat customer.
Unfortunately, many businesses think the customer journey is restricted to one set of touch points, without really considering the fact that a prospect can enter your world from any touch point.
Sometimes, a customer may well bypass ALL touchpoints and come straight to you through a referral. It may sound complicated, but actually, the only thing you need to be aware of is that ANYONE can enter your world at ANY point.
Your job as a business owner is to create a great customer experience regardless of how someone interacts with your brand. The difference between a good customer experience and an exceptional one really does come down to the details and the quality of each interaction they have with your business.
By mapping out the customer journey, it helps you understand the high-level overview of how your audience are finding you and interacting with you. The aim is to figure out how you can optimize or engineer each interaction and experience, so it helps your audience want to take the next step with your business.
Mapping the customer journey always starts with understanding your ideal customer and what they want – and then figuring out the best ways to help them make an empowered buying decision with the right information.
The other major benefit of mapping the customer journey carefully is you can clearly see where the gaps are and what needs to be improved and where.
Google’s Zero Moment of Truth
During the customer journey, there is a point where the prospect is ready to become a customer. Google calls this the ‘zero moment of truth’ or ZMOT – it refers to the moment in the buying cycle when the prospect researches a product just before they decide to buy.
Typically, before someone makes a buying decision, they might do any of the following:
- Check your reviews online
- Check testimonials and case studies
- Look at competitor products
- Speak to friends
In other words, the decision between wanting something and actually buying is not a linear decision. Your job is to make the customer journey as easy and as frictionless as possible, giving prospects what they need in order to progress to a paying customer.
The number of touchpoints is extremely important in the customer journey – and varies depending on which industry you fall under.
In fact, it can vary anywhere between 7 and 22 touchpoints (or even more depending on the industry) BEFORE prospects decide to buy!
In business to business (B2B) markets, buyers typically consume 13 pieces of content BEFORE making a buying decision, whereas for business to consumer markets (B2C), it can vary between 10 and even 40 depending on the product.
In short, prospects want to:
- Compare your product to alternatives
- Check reviews and mentions on social media
- See examples/applications of your product in use
So what does this mean for you?
Simply put, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of prospects becoming buyers:
- Regular awesome content that solves problems for your ideal customers
- Encourage customers to leave reviews on Google, your website, Social media etc.
- Ask for video testimonials of your products/services
- Find ways to engage with potential customers through social media, email and more premium content people have to sign up for
How Do I Map My Customer Journey?
The following exercise will help you think about the customer journey in a lot more detail. A simple spreadsheet is a great way to capture this information:
Step 1 – Create Awareness:
- What can you do to get in front of your ideal customers?
- Which social media platforms can you hang out on and what kind of content can you create which solves the problems your audience is interested in?
- What kind of ads can you run to get people excited in what you have to offer?
Step 2 – Create Engagement:
- How can you get people to engage with your brand?
- Can you engage them on social media and get people into a Facebook group or encourage them to comment/regularly consume your free information?
- Can you poll/survey/quiz your audience?
Step 3 – Hook Them In:
- What can you offer of value in exchange for your prospects email address?
- Write at LEAST 7 emails in your funnel to get people excited, solve problems and offer your best content to get prospects hooked!
- Ensure your free content has a call to action at the end to turn visitors into actual subscribers.
- Can you create several pieces of content that people can sign up for that solves different problems?
Step 4 – Sell To Them:
- At this stage, encourage prospects to become paying customers
- What can you offer that’s low cost and low risk, but super high value?
- If you’ve used paid advertising, your goal is to at least cover the cost of your ad spend
Step 5 – Create An Exceptional Experience:
- Nothing makes a new customer happier than feeling as if the vendor has gone above and beyond in creating a fantastic experience
- Give surprise bonuses, make customer service easy, send even more helpful content so customers feel excited and wowed
- What can you offer/do/create to ensure an exceptional experience?
Step 6 – Create Loyalty:
- Creating a customer isn’t enough. You want customers to buy from you repeatedly
- What can you offer to ascend customers to another level?
- Can you offer a VIP service, more bells and whistles, done for you etc?
- Where are the opportunities to offer customers additional products and services?
- What are customers asking for which you don’t currently sell but could?
Step 7 – Ask For Reviews:
- Happy customers love to share their experiences!
- Ask them to leave reviews on Google/your website/social media
- Ask for testimonials so other prospects can make an empowered buying decision too
Step 8 – Create Raving Fans:
- Raving fans actively tell the world about how awesome you are and will gladly refer you to others
- Can you create a process for actively asking for referrals?
- Could you offer an affiliate/partner program?
Hopefully you can see from this exercise that multiple touchpoints for your audience are a must, and that your job is to make each stage of this journey as easy and as value packed as possible.
The key thing to remember is the word EASY – customers LOVE easy. Therefore, make every interaction easy and make the change between each stage in the customer journey as easy and as frictionless as possible.
By the way, if you found this helpful and want more, check out my book ‘Mind-Hack™Marketing: How To Turn Customer Psychology Into Breakthrough Sales’ which is available worldwide on Amazon.
