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Customer journey maps have the potential to be the best tool your marketing department has – or a colossal waste of time. There are plenty of articles out there that will tell you how to build a customer journey map in “3 easy steps.” Those don’t work, at least not by our standards.

If your customer journey map isn’t moving you towards more conversions and awesome retention rates, it’s a waste of paper.

The way most people do customer journey maps looks like this: Bring your ‘best and brightest’ into a room for three hours, play “this is who we think our buyer personas are,” “this is what we think they’re feeling,” and follow it up with “these are where our touchpoints are.” In other words, it’s “brainstorming” with insufficient research. You’re not creating a map, you’re having an office party. And the customer journey map is the party game.

Lame.

Do I sound harsh? Good. Because customer journey maps done wrong really burns my biscuits.

They have so much potential to be useful.

Actionable. Energizing. Even inspiring.

But to be truly useful, you have to approach them from the foundation of research, grounded in real, verifiable customer data. And that’s the step too many people miss, because it’s just not as much fun.

Forget fun – this is marketing strategy.

When a customer journey map does its job, it becomes a tool that lets you (and your marketing team) visualize your relationship with your target customer from first eyes-meeting-across-a-crowded-room encounter to mutually fulfilling partnership.

It shows the most likely places to meet your target, what they need there (depending on which stage of the sales funnel they’re in), what they get there currently, and where mismatches in expectations and desired outcomes may be losing them.

If this sounds like I’m describing more than just a customer journey map, you’re absolutely right.

This definition is much simpler:

“a customer journey map is merely an illustration or diagram of all the places (touchpoints) your customers come into contact with your company online or off.”

To make your journey map actionable, it can’t be merely an illustration of touchpoints. It has to illuminate the relationship, in its entirety. It has to pay attention to not only where prospects are, but what they need – and how to give that outcome to them in a way that moves them closer to your desired destination.

This journey map will become your visual cheat-sheet to understanding your customer on a deep, meaningful, actionable level.

It’s not simple. But there are three steps.

Step 1: You wouldn’t plan a road trip without research…

Research is where we always start; and if you’ve created your Buyer Persona (the right way) already, you’re mostly there. You’ll want to base persona research on your current ideal clients: Those who’ve bought from you, love what you do, and recommend you to their colleagues and friends.

The persona creation process answers these questions:

• Who is my ideal customer?
• What do they want, in life, at work, at home?
• What do they need?
• What are they trying to accomplish?
• What goals drive their behavior?
• What are they looking for that I can provide?

You’ll get those answers through qualitative research – voice of customer data – that gets to the heart of behavioral drivers, concerns and expectations.

Oh, did I forget to mention the standard demographic data points? Age, sex, marital status? No, I didn’t forget. They’re just not as important unless you’re selling Viagra. Focus on what matters for your customers.

Qualitative research can be done a number of ways, but each method has its limitations, which is why I recommend using several. Not just surveys, mining user reviews, or recording customer service chats and conversations – but those in addition to customer interviews whenever possible.

As Genuinely founder and CEO Mack Fogelson explains about their own customer journey development process:

“Most companies are making assumptions about their customers based on what they think they know vs. actually talking to their customers 1:1. Their maps then become an accumulation of biases and inferences vs. what their customers actually need.

What they’re missing is the underlying motivators that cannot be seen in demographic or psychographic data. Our customer journey maps open up the Thinking/Feeling/Doing in each stage of the customer journey, across the sales funnel.

Customer journey mapping requires you to actually speak with your customers. Not just digitally through surveys or other methods of collecting data. 1:1. Face-to-face.

Good customer journey mapping requires collection of all of the data you have about your *actual* customers, not just a stereotypical persona.” – Mack Fogelson, Founder & CEO, Genuinely.co

Whichever method you use, when questioning current customers (always a good place to start), ask about early stage touchpoints they experienced, with questions like:

• Where did you first see our brand? (And give them options, depending on where you’ve placed advertisements)
• When you first saw our ad, what did you think we could do for you? (Open ended question)
• What initially prompted you to visit our website? (this is where you’ll uncover potential influencers and other touchpoints you might not even be aware of)

And any other questions you can think of that will give you an idea of not only where they first find you, but also what they want when they do.

We’re pulling double duty here. It’s not just about finding the “where” but also the “why?”

We also want to start to piece together a timeline that takes us from that first touch point to first conversion. This may be difficult for people to answer (memories just aren’t that good), but to get a ballpark answer, ask:

• “How long did it take you from first seeing our brand to making your first purchase?”

You may want to give them a multiple-choice response option and a free response option, just in case they’re kind enough to expand on exactly what their journey looked like.

But this is asking a lot. If you’re going to ask your customers to take this much time with you, you’d better offer them something good as incentive.

From this research, you can build out your buyer persona into a genuinely useful tool that points you in productive directions for future marketing decisions. And from there, you can widen the scope of your research to people who fit within your target parameters. Cubeyou is particularly good for finding early touchpoint opportunities (ie. where specific consumer demographics hang out – including what they read, watch and do in their spare time).

Using all of this information, you can begin to place markers on your map.

“Customer journey maps get a bad rap, much like personas. That’s unfortunate because when done properly, they can be very enlightening in terms of your customers’ needs and pains. Journey mapping helps articulate information in a simple, memorable way so that everyone is on the same page about: customer goals and expectations, customer experiences, optimization opportunities, and internal ownership.

When proper research is conducted (the narrative needs to be fact, not fiction), having up-to-date customer journey maps for your various experiences can be useful, especially for large companies. It’s meaningful to visually map out phases of the buying cycle, emotions, touchpoints, channels, etc. along each journey.

That said, be aware that linear funnels are idealistic. Most customer journeys are much more complex and, well, messy. Be sure you’re mapping accurate journeys instead of your idealistic linear funnel.

Overall, customer journey maps range from helpful to totally useless, depending on how data-driven and realistic you are.” – Shanelle Mullin, Shopify

Qualitative research tools for you to consider:

• SurveyMonkey
• AYTM
• Qualaroo
• Instantly
• Cubeyou’s Customer Insights Suite

Step 2: Charting the course to conversion

We’re going to start our chart with a goal: Move the customer down the sales funnel. No, we’re not mixing metaphors (map? Funnel? What?), because we’re using both at the same time.

Don’t be afraid to add dimensions to your customer journey – it can make it an even more useful tool. Georgiana Laudi, Digital Strategist says she adds KPIs at each stage, and doesn’t stop there:

“At Unbounce, I reorganized the entire department to match our customer’s journey, and called it the Customer Journey Tribe. It’s not something usually done in marketing, but it’s a popular approach for structuring dev teams.”

And, from my Customer Success perspective, I’d also recommend adding Customer Success milestones, so you know exactly where, when and how prospects and customers are finding value with your brand (yes, Customer Success is typically associated with SaaS, but believe me, e-commerce customers have to be successful too!).

But let’s not overthink this right now. Let’s just start by drawing your map in the shape of a funnel.

This is, clearly, simplified for the sake of explanation. But what you see is a customer journey map with touchpoints overlaid onto your typical sales funnel.

The Target Customer doesn’t know who you are, until they reach a touchpoint – but because you’ve done your Buyer Persona research, you already know what they want and need (maybe even before they do). This gives you the power to make that first touch point count by making them problem-aware (at the earliest stage) or solution-aware (their pain can be fixed!).

That first touchpoint might be an ad on Facebook, a banner ad on their favorite niche blog, the recommendation of a brand advocate or influencer, etc. Some of those you have direct control over, like ads. Others you have indirect control over, like providing great user experiences to guarantee yourself positive recommendations from your customers on user review sites.

The target customer then becomes a prospect. They’re interested. You’ve given them a reason to think that you can provide what they’ve been wanting, searching for. They come to your website – the next touchpoint possibly – and what do they find there?

Hopefully something that brings them closer to their ideal outcome.

If you’re an e-commerce site selling wine, maybe that’s a quiz they can take that leads them to wines they’d most likely love (BrightCellars does this brilliantly).

In fact, quizzes are a great way to immediately raise engagement, and it can be as simple as having the lead fill in their measurements and filtering results by what clothes will fit best. Use your imagination!

This touchpoint is very important. They may have heard of you before, but this is where they finally meet you and form a strong impression. That impression either bounces them off the page, or leads them further down the funnel towards conversion.

At each of these stages, using your customer research, chart:

• What they know (ie. what funnel stage they’re in).
• What they want (ideal outcome).
• How to bring them closer to that ideal outcome using the touchpoint you have.

“For me, it’s about identifying my customer’s motivations, desires and intent and using that knowledge to build a better customer journey. I use_their_words, I optimize the colors, font, copy, images and entire content according to what I learn from customer interviews, surveys and emotional targeting research (emotional SWOT, customer awareness mapping, competitor research, etc.)” – Talia Wolf, GetUpLift

Your customer journey map can also show you where problems in your funnel are happening – because problems tend to happen around touchpoints.

If you find that customers are falling “off the map” around a specific touchpoint, it’s time to bring out the customer journey map again to help you find the reason why.

• Perhaps they’re dropping out during the post-opt-in email campaign.
• Or, perhaps you notice that your website pageviews are high, but as soon as they find your product page, they bounce out.
• Or it could be that they do buy, they convert, but then they call your customer support and never buy from you again.

The question becomes: What aren’t they getting – that they need – to move down the funnel?

And this is where conversion optimization practices like customer surveys, UX research and A/B testing can really help to demystify the situation.

Step 3: Confirm your hypotheses

Even with research, your customer journey map is really a series of educated guesses – aka. hypotheses. And hypotheses are made to be tested.

Once you have your map, you’ll start finding potential opportunities to optimize experiences at each touch point. And this is where you can confirm your guesses about your user, and about what will move your user, with A/B or multivariate testing.

And that’s a whole other post – or five – which you can read here.

Learn more about A/B testing.

Conclusion: Customer journey maps are great – unless they aren’t

Customer journey maps, when done well, serve multiple functions. They:

• Empower you to identify and understand customer needs, so you can improve customer service, experience and UX.
• Save money on touchpoints/ads that don’t work, and show you where to spend money on touchpoints that work best.
• Unearth opportunities to differentiate products.
• Increase conversions drastically.
• Improve retention and build your brand reputation (because customers are getting what they need).
• Create brand advocates who create even more touchpoints and conversions!

But when we talk about customer journey maps, we have to acknowledge that most aren’t used this way.

Too many customer journey maps (and their respective “How to” articles) focus more on what the company wants customers to do, rather than on helping customers achieve their ideal outcomes (even if that ideal outcome is finding a gorgeous prom dress that makes a 17-year-old feel like Cinderella). They tend to be too focused on acquisition, and not enough on retention (did you notice how my sample funnel went beyond conversion? Brand advocacy and retention is important for every business!). Essentially, they’re focused on the company’s success, and not the customer’s.

I come from a Customer Success background. I believe that if you lead the customer towards achieving their ideal outcome, and don’t disappoint on delivery, you will win their loyalty.

To do that, of course, you have to know your customer really well.

And that’s not nearly as simple as “X marks the spot.”

Fear, uncertainty and doubt accompany every transaction we make, to some degree. They all influence ecommerce conversions in various degrees. We expect that when we exchange our hard-earned cash for a product, we’ll receive something of equal or greater value in return. But we’ve been fooled before (and if we haven’t, thousands of online reviewers have, which is enough to make anyone jumpy).

Fundamentally, the e-commerce customer fears they will be giving up something they know is worth (money) and may not receive the same value in return. They are uncertain whether they will be satisfied with the choice they made. Maybe something else might have been better, but they missed out on it (FOMO isn’t just for millennials). And finally they will doubt (until proven otherwise) whether they need the particular product/service at all.

You are competing against all of this, and as an e-commerce store, you are guilty until you prove innocent.

And then there’s the process of paying, which involves the buyer leaving some of their most sensitive data in the hands of people they don’t know. You are asking them to take your word for it that their data will not be abused and that they’ll receive the product as advertised.

As you can see, in online world there are a lot of obstacles one must overcome to make a positive decision on whether to buy at all.

Factors influencing the decision to buy

Who is the seller?

It’s a lot easier to sell something in person than it is to sell over the internet. Why? Because when you have a brick and mortar store, your customers can walk in, meet you face to face, see, hold, and maybe even try out the product immediately, and if once they buy anything goes wrong, they know exactly where to find you.

E-commerce stores come with none of these luxuries.

When customers reach an online e-commerce website, they are keenly aware that they only see what you want to show them – about yourself, and about your products. And they don’t trust you to tell them the good and the bad. They arrive in a state of doubt.

From there, website visitors are left to wonder whether the e-commerce site is legitimate – and they make this first impression very quickly, in less than 5 seconds. This impression is based almost solely on the store’s visual presentation. Does the website look modern and professional? Or does it look like it hasn’t been updated in 20 years? Having an out of date website sends a red flag to already suspicious customers that this is a fly-by-night operation.

If you make it past that first impression, visitors will continue to look for clues that will confirm or invalidate their initial observations. They’ll look for professional photos of products, testimonials and reviews from customers, and security badges – and they will form a strong impression based on how easy your website is to use, and how well you’ve ironed out your user experience.

Brands that are strongly established have a strong advantage over newer or smaller brands, but that doesn’t mean you’re out of the running. You don’t need to be Amazon to make a sale.

How do you establish trust on your homepage?

To bridge this first five seconds you need to include the following:

1. Clear information who you are

When you give your prospects clear info of who you are, preferably with pictures of employees (contextual photograph tend to work the best – ie connect your employees with your product), office space and other info that unambiguously shows there is a real business behind your website. Include phone numbers, office addresses and other info that shows your business is legitimate.

2. Provide an up to date website design

Modern and up to date design has very good chance to woo your visitors and make them trust you more. Which does not mean you need to include novelties that look good on paper but have unproven effect on user experience.

3. Prototypical layout of the ecommerce stores tends to help a lot

Your website layout has the best chance to make your visitors convert if it feels and looks familiar to other sites in the same business.

“In a study by Google in August of 2012, researchers found that not only will users judge websites as beautiful or not within 1/50th – 1/20th of a second, but also that “visually complex” websites are consistently rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts.

Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites – those with layouts commonly associated with sites of it’s category – with simple visual design were rated as the most beautiful across the board.”

Tommy Walker from Shopify in his blog post for Conversion XL

4. Perfection

It goes without saying, but is worth repeating – your copy should be absolutely free from any grammatical or other errors. Paying attention to small details like that enhances trust and credibility of the website and helps reduce doubt.

If you successfully negotiate this step and get people to pay attention to your actual offer and products, you encounter the next big step.

Gaining trust on your product pages

Congratulations – your visitor has made it past your home page and trusts you enough to click onto a product page! Unfortunately, there are many more obstacles ahead. This is where you can make or lose the sale, and much of that depends on whether you can eliminate the fear factors that would prevent your visitor from purchasing.

Hopefully you’ve created a great product page (not sure? Check out our guide). In the sea of photoshopped images, false advertising and similarly questionable methods, you need to convince your customer that your product image is real, accurate, and delivers the information they need to make their decision. Once again, you face the issues of doubt and it needs to be minimized.

This is a nice e-commerce product page – but take a careful look at the product images. Yes, they’re professional and appear to be accurate in color (a frequent problem since every monitor shows color a little differently), but they are missing vital information for the target buyers to make a decision.

There is no picture of the inside of the purse.

How is the buyer to know if there’s a cell phone pocket, hidden zipper pockets, or any of the other little conveniences that separate a bag from a really fine, useful, purse? There’s not enough information.

Physical stores have this advantage over online business. When a visitor walks into a store, they can see the actual product and test it right there. When you can’t deliver that experience, you have to invest in giving your visitors the next best thing – which is lots and lots of information.

• Pictures that show multiple angles and interiors of the product, as well as pictures of the product in use (it would be nice to see that purse on someone’s arm to get a better idea of its size)
• Testimonials from previous purchasers who can report back on how the product feels and functions
• Promises of customer support and easy returns should the product arrive flawed
• Promises of fast shipping

Many sites prominently show things like same day shipping guarantees, money back guarantees if the item is not delivered within some reasonable time, and offers of shipping tracking. If your store did a good job in establishing trust at the outset, visitors will be more likely to believe you at this stage.

Social proof on your product pages is golden – literally, it will make you money.

Make sure you have credible testimonials and/or user reviews on the product page itself. Visitors won’t trust you to tell them what your product is really like, but they do trust their peers, especially if the reviews you show seem authentic (ie. not all completely, 100% positive).

If you can, let them know also that they’re getting the best deal (to combat FOMO – fear of missing out). Booking.com does this in a very clever way: If you open their home page, you will see their “Best Deal Guarantee. We match any price you find online.”

You can also offer added incentives at this stage, like free shipping to customers who spend a minimum amount. Often, sites will offer their first customers some additional benefits, to encourage them to purchase a product. SaaS companies offer demos or freemium versions of the software they sell, so the potential customers can try it hands-on. That might not be possible for product-based e-commerce stores, but the principle is the same – give them an offer they can’t refuse.

Eventually, given enough persuasion, at least a few of the visitors will take a dip and put the product in their cart.

Hooray!

All they need to do now is to give you their money.

Hah! Like it’s that easy.

Because this is where fear really takes the wheel.

Transaction

“Your greatest dreams are all on the other side of the wall of fear and caution.” – Unknown

The real test of your website is whether the visitor will trust you enough to give you their money. Unlike in the brick-and-mortar world, paying online requires giving away some of the most sensitive personal information we have – our bank accounts. To expedite paying online, visitors must provide you with a way to charge their credit cards.

There are so many horror stories about identity theft that visitors are rightly concerned about passing around their private information. If they are not 100% confident that you are trustworthy, they’ll change their minds and leave. In case you missed it, here is an excellent post about shopping cart abandonment on our blog.

Fortunately, there are ways to earn their trust.

This process begins long before they reach your shopping cart – you’ll need to provide a number of trust indicators, including design, content & copy (this starts right on the homepage), social media and social proof throughout your website and online brand presence.

Those alone will probably keep your bounce rate down.

Conversions, though, are somewhat more complicated beasts. To make people give you money, they not only need to trust you, they must feel safe too.

Here is where security seals come into play. Common examples are Google Trusted Store certificate, Symantec (previously known as VeriSign) SSL certificate, and PayPal.

Using trust seals and certificates, you can alleviate a large part of the fear visitors may have about the online transactions.

Here’s how this works: Many users will be reluctant to provide their credit card numbers to you directly. In this case you can use third a party service, such as PayPal or AmEx Express Checkout, etc. Using these services, your visitors can authorize payments to you without revealing their personal information.

Sometimes visitors are not willing to reveal their information because they think you will clutter their inbox with promotional emails, or do not want to fill in forms for any number of different reasons. In this case, you might also consider offering a “guest checkout” option, so visitors don’t need to create an entire account before purchasing at your store.

Guest accounts are useful for establishing first contact and getting your customers to try your service out. Once they buy, they will most likely return and create an account. But that trust must be earned.

And nurtured. And maintained.

Nurturing and maintaining trust

There are numerous studies, such as Business Insider Intelligence research, that show that returning customers have higher conversion rates and spend more time on websites.

It’s clear that once you sell something and turn your visitor into a customer, the odds are good that they’ll return and purchase more and more – if you don’t disappoint them.

Returning customers are much more likely to trust you and with each new transaction, this trust will grow. It is your task to keep up the good work and keep the customer satisfied.

There are a few things you can do to stay in your customers’ good graces.

Personalization: This is also one of heuristics that we mention in our blog post on heuristic research. Personalization is how you make each customer’s visit to your website seem like a familiar and welcoming experience, like walking into the bar at Cheers (everybody knows your name).

One of the world leaders in personalization is Amazon. Once you establish an account, they will track all your actions, purchases, reviews, product views and wish lists and try to show you the merchandise they believe will interest you the most. This approach is one of the things that made Amazon into what it is today. It may not be warm and fuzzy, but it gets top marks for being relevant.

Reliability: This is another feature your website must have to retain the trust of its customers. Your service must always be of the same high quality. If you make one slip up, you may get away with it, but you may also experience adverse effects. One negative review or blog post on your service may be all it takes to bring your website to failure.

Consistency means maintaining the experience of your website as roughly the same, or at least similar, over time. Unless you really need to change, keep the website design, content and navigation familiar so the returning customers can recognize it and use it easily.

Think of this in terms of your favorite grocery store. If they kept changing the isle where they keep the bread, it would be quite annoying.

Friction – not quite fear, but just as bad

To fully grasp the concept of friction, we will borrow a model that can be very useful for visualization purposes. It is called a persuasion slide.

The main elements of the model are nudge, gravity, angle and friction. Nudge represents your call-to-action and value proposition. The force of gravity is the constant and represents the motivation of your visitor. Angle represents the elements such as ease of use, content consistency and other motivational factors you provide. Finally, friction is any hurdle or difficulty, real or perceived, that may dissuade your visitor from purchasing.

In terms of a model, friction is a generic term denoting everything that creates an obstacle or hurdle in the path of conversion. While the process of buying something will always have at least some friction, it can be minimized using the right methods .

Those methods include:

1. Increasing motivation through offering additional benefits
2. Limiting the amount of information a visitor needs to provide (especially private information)
3. Increasing trust and confidence (as we discussed above)
4. Easing the way the visitor interfaces with the site (improving the user interface)
5. Offering social proof

While overcoming friction may be difficult, and reducing it to zero impossible, your website must make conscious and deliberate effort to smooth the slide’s surface enough to make the really motivated visitors convert. Failing to convert the motivated visitor, who has reached your website in search of a solution to their problem, is a sure sign that no other visitor will convert either.

Useful methods to further increase trust to increase ecommerce conversions

Using content marketing you can demonstrate your customers you know a lot about the products you sell, you are up to date with the business area your site operates in or simply offer them useful advice related to the issues you products solve.

The best way for content marketing is to maintain an active blog for example. Or you could use videos to present your products. Interactive content can be the best way to foster trust and gather some data on your customers too.

Interactive content such as quizzes, assessments or trivia, as well as calculators and similar, can be used to provide useful information to your prospects and also gather information on them, they volunteer to provide.

While not providing any direct benefit to your website, providing content will increase your credibility and reduce doubt and uncertainty with you prospects.

There’s nothing to fear – but fear itself

Convincing the customer to make the first purchase is what every e-commerce website struggles with. As you have seen, there are many obstacles you need to overcome. Every one of them is in a certain way influenced by doubt, uncertainty and fear.

Using methods such as social proof, trust seals and authentic and honest copy can go a long way towards alleviating fears and doubts with your visitors. Of course, it is impossible to make fears and doubts totally go away. But, all you have to do is to minimize them enough so the visitor’s motivation is a more powerful force. This will increase ecommerce conversions for sure.

You can achieve this by easing the way the visitor interacts with the site, giving benefits (deals, special discounts or coupons), allowing instant transactions (think ‘Buy with one click’ at Amazon) or expediting delivery. Furthermore, make sure that your website design is modern, simple to navigate and clear.

Relevance and clarity go a long way to earning your visitors’ trust and grabbing their attention. Make sure that you have both areas covered.