6 Steps to Creating Fail-proof Website Customer Journey Maps

Looking for a way to get ahead of your competitors with similar products to yours, appeal more to your customers, offer them a service that speaks to their needs as fast as possible while keeping their pain points at a bare minimum?

Alright, this sounds like the whole dream pack, but ''how do I do it?'' I can hear you ask.

Ladies and gentlemen, here I am presenting you with: Customer Journey Maps!

Customer Journey Maps act as the perfect guide for your product, marketing, sales, and support teams and will help you understand what your customers are experiencing while using your product.

Let's dive deeper into the definition of a Website Journey and study some examples & statistics.

Buckle up.

What is a Website Journey?

Website journey refers to the customer's entire experience while communicating/interacting with a website. It begins from the very discovery of the website and reaches far ahead to purchasing/benefitting from the service that's being offered. Customer journey maps are your personal guides that can be used to track this interaction between a user and a service provider -you- over time. They're basically a visual representation of your customer's journey starting from the beginning.

You can benefit from them in various areas; your sales team can learn from them, your marketing team can learn from them, even your design team can learn from them, being able to tell if customers have a specific issue that can be solved by improving designs.

So, having defined a website journey of a typical customer, let's now dig deeper into the benefits of these maps that will help us track website journeys.

Why are customer journey maps important for websites?

And... Why would you want to have customer journey maps? 

Well, because creating a customer journey map is crucial for any kind of business to step up its sales and marketing games.

Put simply, customer journey maps can be used if you need more sales, clicks, engagement; or if you want to enhance your digital marketing, and for much more. 

Imagine you're facing a certain problem concerning your customers' experiences with your product. What will help you understand user behavior and thus, offer them a seamless experience with your service?

The answer is Customer Journey Maps. When used right, they can help you emphasize with your potential customer, see from their perspective, and have a throughout opinion on their process of digesting your service.

For a better clue, here's more of what Journey Mapping helps you with:

• Having a visual look on end-to-end customer experience
• Understanding some of the complex user experiences & behaviors
• Building empathy for existing and potential customers
• Understanding and solving user problems effectively, thus gain loyal customers for the long term
• Uncovering and getting rid of pain points 

Wrapping up, customer journey maps are crucial for they are a strategic approach to understand, meet and optimize customer expectations better.

Here are some key statistics to show you how important they are:

Statistics on Website Journeys and Website Sessions

• 63% of customers think that the best brands go far beyond expectations across the customer journey. (Wunderman, via Adobe)
• 65% of participants would become long-term customers of a brand if they can serve positive experiences along the customer journey. (Forbes / Arm Treasure Data)
• 85% of business owners who have used customer journey maps found that they lead to customer loyalty, lower churn, fewer negative feedback, and higher NPS. (MyCustomer)
• 86% of marketers believe that it’s absolutely critical to creating a solid customer journey. (Salesforce)
• 88% of professional teams say a strong customer journey strategy is vital for the achievement of their marketing goals. (Salesforce)
•  Customer journey mapping enables teams to create personalized experiences for every individual. And according to research, that's exactly what 52% of customers ache for.

3 Website Journey Map Examples for Inspiration

1. Spotify (Journey of a SaaS tool website)

Spotify is one of the world’s most loved and used audio streaming platforms.

How did Spotify benefit from Customer Journey Maps?

Well, Spotify reached a point where it wanted to enhance the music-sharing experience for its users; therefore, it hired a marketing team to create and improve a customer journey map.

The aim of this process of customer journey mapping was to understand how users were benefitting from the music-sharing experience.

This was how their journey map looked. With this map, it was easy for them to see and track the online customer journey beginning from the moment they listen to a song that has been shared with them and until the point where they decide to stick with it or not.

And thanks to this powerful tool, Spotify was able to uncover pain points for its users and take the next step to solve them in order to provide a seamless music sharing experience.

2-Amazon (Journey of an E-Commerce website)

Amazon is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world. And because it's wildly popular and used worldwide, it has got to have a customer journey map -a complex one-  to keep up with needs and wants! 

Here's what Amazon's customer journey map looks like:

Yes, it's a bit difficult to read and understand, but it tells a lot. Through this map, we're able to see the platform's customer conversion funnel and how Amazon optimizes customer engagement through its sales funnel.

With a closer look, we're able to tell the success metrics included by Amazon for each step of the long customer journey. These metrics indicate impressions, adds to list, add to cart, purchases, reviews, feedbacks, subscriptions, and conversion rate.

Take note, folks; it's crucially important to include these key success metrics to track your movement accurately.

3- SaaStr (Journey of a Blog Website) 

SaaStr is the largest community of founders, executives, and entrepreneurs of SaaS. Their aim is to help users achieve their goals with more assistance and less anxiety.

What is their strong suit?

Well, the name speaks for itself: SaaS for Software as a Service and ''tr'' for training. They provide great service as a training company, and the way they do it is essential to our understanding of their customer journey through which they try to get people to join their newsletter.

How do they do it?

They take their website design and turn it into their benefit. On their website, you can see that they have a ''Get the best SaaS advice'' section and underneath a ''Subscribe to SaaStr Newsletter'' option. I think you understand why I'm mentioning this here:

Simply put, what they're doing is making their visitors -potential customers- read those useful articles, see the valuable info & content in them, and therefore achieve their aim of proving value in their service and gain more interested people as a result.

They offer trips & tricks on SaaS, share ideas and knowledge, provide professional, in-depth content sessions from the best SaaS speakers by holding and performing the SaaStr Annual conference.

Create a Butter-Smooth Website Journey Maps in 6 Steps

Now that you're done with some of the unique examples of journey maps, it's high time you started creating your own! 

Here are 6 important steps to get you there.

1- Define the Users and Their Motivations

The initial step of great importance to create a website journey map that works is to define the users and their motivations.

Imagine reaching out to a support team after all the effort you put into the work you're trying to accomplish only to find out they're.. incapable of helping you? The possible reasons for this inconvenience are the lack of knowledge towards the customer -you- and not paying attention to the customer's motivations. 

What you need to do is simply build a throughout picture of your customers whose journey you're interested in tracking. What I mean by building a picture is, benefitting from all the data, be it demographic and/or psychographic. They will help you create a persona that you can work on.

After having a clear understanding of their origins, the next thing you should do is define their aims. 

What is customer behavior? What are customer personas? What are customers trying to achieve using your product?

For instance, someone going through your FAQs with specific keywords is likely looking for assistance on a certain topic. Targeting their aim, which is finding the right answer for this scenario, will help you optimize their journey in that sense.

However, try to keep in mind that several different people visiting your page might have different needs & wants. So, it's equally important to remember what drives them to your product in the first place. These details will be additional indicators of your customers' intent and thus help you learn more about them and act accordingly.

2- Define the End Goal

Be 100% sure about what you want to accomplish. Write down your motives.

What do you want in the long- term? What challenges are you facing along the way? Why are you mapping the journey of your customers?

Always take the first once you have clearly found an answer to these questions and decided on how this process is going to end for you. It's very important that you are clear about why you're creating a customer journey map, to begin with.

Your end goal -one of the most common ones- might be identifying gaps/friction in your customers' experiences using your service and trying to get rid of them to provide better value.

Wrapping up real quick, at this stage of creating the optimal journey map, you should definitely be aware of your end goal. This will make your process a lot easier and motivating.

3- Identify the Touchpoints

First, let's get this out of the way. What are Customer Touchpoints?

Touchpoints are indicators of all the places on your website where your visitors can interact with you.

What you need to do at this stage is conducting a throughout research on all the touchpoints your customers are currently using.

This is a crucial step in creating a customer journey map because it provides you with insight into your customers' behaviors and actions. If they are using fewer touchpoints than you expected, this might indicate the fact that they are quickly giving up on your website and leaving it pretty soon. However, if they are using more than you expected,  this might also mean that your website is too complex and takes too much of their effort to reach their goal.

Whatever is the case, comprehending the touchpoints is a functional way that will help you understand the motives of customer journey maps.

To track your website traffic, you can benefit from tools such as Google Analytics; the platform will help you identify the most common touchpoints and the actions associated with them.

Once used and understood right, you'll see that touchpoints are key factors in creating the optimal journey map. 

4- Sketch the Journey 

This is probably the part you've been waiting for.

Before finalizing your work, you need to gather all the information you have and sketch your customer journey in a detailed, step-by-step design.

The sky is the limit here. You can get very creative with you lay it out, there's not only one right way to do it. Just put together all the ideas your team comes up with; take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

5- Lead the way & Analyze the Results

This is the part where your exercise of mapping actually comes alive and stops being hypothetical.

To be completely sure about the map you've created, there's not a better way than trying it out yourself first. Just pretend to be the customer with a certain aim, and start the journey from the very beginning just like they do. 

For each of your user personas -after collecting all the data on them- you should be a part of the journey and go through what they would go through; take part in social media activity, emails, clicks, and any kind of engagement. 

And the next thing you should do is analyze the results and data you have collected after this process.

How easy is it to find key elements on the landing page? Are they visible enough? Does your site do a good job walking the users through the process? Can they easily engage with your service?

The answers may upset you. But wait, of course, you have designed your map with full attention and care, yet it might still not turn out the way you wish. It's totally fine because this will lead you to the next important step.

How can you perfect it?

You will come across some parts where your customers' needs aren't exactly being met and some common customer pain points may occur. By focusing on this outcome, you can make sure that you'll provide a more valuable experience and offer 10/10 solutions for your visitors.

6- Iterations and Perfection

Here's your last but not least step to complete your entire journey process. 

Iterations and Perfection.

As said before, it's possible that you might encounter some parts that need alterations within this process. Your job is to make the necessary changes to perfect your customer journey map through the help of this final step.

Once you've test-driven the map yourself, it will be vital for you to add new features, change some parts and maybe repeat the process over time as you keep updating it.

Always keep in mind that testing is key. No matter how satisfied you are with what you've created, you must always test it. This is the only healthy way to make sure your customer journey works as smoothly as you expected.

There are a number of ways that you can benefit from when you want to enhance your mapping process. You can use user testing, which is a more robust approach and relies on different people who haven't experienced your product before.

Or, you can gather and analyze further info by focusing on user feedback, which will help you understand -and improve- your customer journey. This option might sound a little cliche, but it always works.

These data will, for sure, give you an idea about the appropriate changes that your site requires.

No matter how big or small the alterations are, you can be sure that they will be effective because they will be driven by the customer's personal experiences instead of you trying to make random changes with the hope that they will turn out well and useful.

Wrapping Up

Remember, if you wish to map out a customer journey, your aim should be to emphasize with your customer and simply put yourself in their shoes to be able to create the best experience for them! 

There's no better time to start than today. Good luck!