How fast does 21 million seconds pass before your waking eyes, or — more importantly — your customers’ eyes? With the accelerating cycles of new technology introductions, news and content releases, and your busy calendar of mobile app release cycles, it is easy to lose track of the incredible digital journey your customers are making with your brand each year.
How many opportunities/touchpoints will you use to reach out to your customer in the coming year? How will you know if it is the best time to reach that customer? Many of our customers have 2, 5, or even 10 or more mobile apps, web sites, and social channels (in addition to a real-life experience, such as a brick & mortar location) across which they hope to reach the right customer, at the right time, with the right offer to inspire purchases, loyalty, or engagement. That’s where business happens.
To keep the marketing team’s collective heads from exploding with all of this potential and opportunity, we recommend a Digital Customer Journey Map.
Here’s a visual example of what end-result Digital Customer Journey Maps look like:
This simple yet beautifully-rich diagram can help your team visualize the path customers might experience through each of the digital touchpoints. Once built, this map will highlight the handoffs, coordination, and overall journey through apps, channels, and milestones which can be personalized to increase customer engagement.
How do I create a Digital Customer Journey Map?
Do you have 4 hours to spare? Localytics can facilitate a discussion and interactive session where your team generates a list of digital touchpoints through the entire end customer journey:
- Discovery
- Research
- Transaction
- Fulfillment
- Advocacy
- Departure
In each of these journey steps, participants are asked to define the Tasks, Questions, and Interaction Type (physical, digital, or both). Depending on your industry, this path can be mapped to a calendar, a subscription framework, or a retail season.
Our team has a wealth of experience to align participants on the digital touch points and data collected at each step of the customer journey. We will ask questions that expose the Emotions, Weaknesses, and Influences that impact your end customer’s success at each stage.
From this initial map, the design of Personalized Interactions (Push, In-App, Inbox, Email) delivered in a full calendar year become the trail maps to your customer’s digital journey.
- What offers or content will be of most interest to them based on the path they have taken through your digital landscape?
- What communication can your company provide in guiding customers to paths of increasing value, deeper engagement, or friction-less customer service?
- Should that communication reach them when they reach a certain day of use, or triggered by an in-app behavior, or in response to an external event in your stores or geographic locations?
The timing and content of your mapped activities will be more impactful if you can increasingly personalize them. Read our eBook for a more complete explanation of Localytics’ Stages of Personalization and how it is applied to each of the steps in your customer’s digital journey.
Regardless of your organization’s readiness to meet every opportunity with the right message or offer, this digital engagement journey map creates prototyping and validation opportunities with your marketing team. If you’re ever lacking clarity on ultimate customer value proposition, this is a great way to get back in alignment.
And remember above when we referenced how fast everything is moving? Well, that’s not going to stop anytime soon. As digital engagement changes in 2019, 2020, and beyond, having this type of map allows for shared decision-making around any potential strategic adjustments needed, i.e. “pivots.”