The relationship between a brand and a customer doesn’t begin at the point of purchase, but long before that! The customer journey starts from the first interaction they have with your brand. To ensure their conversion into loyal customers, you need to build the perfect customer journey. Understanding customer needs will help attract and convert them into repeat customers, thereby enhancing sales and boosting profits. Therefore, it’s essential to design your own customer journey.
What is the Customer Journey?
The Customer Journey is the process through which a customer interacts with a brand to achieve a specific goal, comprising five fundamental stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty, advocacy. Based on the quality of service at each stage, the customer decides on the final evaluation of your company. Therefore, it is essential to take care of all preceding stages to leave the best impression on customers.
Stages of the Customer Journey
Every journey has its stops, and the stops or stages of the customer journey are:
1. Awareness Stage
In this stage, the customer is not aware that they need assistance or face a problem, so your role is to identify pain points to show them their problems indirectly. After this, the customer will want to learn more about these problems that they wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t pointed them out. Note that the customer in this stage is not ready to hear any offers or services; instead, they need education and to learn more about those problems.
2. Consideration Stage
After the customer knows everything, they need to know about the problems threatening them, their attention will turn to finding solutions. They will start searching for available services to solve those problems, and here comes the role of the marketing department you’ve hired for your project. It needs to attract customers by presenting solutions and services in attractive and distinctive ways. Even if the customer doesn’t decide to implement the solutions immediately, your brand will remain present in their mind.
3. Conversion Stage
This is the decision-making stage, where the customer has completed their research, compared available offers, and the benefits they will receive from each offer, and finally settled on your offer over others.
4. Loyalty Stage
After completing the purchase, the customer has formed an overall impression, not only about the product or service but also about the company as a whole. Many companies invest a lot of effort in this stage specifically, to avoid losing customers due to poor service and ensure gaining loyal customers. Therefore, you should ensure constant communication with customers to understand their feedback and complaints and to gain them as loyal customers.
5. Advocacy Stage
This stage entails encouraging your customers to recommend your brand to others, thereby gaining more loyal customers. Reaching this stage is one of the greatest indicators of success, as customers not only repeat purchases but also bring more customers from their friends and families to you.
Read more: How to Easily Boost Brand Awareness?
The Importance of the Customer Journey
The versatility of the term ‘customer journey’ in business extends from its ability to yield numerous significant benefits, including:
1. Gaining a better understanding of customers
Treating consumers as humans rather than just numbers boost their desire to engage with your company, and this is one of the most important benefits of the customer journey. This strategy is also known as personalized marketing. It allows you the opportunity to better understand customers, enabling you to tailor the business to provide them with the best experience. This, in turn, enhances the quality of your services and products.
2. Boosting customer retention rate
The customer journey isn’t just about acquiring more customers; it involves steps that encompass caring for the post-purchase experience and engaging with customers if they leave the project for an extended period. This way, you’ll identify weaknesses in your business and correct them to provide your customers with an exemplary experience in your business.
3. Boosting Sales
Boosting sales comes as a result of everything mentioned earlier. Understanding customers and marketing according to their needs while maintaining previous customers will naturally lead to enhancing the company’s reputation and attracting more customers, ultimately resulting in a significant improvement in sales figures.
A Business Journey Map Template
Let’s assume we own an online store selling mother and baby care products, and we want to design a customer journey for it. This can be done by following the steps below:
Attraction: From Stranger to Visitor
Attraction can be achieved through paid advertisements on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, etc., including a link to the store. Alternatively, it can be accomplished by creating educational content on blogs that interests the target audience, such as: “How to use age-appropriate health tools for your child.
Communication: From visitor to potential customer
You can utilize landing pages at this stage (which are the pages users are directed to after clicking on an ad link, such as ads on search engines), or you can use paid advertising or social media marketing.
Engagement: From Potential Customer to Client
Here comes the moment of actual purchase by providing customers with the opportunity to buy and encouraging them through sending discount coupons and offers. Don’t forget to continue advertising, but focus at this stage on sales-oriented content.
Satisfaction: From customer to loyal customer
Continue serving the customers even after the purchase, listen to their inquiries and complaints, and make sure to offer additional deals to loyal customers.
Certainly, you may have noticed that building the customer journey is a cumulative process that works for the long term, and this has its positives because you’ll learn a lot while working on each stage and measuring its results periodically. If you’re working on building your own customer journey and need marketing consultation, professional designs for your website and platforms, or any other needs that successful brands require, just reach out to UFUK Agency! Book your consultation with us today!