6 Mistakes to Avoid When Mapping Customer Journeys

Working with thousands of companies over more than two decades has helped us understand why some succeed and others fail. One of the most essential ingredients in the recipe for success is the creation of one-of-a-kind customer relationships.

But nobody said success would be easy. Delivering a personalised, cross-channel experience at every step of the customer lifecycle can be challenging.

According to the latest State of the Connected Customer report, 88% of customers say experience is as important as products or services, and 73% expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.

Customer journey mapping provides the critical framework and modelling to meet those demands and create a great, personalised customer experience. By first establishing a customer journey map, marketers can deliver digital experiences that are highly relevant, timely and tailored to specific customer needs. But to build successful customer journey maps, they must avoid these six common mistakes:

1. Your customer journey map has no clear goal or objective
2. You’ve forgotten to define your audience
3. Your customer journey map is missing crucial data points
4. You don’t have a content strategy
5. You’re communicating on the wrong channels
6. You’re running when you’re only ready to walk

1. Your customer journey map has no clear goal or objective

Don’t underestimate the power of setting a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goal to define your path and determine your success.

To set your first goal, get in that New Year’s resolution frame of mind — define the point you want to reach, then figure out each step of how you will get there, breaking down that lofty goal into manageable, measurable steps you can tick off as you go. A high-level goal will direct the development of your journey and help you focus your efforts, and can be refined as you learn more.

From there, define exactly what you hope this journey will achieve. Your SMART goal will also help you to clearly define success post-launch. For example, if your goal is to launch a new product, but you also need to continually acquire additional customers after launching it, a SMART journey goal might be to acquire 25% more new customers for that product in each quarter after launch.

2. You’ve forgotten to define your audience

Take a tailored approach when thinking about your audience. The State of the Connected Customer report shows 56% of customers feel most companies treat them as a number, so focus on building a customer journey that delivers a one-on-one message to help your business stand out. 

1. Understand exactly who you are speaking with and where they are in their lifecycle with you. 
2. Decide if you will use a broad audience (all bank customers) or a narrow audience (all newly acquired, high-value bank customers in Melbourne) to show how participation in the journey will meet your mutual goals and set a solid foundation for the journey itself.
3. Remember that different generations will have different preferences for how you engage with them. Salesforce research shows, for instance, that while 63% of Millennials prefer to purchase online rather than in store, only 38% of Baby Boomers feel the same. 
4. Audit the current customer experience. Be objective and brutally honest — and remember that your customers are human.

Taking the time to understand what matters to your customers and what they want from you will yield high rewards. Seventy-one percent of consumers have switched brands in the last year, so find out what makes your customers loyal and do more of that. Hint: building trust, understanding their needs and delivering personalised offers will go a long way.

Health fund nib has seen the benefits of making customer journeys more defined through personalisation. Previously, its newsletter was sent to most of its email list, resulting in an open rate that hovered around 30% to 35%. 

By splitting out the people who hadn’t read it and sending them more personalised emails, nib developed more relevant messaging over time through testing. The open rate of some of their campaigns now sits at 65%.

3. Your customer journey map is missing crucial data points

Dig a little deeper and see if there are any other accessible data points you can use within the journey to personalise elements. In addition to an email address, look for postcode, gender, last purchase date, preferred location and so on.

How do you go about collecting additional data?

1. Check the data you have today, evaluating its quality, completeness and accessibility. Every data point you access will add value and richness to the journey.
2. Document the data you need. Does it exist but is currently inaccessible, or do you need to start collecting it?
3. Envision the data you want. Dare to dream about the hard-to-access data points so you can personalise every message.

And remember to make any data collection strategies ethical and compliant. Nearly 80% of consumers say additional transparency increases their trust in a company, however two thirds believe that most companies are missing the mark and aren’t being transparent about how they use personal information. 

4. You don’t have a content strategy

Both in-journey content (delivered in the message itself) and out-of-journey content (which a subscriber would navigate to with a click) can be extremely powerful when used in tandem.

How do you make sure you have both? Audit what content you have available today, plan what you need to create in the short term and create a strategy for future content that will delight your audiences. And, like nib, make sure you define how you will measure the success of your new strategy — the State of Marketing report shows 83% of marketing organisations track content engagement metrics, up 14% from 2021. 

Knowing exactly what you want your customer to do and keeping a laser focus on calls to action (and resulting landing pages) will allow you to be helpful, supportive and resourceful to your customers along their journeys.

It’ll also mean you’re focusing your energy where it should be — actions that will generate ROI.

5. You’re communicating on the wrong channels

Instead of messaging your audiences in the channel you want them to be on, identify the channel they are already on and engage them there.

Ask yourself: are your customers desk-based and completing a web form? If so, using email makes sense.

However, if they are on the go and seeking brief information quickly, SMS may be appropriate. Keep in mind also that 78% of customers have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction so having a truly omnichannel experience will allow them to do so seamlessly.

Consider how ride-sharing service Uber uses different channels for pre-, during and post-ride messaging: a combination of push, SMS and email. Now consider how it would impact your experience if you received the ‘Your driver is two minutes away — track them in the app’ message only via email.

Tailoring channel use to both audience preferences and audience actions creates one seamless engagement path for customers, no matter what channel the customer is on.

Australian fashion retailer White Fox quickly learned that SMS was especially effective for their target market. The brand uses Marketing Cloud Engagement to send follow-up SMSs if promotional emails are unopened. They also use the channel to drive urgency around shopping events, on the days they sent SMS surrounding Black Friday, they saw a massive 40% uplift in sales.

6. You’re running when you’re only ready to walk

Once you understand your goals, audience, relevant data points and strategic content, you will be ready to create a comprehensive customer journey map. But remember not to bite off more than you can chew.

Think of a successful customer journey as having three versions:

1. Crawl: using what you have available today
2. Walk: using what you can access with a little elbow grease
3. Run: your ‘blue-sky’ vision

If you currently have a monthly EDM and limited ability to segment your audiences, your crawl version shouldn’t be a multistep, multichannel drawing that spans five whiteboards. A great starting point could be a single automated touchpoint with two reminders for non-openers — sometimes a simple automation can drive amazing results. For example, White Fox added an abandoned cart pop-up on their website and saw a 27% click-through rate and a 10% conversion rate.

Similarly, if you already have that multistep, multichannel journey up and running (good for you!), your run version shouldn’t be limited to data and content from the past, but should be stretched to incorporate real-time data and predict future customer needs.

The best customer journey mapping mindset allows for testing, learning and iterating while actively servicing your customers.

Read more

• What does ‘real-time marketing’ really mean?
• Dos and don’ts: how to make your brand marketing authentic
• How personalisation transforms customer experience

Note: this piece was originally published on 12 July 2021 and has been updated.