What Is CJM or Customer Journey Map and How It Works

Online retailers are always looking to sell more and faster, so they work to improve the customer experience at every stage of the sales funnel. They study the profile of the target audience, improve the usability of the site, and use innovative internet marketing tools to make sure potential customers make a decision about buying in the shortest time possible.

Today, technical capabilities make it easy to collect and analyze data about customers and the path they take to purchase a product. Marketing uses the Customer Journey Map for easy handling of such data. Let’s break down what it is and how to apply CJM in your work.

What Is CJM?

Customer Journey Mapping, or CJM for short, is a mapping of the customer’s or customer’s path to the point of purchase of services or products. Visible visualization takes into account all factors – thoughts, impressions, motivations, emotions of a person who is going to make a decision about purchasing, ordering services, downloading a 22Bet app or other programs. This marketing tool presents the communication history of the potential customer with the company from the moment of acquaintance to product choice.

What to Use Customer Journey Mapping for

Visualizing the entire customer journey helps you see the entire process: what influenced the decision to buy, how the customer came to the site, what products they were interested in, what challenges they encounter on their way to purchase, and so on. Thanks to CJM you can find weak points in your business processes, improve the customer experience and even increase sales.

Mapping will be useful for businesses at any stage of development to gain an in-depth understanding of customers. The main thing to remember is that the result depends on the accuracy of the data used, so you can’t rely only on your own opinion. Take into account information from fellow salespeople, use third-party market research from public sources, or conduct your own.

Use the results to adjust your marketing activities:

• Connect new communication channels if it turns out that the target audience prefers them. For example, messengers, which many companies have recently started using.
• Shorten the customer journey to the final decision by optimizing the company’s business processes.
• Take into account the client’s psychological profile and interests when setting up marketing tools. Select the levers of pressure taking into account the individual characteristics of users.
• Explore all fears, doubts and expectations of the customer to improve the quality of interaction with them and increase brand loyalty.

How to Build the Customer Journey

Routing the Customer Journey is a complex process that requires analysis of various data, but the results will exceed all expectations. For example, you can form a completely new, perfect customer journey or make changes to the product that improve its competitiveness. Successful routing requires looking at the same activities from the customer’s perspective and from the company’s perspective.

Six sequential steps are used to build it:

1. Study the audience and create basic portraits of customers. Form consumer segments based on expressed characteristics: age, gender, position in society, income level, hobbies, marital status. Gather as much information as possible about their preferences: what sources of information they use, what motivation they have, how they make purchasing decisions. Collect information from various sources, like a CRM system, social surveys, web analytics, questionnaires.
2. Establish points of exit to the brand and channels of communication with services or products. A customer journey map takes into account where consumers are concentrated and the length of their journey to products. Google analytics and other Internet marketing tools will show you the touch points. At this stage, study customer behavior on the site – time of visit, places of high concentration, and determine the most successful forms of subscription. In general, you need to study the movement through the sales funnel. The Customer Journey Map indicates zero points of contact. Lack of contact is also important information you need to determine the shortcomings of your current marketing scheme.
3. Identify the potential customer’s channels of interaction with the brand. Consider all channels and leave only those that convert leads into actual customers. Optimization of the journey allows you to understand where customers are coming from for the product, which points to pay more attention to, and what should be removed from the current CJM chart.
4. To properly nudge the user to buy and create the perfect instruction of live interaction, study the results of surveys, feedback. Work through the experiences of customers who share feedback on brand sites, forums and social media. Conduct surveys to get real data from customers. Email surveys can be used to collect data.
5. Test the usability of the site. Evaluate the comfortable arrangement of buttons, the presence of subscription forms, links to the sales funnel, ease of filling out personal information, the availability of a customer account, the organization of product search and other factors. Use the findings to build a Customer Journey Map.
6. Complement the data with a brainstorming session to find weaknesses, identify new ways to reach your brand touchpoints and improve the customer experience.

CJM Tools

You can create a route map using free programs and apps:

• Touchpoint Dashboard, a paid service for mapping a person’s itinerary, taking into account psycho-emotional portrait, hobbies, goals and plans. The scheme can be supplemented with pictures for high-quality visualization.
• Canvanizer – a free service for creating a CJM-chart according to the instructions provided by the developers. You can also create instructions, templates, check customer experience, and build consumer routing.
• Google Spreadsheets – an accessible tool for creating and visualizing an individual shopper experience, structuring and analyzing the information collected. They write the steps of interaction vertically, and line by line they write the results. The table functionality allows for quick edits, markups, data changes and transfers, so it’s an acceptable CJM tool.
• Miro is a user-friendly online platform and feature-rich service for visual interest allocation. The program presents a simple, straightforward interface, but there is a limitation for free features.

Summary

Mapping the customer experience allows you to see the problems a customer faces all the way through to the point of purchase, and to find the best ways to solve them. CJM helps marketers and  the sales departments work more effectively. When mapping, you need to rely on your data and make constant adjustments.