You Ask, I Answer: Why Map Customer Journeys?

In today's episode, John asks, if the customer journey is different for every person, why bother trying to map it? So it's a good question, uh, because it is true that customer journeys uh maps and customer journeys do have all these different ways people can take towards conversion, and trying to force people down a rigid funnel where they must do each uh step in sequence is nowadays largely a feudal uh effort. Well, the reason for that's pretty simple. It has a lot to do with this thing. Uh you can be in multiple stages of different journeys just within a single uh device.

I have seen people, uh, you know, back when you were allowed to go shopping, uh at malls and stores, uh, talking to friends on their phones, uh, video chatting with them, and having you know, holding up pieces of merchandise, asking their opinions and having them do some research on their own. And you know, that person for one vendor is at a certain point in the journey and another vendor is at a different point in the journey. And so it can be a very complex uh thing. You can be at points in a customer journey and move backwards, right? So uh real simple example, you're you're uh looking at a new device or some new gadget, and uh you're at the consideration phase, like wow, this this thing looks really good, looks really cool.

And then you read a review of it, and you're like, uh, actually, uh got really bad reviews, and you go back to like the uh uh research phase, right? And so you can be you can move forwards and backwards in inside of a customer journey. Now, that said, that is at the individual level. The presumption in the question is that a customer journey is a wide open field of possibilities, and you can move any direction you want. You know, you know, it's like uh it's like being in a video game, right?

And you can go anywhere you want, and there's no clear direction that somebody goes, and that's not true. Uh when we think about customer journeys, there is there are a limited number of ways that you can rationally buy a product, right? There's a limited number of opportunities, there's a limited number of just ways you can do that. It's kind of like uh we talk about in the martial arts a lot. Yes, every single person is different.

Yes, there are hundreds of martial arts styles. But in the end, there's only so many ways you can punch somebody in the face that are that are logical and rational, right? Uh and effective. And so with customer journeys, the exact same thing is true. There are only so many rational, reasonable ways that you can take towards conversion, and that is something that you can understand in the aggregate.

There's an apocryphal tale of a university, and I it was someplace supposedly in the Midwest, have never actually gotten an answer as to whether this happened or not. Uh, but it seems reasonable. And the story goes, they did not put down any sidewalks on a new campus, let students walk everywhere they wanted for a year, and then paved over the most worn pathways in the grass, and supposedly the campus feels more natural. Well, extending that logic to customer journeys, if you were to know how somebody traversed either your website or how somebody traversed all the channels that are out there towards conversion, and you looked at the most walked on ones, uh, you might get a sense of hey, here's how people make the journey to conversion. And there's a couple different ways you can illustrate this.

Let's actually go ahead and uh bring this up here. So this is a customer journey analysis. This is a very simplistic one where we are just looking at uh the channels that led to conversion the most. So in this chart here, we see uh organic search for my website drove uh almost 80% of traffic. Uh now there are some debates uh and I think it's some reasonable questions I should be asking my website.

If this was a major commercial enterprise, I would be at substantial risk uh because 80% of my traffic comes from one source. That's not a good thing. Um definitely need to diversify my traffic sources. But putting that aside, I see my newsletters there's number two, medium.com at number three, uh, Twitter at number four, and Bing at number five. So I have five of the most popular pathways, most popular channels that lead to conversion eventually.

Now, is that the last thing that they did? No, not necessarily. But at least from here I can see these are the things that if I have to figure out how do I budget, how do I resource, what should I focus on if I want to double down on what's working? In this case, pretty clearly I should be doing a lot more with organic search. All right.

Now, if we wanted to make that even more fancy, uh this is a version where we have the exact same numbers, but in software in web analytics software in particular, you can look at the the steps somebody takes on their journey and then just count up essentially how many times does this appear in the first third of the journey, how many times does it appear in the second third of all those steps, how many times does it appear in the last third. And what we see here is that uh organic search for me it tends to appear towards the beginning, whereas email uh and social tend to appear towards the end. And so people discover my site through search, stay in touch with email, and then come back to do important stuff through social media. That's important. That tells me from a con uh a messaging perspective hey, your messaging on things like social media.

It's okay for you to have you know more closing language in my content because it tells me, yeah, people are ready or or more ready to convert from those than they are from, say, like organic search or even email. I have to give some thought here to my email marketing. Should I be pressing that hard to get people to convert, or should I be nurturing the relationship with the intent of eventually using social media to get them to close? So these are two examples of customer journey maps that uh I built for my website. This is actually a service that uh I offer through my company, Trust Insights.

If you're interested in having this done for your company, uh go to trustinsights.ai. I will tell you right now it is reassuringly expensive, so it it it will do a good job of giving you the strategic blueprint you need for what's working and how it's working. But to go back to John's question, there are only a certain number of ways, as you can see here, where people convert, right? That journey is not completely irrational, right? And and there's not traffic everywhere, and people just wandering off on their own.

There are distinct sequences that people take towards conversion, and those distinct sequences are things that we can know and address and serve 80, 90, 95% of our audience serve them well by investing properly, by messaging properly in the channel groupings where it makes sense to do so, um, and understanding what it is that we should be doing more of. I should potentially be diversifying a bit, right? Maybe I should do a little bit more with email. Maybe I should try some ads. I am doing well with organic search, and I need to continue to do well and stuff.

So that you know we want to double down on what's working and want to uh shore up the stuff that isn't working to the extent that we can. So that's why you would do customer journey mapping. That's why you bother trying to map it, because it can give you aggregate insights that can guide your strategy. If you have follow-up questions about customer journey mapping, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.