What is a customer journey and why are they important?

19 June, 2023

Among lots of marketing terms, you might have heard about the “customer journey” at least once, but have you ever really read about it? Or use it to see what advantages it can offer you? because there are plenty of gains you could derive from it. Let’s take a closer look at the customer journey map with GoSELL!

Customer Journey: What is it?

Customer journey is simply known as a process or a timeline of a customer whenever they start to think about buying a product until they purchase it completely. Each customer has different actions throughout the stages. This philosophy is a crucial part for both customers and enterprises. Thus, understanding these stages of the customer journey map will help your business know which stages needed focus the most.

The definition of customer journey

Customer journey is defined and designed as a detailed map which shows the way a customer interacts or feels in different stages. Each phase of the customer journey consists of customers actions and experiences when they once engage with a brand. All these phases would be done before a buyer becomes a customer. Because a buyer could only purchase your product once, but if they repeated purchases, they would be your loyal customer. In different terms, every potential client must walk through a customer journey map before purchasing any products. 

Customer journey maps help a brand interpret its customers’ story further behind when any actions were taken. And customer insights are usually hidden or underlaid after it. For your information, customers actually do not express their expectations, pain points or insights for businesses to notice. Then it will be necessary for your business to utilize measurement tools or data analysis systems to investigate customer journeys then collecting customer insights would be easier. By that, your business’s sales and marketing strategy will be more effective. 

Every sustainable business requires understanding customer behavior and reaction throughout the whole customer journey map to ensure they would not miss any chance to reach potential clients. As such, attracting potential customers or remaining customer loyalty would not be that difficult!

Although all customer journeys are not the same, you can still observe it and consolidate it according to the fundamental phases.

Phases of a customer journey map

The definition of customer journey philosophy would not be enough since it was just a starting point. You are required to understand your business objectives and combine them with these customer journey stages to assure the whole process of development. 

Mostly, customer journey is divided into five stages:

• Awareness:

In this phase of customer journey, your potential clients have neither purchased any products from you nor gained much information about your brand. Most of the time this phase begins before one person becomes a customer. To increase awareness, an advice for every business is to use multiple channels. You can use tactics like organic search, paid advertisements, referrals, news stories, social media posts, and email campaigns to catch your audience’s attention. Recognizing business target markets is essential in this case so that you can direct resources toward the topics that your personas are most likely to find interesting. 

• Consideration:

Considering your brand or your products would be the next step after getting to know you in this customer journey map. Customers are probably comparing your product to a number of others that are being offered by your competitors at this point. Valuable or expensive purchases may need weeks or even months of thought, but smaller ones can be made in a matter of seconds or minutes. At this time, information is crucial to help them make a decision. So, if you might not want your customer to leave, focus on this customer journey stage is needed. Methods which you can use to capture their consideration are: customer reviews, FAQs, free trials or samples, and/or commercial videos.

• Decision:

Make sure you do not lose your customer at this crucial time of the customer journey map because all of the effort you did in the prior two stages should have led to the choice phase. Or your customer will maybe change their mind and choose your competitors’ products over you. If you require too many actions a customer must take in the buying process could send a user back to the consideration step. Ensure there are simple ways to contact your business’s representatives because customer care may be vital in this customer journey stage. The history of the customer journey across all channels should be available to this team.

• Retention:

This stage in the customer journey is usually ignored. Most people think it is the end of sales once the customer buys a product. But it should not end that way. A very useful information for you is that acquiring a new customer may charge you five times more than remaining an existing one. Therefore, investing in developing relationships with your customer is necessary. Reselling to people who are currently in your buyer funnel effectively involves personalization, staying in touch with current clients, and soliciting feedback.

• Advocacy:

Advocacy might be the last stage in the customer journey map, but it would not be the least important stage. Imagining when your existing customers spread positive comments, feedback about your company or product to the new ones would be a great thing, wouldn’t it? The act of advocating can take many different forms, such as writing online evaluations or speaking with friends and family face-to-face. Encourage referrals by providing special affiliate links that entitle the sender and recipient to savings on subsequent purchases. 

The importance of customer journey

Identifying how customer journey is crucial would be helpful for your business. What you need to know is that: the customer might be random, but the customer journey is not. This framework helps you understand customer sentiments, experience and what factors influence those elements. Customer journey map supports you in planning marketing initiatives through the marketing funnel. This also eventually enables your ability to conduct in-depth analysis of customer personas and how you can serve them best. 

Benefits of creating a customer journey map 

It begins with the customer journey, which requires shifting your attention away from organizational channels (or processes) and toward the realities and perspectives of the target customers.

Read more: Target Audience: Key takeaways and ways to optimize sales with it

Everything that the consumers experience, from symptom relief to problem solutions, will be evident. Thus, customer journey allows you to focus your efforts on resolving the root of the issues rather than just their symptoms. In other words, the customer journey map ensures the interactions of the whole time between customers and brand is valuable. And to guarantee your potential customers will not leave you for any reasons. 

Another common understanding of the customer journey map which will make it possible for the organization’s various divisions to share the same perspective and point of departure. In this sense, the map functions as a compass for all of the tasks that the group must do together.

Dismantling silos can help you identify the problems that can only be resolved through cross-functional collaboration. The customer journey map can help departments collaborate and work together to achieve main business objectives.

Develop a comprehensive customer journey map in this digital era with GoSELL

In this digital era, customers spend most of their time online. In this situation, digitalization of customer journey is needed. By understanding challenges that businesses usually get when applying customer journey mapping in marketing, GoSELL’s products provides you with comprehensive solutions to help you win the customer journey. 

Increases brand awareness phase of customer journey with GoWEB, GoAPP, GoSOCIAL & GoLEAD

As mentioned above, the awareness stage is when your business must expose everything you have got to customer. And a very useful advice is to use as many channels as you can. In that case, GoSELL’ s products will be the best choice for you.

GoWEB brings you numerous attractive website themes to help you build your own platform online. Nothing can help raise awareness better compared to your own website. Having an official website with a friendly interface and great compatibility will help increase your brand awareness among potential consumers. What is more is that the websites are designed based on SEO standards, which allow your website to place on top search. In that case, your brand will capture customer’s attention easily, and be aware of your brand when they search for relevant product information. 

GoAPP boosts consumer brand awareness. Having a sales app will help your business stay visible on customers’ mobile devices, build brand awareness, attract and keep customers.

GoSOCIAL increases your brand awareness by offering you one single platform that can integrate 5 Facebook and 1 Zalo OA at once. Spreading your business’s exposure on social media will help customer know about you and what you are offering to them. Integrating social media channels on GoSOCIAL would bring tons of benefits about raising awareness. Because you can communicate with PR materials and content advertising creation to reach your potential customers.

GoLEAD helps you to utilize landing pages to advertise your business, products/services. Advertising in this stage is important because it can give the potential customers all of your information. Whenever your information reaches them, they will be aware of what you are doing/offering. Both Facebook ads and Google ads can be deployed in this stage to support you. Running ads will be a perfect way to attract customers. Then your sales number could also increase. 

GoSOCIAL & GoPOS – Enhances customer consideration, decision and retention stage 

In this stage, you will want customers to be staying with you instead of choosing other competitors. Therefore, the best advice for you is to continue maintaining the conversation between you and customers. Also, you need to make sure every interaction between your business and customers is a great experience. That is how you’ll show your unique selling points to them to make them trust you.

GoSOCIAL can help you maintain the amount of your products’ or service’s information while also ensuring the customer experience when they interact with your business. Also, GoSOCIAL helps you stay connected and maintain the conversation among customers effectively via two major platforms Facebook and Zalo. Besides that, GoSOCIAL assists sellers closing purchase deals in chatbox and automatically save customers information when they interact with your business into CRM utility. You can win both decision and consideration stages in terms of hit two birds with one stone.

GoPOS provides you with your own management mobile application to use internally. This indicates that you can manage your store from online to offline. GoPOS helps you win the customer retention stage. Because with the functions such as quick orders creation, sales channels synchronization, and revenue statistics reviewing will be helpful to your business. At that time you will be able to guarantee your customer is excellent when buying your product. Everything that you offer is so neat, consistent and transparent whether it is a product, a service, or an experience.

GoLEAD & GoWEB – Collects and analyzes customer data for deeper findings to win the advocacy stage

GoLEAD & GoWEB recommends your business to use the landing page for collecting customer data and customer reviews. You can allow customers to evaluate the products after they purchased from you. Positive reviews could help you win the advocacy phase. Customers are more likely to trust a product when there are more reviews, which increases the product’s reputation. 

30+ Features from GoSELL – Assist you more in winning your customer journey map 

GoSELL integrates not only sales management but also marketing support features. This is a set of tools that aid in the effective management of specific business areas by companies or small retailers. Additionally, the feature offers a prompt and accurate sales service to ensure that customers are consistently happy with your company or store. 

If your company is still struggling in growing your business size and has not understood the customer journey map clearly, don’t worry, come and GoSELL will be proud to help you out!