Customer Journey Mapping For Your Agency

Email marketing for agencies is among the fastest, most tried-and-tested ways to communicate with your audience. Automated email campaigns that improve the customer journey can be very effective and scaled to large numbers.

A general rule for improving conversions is to define your customer journey for planning a better email campaign. Many top agencies across the world not only help their clients use customer journey mapping to level up conversions but apply themselves too.

What Is Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey is the one they take from the awareness stage (realizing their need) to completing their product/service experience (conversion stage).

A customer journey map collects research data from email campaigns and breaks down the customer journey from awareness to fulfillment into multiple funnels while evaluating each stage from multiple perspectives like emotions, goals, pain points, etc.

Why Customer Journey Mapping is Important?

Customer Journey Mapping improves conversions and sales, reduces costs, identifies gaps in customer service, helps build brand loyalty and enhances customer experience.

Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at how to create an effective customer journey map so you can help your clients better.

How To Create Effective Customer Journey Maps ?

Begin With The End In Mind

Any map begins with the end in mind, so the first and most critical step is to have defined goals. An email campaign would include goals like emails opened, CTR, conversions, referrals and more.

Defining these goals help look at the map with a perspective; otherwise, you might get lost looking at a large number of diversions.

Having understood the end goals, you can evaluate the campaign by breaking down the customer journey into little milestones and seeing if they’re in line with specific goals created.

Know Your Customers

Know your customer (or client) need not be limited to address proofs. To ensure the success of multiple stages of an email campaign, you should understand what the customer has experienced at any stage of the campaign.

One lousy email can derail the entire chain while a well-crafted one pushes them onto the next part. Defining the customer persona will not only help you gain clarity on who the email journey is for but may also create subsidiary audiences, enhance your brand or reveal a demand they didn’t know previously existed.

This can be done by creating a list of questions that explores the customer and your relationship. For example, questions like-

• How did you hear about us?
• What attracted you to our website/ app?
• What do you seek to get from us?
• What would you tell your friends about us?

Touchpoints

The difference between a person who knows your client’s brand and them becoming a customer is action. These actions, when repeated over time, build brand loyalty, and if your clients build a good enough relationship with them, the customer becomes a mini-brand ambassador.

The key to nudging the customers to act is to ensure your clients deliver on their promises, speak to customer emotions, and remove any obstacles that prevent them from carrying out actions.

Your clients can set up these touchpoints for each email, linking it to:

1. Customer satisfaction at each stepWhat are they looking for? How can we better this part of their experience? Are there product improvements we have to make at any stage? Can the communication be better?
2. What is the emotion we want to invoke?Love, compassion, inspiration, pride, joy are a few examples. Ensure they’re in line with well-defined brand values.
3. What are the factors that are stopping them from acting?Timing of emails, load time, content, and design are just a few of these factors.

Be The Customer

You must ‘be the customer’ and take the journey from your audiences’ perspective. Doing this will help you look at things from multiple points of view and tweak your processes to connect problems with actions and create a seamless journey.

This will also solidify the above steps you’ve taken and open ways to add to them.

When taking the journey, you might feel an emotion completely different from the customer or even come across an idea for a new feature.

Make The Map Exciting

As with any map, the journey is just as fun as the destination. Create graphs, add images of your most loyal customers, paste memes or colorful notes, link them to product roadmaps or marketing calendars, transfer them to an insight sheet or even connect it to the performance tracker.

In short, making the map exciting means the journey can be exciting as well!

Conclusion

The critical function of an agency is to not only improve the end goals of the client’s business but also to provide fun, functional, industry-wide practices that enable them to do so.

While email campaigns for client journeys are commonplace, customer journey mapping can help these campaigns fulfill their objectives and create happy customers that satisfy your clients.