The CMO’s Definitive Customer Journey Playbook

According to PwC, 73% of customers consider customer experience (CX) to be a key driving factor in their decision to buy. Most marketing leaders know the value of making CX a priority, with 87% agreeing that exceptional customer experience is essential for increasing loyalty and trust.  

But how can businesses manage the customer journey effectively, and how can marketing professionals ensure that customers not only convert, but turn into loyal brand advocates?

In this guide, we'll cover the follow chapters:

1. What is a customer journey?​
2. Why customer journey mapping is important
3. The 5 key stages of the customer journey
4. How marketers can analyze the customer journey
5. The art of customer journey management
6. 7 ways to improve your customer journey
7. Final thoughts

What is a customer journey?

Before we dive deeper into how the customer journey works and how it can be improved, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what the customer journey is.

The customer journey can be summed up by the experiences that a customer goes through when interacting with your brand. The entire journey – which is more than just a transaction – tells the story about your users, their behaviors and what makes them come back time and time again.

Why customer journey mapping is important

Not only are 86% of buyers willing to increase their spending when they receive great customer experience, according to PwC, but they’re also more likely to shop again, recommend your products/services and share more personal data with you. This starts with getting the customer journey right.

The customer journey is vital to improving CX because it looks at all the touchpoints with which your audience interacts with you. These customer touchpoints cover the different stages of the buying process – including before purchase, during purchase and after purchase – ultimately shaping their overall experience with your company.

By understanding the customer journey and adapting it to their needs and desires, you can prevent dissatisfied customers from slipping through the cracks. Whether customers interact with you through email, social media, live chat or any other channels, they expect a multichannel or omnichannel shopping experience where their preferences are saved and their offers are personalized.

However, CMOs have to bear in mind that the more touchpoints there are, the more complexity businesses face when it comes to facilitating satisfaction. This is why the customer journey has to be carefully mapped – and must be made a priority to ensure consistency of service.

The 5 key stages of the customer journey

When it comes to breaking down the customer touchpoints, there are five main stages to consider:

1. Awareness

Your customer’s journey begins before they’re even ready to buy from you, so brand awareness matters. Before someone becomes a customer, they’re just a person on the internet with a problem to fix – this is your company’s chance to offer a solution.

Take a multi-channel approach, create persona-specific content, and adopt a range of digital marketing tools and techniques to get your brand seen.

2. Consideration

During the consideration stage, your brand will be pitted against others on the market. To speed up the process for potential buyers and stay ahead of your competitors, providing information is the key.

Relevant and informative content, a helpful FAQs section, excellent customer reviews, free trials and samples and things such as demonstration videos can all help a customer weigh up multiple offerings from different brands.

3. Decision

As buyers get close to making a purchasing decision, they’ll likely compare your offering to something similar. While price and product are important, there’s even more value in delivering an outstanding customer experience – so think about how you can make your brand stand out in this way.

A shopping process that’s complicated, clunky or hard to navigate could put a customer off – even if you’re cheaper than your competitors. Customer service also plays an important role here, so it’s in every CMO’s interest to build good working relationships with the customer service team and to enable better collaboration between Marketing and Sales.

4. Retention

Just as your customer’s journey doesn’t simply start with a sale, it doesn’t end after they’ve purchased either. Their journey continues long after the transaction is complete, and marketers need to look beyond transactions and consider a customer’s lifetime value (CLV). Knowing the CLV of a retained customer vs. a new customer aids decision-making, helping you invest wisely in customer communications and personalization.

5. Advocacy

One of the main benefits of perfecting your customer journey is being able to turn customers into promoters. These are the customers that not only remain loyal to your brand, but talk about you on social channels or with their friends and family. You can encourage customer advocacy by incentivizing referrals, and also by reposting user generated content to engage with those advocates-in-the-making.

The process of onboarding

When it comes to onboarding customers onto this journey with you, a seamless process is required in order to build an end-to-end route for prospects to flow through.

Customer onboarding is important because it oversees the entire cycle, guiding customers through each stage and providing ongoing support as they shift from Awareness to Decision. Get this part right and you can boost loyalty, increase customer LTV, grow referral rates and enable margin building and upselling.