How to Set Up Your Customer Journey to Grow Sales Fast

As a business owner, your initial goal is to make your first sale. Rather than leave it up to chance, you need a systematic customer journey to track that first sale and iterate on the experience for future customers.

Think about the steps a visitor takes before making a purchase. This will serve as your guide in how you should drive your marketing campaign. It improves your perspective by shifting to a client’s mindset. Having this perspective makes your campaign more empathetic, thus, more effective.

So, how should you create a customer journey? Here is a step-by-step guide.

1. Determine your target customers

Knowing who you are serving is the first step in creating a successful customer journey. Set the parameters and make it as detailed as possible. Don’t be afraid to narrow your focus. Just look at Facebook: they started with university students at one campus only to end up reaching every corner of the world and generating billions of dollars 14 years later.

It’s better to engage with 10 people resulting in seven of them making a purchase than engage with 100 with nobody buying. For example, do you want to target male nurses in Asia or millennial mothers, perhaps?

2. Differentiate the stages of the customer journey

The customer journey is divided into four major stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and loyalty. The awareness stage is where you attract all your potential customers based on your target audience. Your aim is to make your audience aware of your brand and what it does. At the same time, you can also gather relevant information from them. You can do these through all forms of web content, as well as trade shows and events.

The second stage is the consideration stage. At this stage, you already have prospective customers. Your goal here is to establish your authority and expertise. You nurture your prospects through automated content, such as email campaigns. Using email marketing automation software makes this simple and easy for you to do so.

The third stage is the decision stage. This is where your prospect chooses whether or not to make a purchase. Your goal is to remove all doubts and successfully convert your prospect.

In the last stage, loyalty, you have gained the client’s trust with a reliable product and service and you continue to foster a positive experience for the customer.

3. Map out the different touch points for each stage of the customer journey.

There are different touch points throughout the customer journey. A touch point is any point of contact between a buyer and seller. Typically, the first touch point is hard to document because there is no opt-in, but it is still very important for the awareness stage. This can happen if someone sees your ad, hears about you through word-of-mouth, or reads one of your blogs.

Another touch point is lead creation. This time, a prospect opts in to your email list, subscribes to your YouTube channel, etc. This is very important since the client has shown interest in your brand.

Make sure to set up tracking for every touch point you can, so you can monitor your prospects’ engagement then use it to guide future experiments and improvements.

4. Implement the strategies and review your performance

Finally, it’s time for implementation. Having a clear plan will make your marketing more effective and manageable, but that doesn’t mean it will be flawless.

See what works and what doesn’t. Document it all. Review how it went, modify your plan as needed, and do it again. Rinse and repeat.

As you’re mapping your customer journey, be sure to name your target group, identify the different stages, map out the touch points, and implement. These steps will ensure that you can measure and ultimately increase conversions. A customer journey can help you visualize the stages customers experience. From there, you can optimize your strategies to speed up and multiply the conversion process.

Author Bio:

Kimberly Maceda is a Content Writer for ActiveTrail. She writes for some top online marketing sites and shares blogging advice on email marketing and marketing automation. ActiveTrail is a leading provider of professional-grade email marketing and automation software for growing businesses.