Customer journey mapping is a new method that is quickly gaining traction in the marketing industry. Journey mapping provides the means for businesses to understand customer behavior.

This method is popular because many marketing experts struggle to link specific revenue/conversion benefits that they expect to get from other marketing investments.

Marketing experts are facing increasing pressure to show the benefits of what they are doing. Businesses want to see how their marketing efforts are affecting the bottom line. Online advertising, for example, gives you a lot of data including new leads, click-throughs, etc. But, traditional market research can’t do that.

What about Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping falls closer to user experience than market research because there are measures you can look at that will give you more hard-fact-based evidence.

Our experience is there are three things that journey mapping uncovers and translates into hard benefits:

1. Journey mapping understands customer pain points. Customers experience pain points in several ways and places like friction in the store, delays during the purchase process, and poor product usage. That leads to dissatisfaction and customer attrition. When you understand customer attrition and view this disconnect with preciseness, you can understand why you lose customers, and how to fix it. If you fix the pain point on a customer’s journey, you will see improvement in your retention numbers.
2. Customer Journey Mapping helps businesses understand moments of truth in the shopping journey that lead customers to choose your product or brand. In a dramatic example, one of our companies found that 72 percent of customers were switching from their brand to another while into the store based on packaging. Simply modifying the package design increased conversion rates. It is even easier to analyze this portion of the customer journey in the online space. Proper CJM analyzes searches, shopping cart abandonment and actual purchases to provide a higher accuracy and benefit estimation.
3. Journey mapping allows businesses to understand the different experiences that satisfied customers vs. dissatisfied customers see from end to end. CJM analyzes how customers are referred to the brand, how they find the product or solution for them, and how it works once they have decided on a purchase.

One company we worked with found that happy customers spent 55% more money than unhappy customers. They redesigned the end-to-end experience for their clients to capture more of the happy people share of wallet. Customers will spend a certain amount of money. The question is where they will spend their money. Understanding the big picture and broadening your focus to embrace the whole shopping experience will encourage consumers to spend their money with you.

Customer journey mapping, when done with the right level of analytic rigor and quantification, steps beyond market/shopper research and becomes a practical tool for driving business results. Let us help you take your customer journey mapping to the next level so you can identify tangible, results-based moves that will help improve the growth of your business.

Contact us at 1-800-549-7170 or send us an email for a free 30-minute consultation on this topic.

Gold Research Inc. has extensive experience in journey mapping, path-to-purchase research, deploying customer intercepts, in-store interviews, and mobile surveys for concept testing, marketing testing, satisfaction research, shopper insights, and mystery shopping. We can also act as an extension of your research team in helping with data processing, analysis, report development, and survey programming.