How to Leverage the Customer Journey Map to Craft Impactful Emails

As a business/marketer, building quality relationships with your customers is something that occupies your mind at all times. Rightfully so, of course. Gone are the days when brands could attract audiences solely on the basis of their offering’s uniqueness. At present, customers are well aware that there exist several businesses to cater to their pain points. But eventually, they’ll gravitate towards the one who makes them feel heard and fosters an active dialogue with them. And to be able to do that successfully as a business, carefully mapping out customer journeys is essential. 

First things first- what is a customer journey map? A visual representation of a customer’s interactions with a company across various stages of the sales funnel. It is a highly potent tool that equips you with an understanding of all the relevant factors that govern the progress (or the roadblocks that restrict) of customers from one stage to another. When you base your email campaigns on the learnings gleaned from a customer map journey, you stand to leave an indelible impression on your customers. After all, who wouldn’t be delighted by emails that respond to their unique interactions and behavior and which align all too well with their interests and preferences? In fact, for as many as 80% of customers, the experience a company offers to them is as important as the merits of its offerings.  

To delve deeper into this subject is the aim of our blog today; in the sections to follow, we will delineate the anatomy of a customer journey map, cover its various merits, how one can use it to create targeted and effective email campaigns, and much more. Eager to get started? Hop on board, then!

What are the Components of a Customer Journey Map?

Before we dive further into this topic, it is worth noting that the customer journey maps of any two businesses are unlikely to be the same. Even if one is to compare two companies selling identical wares, chances are that they will find the constitutions of their customer journey maps to be wildly different. That said, there does exist a set of fundamental elements that you’ll spot without fail across all customer journey maps out there, industry no bar; we take a detailed look at them in this section.

Customer Journey Stages

Simply put, customer journey stages refer to the different phases customers traverse while interacting with a business. Normally, they are:

• Awareness: This is the first stage where customers are aware that they have a problem and are researching for potential solutions to resolve this pain point. During this phase, they don’t have in mind any particular product or service that might prove to be beneficial to them. Hence, while interacting with buyers during the awareness stage, brands look to send educational content their way, keeping two objectives in sight- offering greater clarity to the consumer regarding their pain point, and subtly positioning their offerings as the ideal solution.
• Consideration: Having done a considerable amount of research, customers then transition to the consideration phase where they start comparing the solutions of multiple brands, trying to narrow in on options that will best suit their requirements.
• Decision: When customers finally choose a particular solution, they step foot into the decision phase. Here, the chosen brand focuses on facilitating a hassle-free purchasing process for the buyer.
• Retention:  During this phase, brands look to convert newly onboarded customers into recurring ones, doing everything in their power to offer as superlative a customer experience as possible. 
• Loyalty: If you play all your cards right, you’ll find your customers moving on to the loyalty stage, where they will, without any sort of a nudge, spread the word of your brand among their friends and family. The work you have put into sowing strong customer relationships, will reap rich dividends over here.

Customer Pain Points

Every customer journey map must include the pain points of the buyers for only when you identify them will you be able to cater to them effectively. Besides, a detailed understanding of customer pain points also enables you to curate your customer experience in a much more efficient and organized manner, ultimately empowering you to dial up your conversion numbers by several notches.

Personas

Sound understanding of your target audience’s buyer personas (demographic information, behavioral traits, customer interests, etc.) is crucial toward developing an in-depth understanding of them, which ultimately helps you shape hyper-personalized customer journeys for them. In order to build a detailed buyer persona, however, you first need to gather consumer data. Here are a few ways you can go about that:

• Collecting insights from customer-facing employees
• Sending surveys
• Keeping track of customer activity across your social media accounts
• Taking stock of customer inquiries and grievances
• Analysing audience demographics

Touch Points

Touch points refer to all channels, physical and digital, where a customer interacts with your business. They include:

• The reception desk of your business’ office
• Your website
• Your social media accounts
• Brand events
• Digital ads

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list. Making a note of all possible touch points, direct or indirect, and reflecting the same on your customer journey map is incredibly vital because doing so will allow you to offer a memorable customer experience, nurture your leads in the right way, and enhance the reputation of your brand. 

Emotions

Every purchase that a buyer makes is driven by certain emotions and thoughts. Thus, you must factor them in at every stage of their journey. Understanding the emotions that they might be experiencing across each touchpoint will allow you to foster a positive emotional connection between the both of you. Should you manage to succesfully accomodate the myriad emotions of your customers, the strength of your relationship will know no bounds. 

How Does Customer Journey Mapping Help You?

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of customer journey mapping:

• It helps you develop a strong understanding of your customers’ behaviors, allowing you to engage maturely with them. 
• Rather than focusing on outbound marketing, where you chase customers in an aimless manner, a customer journey map lets you prioritize inbound marketing and draw them towards you by developing relevant and impactful content.
• By arming you with a sound understanding of your customer pain points, emotions, and buyer personas, a customer journey map empowers you to take your customer service to the next level.
• It allows you to make customer-centric decisions, which goes a long way towards improving your retention rates and promoting greater loyalty. 
• It enables you to streamline the buying process for your customers, getting rid of potential hurdles and making it as seamless as possible. 

Making Use of Customer Journey Map to Level Up Your Email Marketing Efforts

By using a customer journey map, you can infuse a vitality like never before into your email marketing campaigns. Here’s how:

• Practice effective segmentation: When you are well versed with the user personas of your customers, you can easily divide them into various segments, curating tailored content for each. Ultimately, this translates into greater interaction and engagement for your brand. 
• Have greater clarity regarding automated workflows: An intimate understanding of your customers’ interactions and behaviors helps you to effectively configure automated workflows, which, in turn, enables you to send them the right message at the right time. 
• Write email copy that converts: Since you are well aware of what works for your customers (and what doesn’t), you will be able to compose copy that will strike a chord with your customers, subsequently driving up your conversions. 
• Mindfully curate the brand identity of your email templates: A customer journey map will help you understand what aspects of your brand your customers are most fond of. Consequently, it will allow you to curate your templates in such a manner that incorporates all these elements; this will help you both, develop a unique brand identity and appeal effectively to your customers’ sensibilities, too.

Wrapping It Up

In 2023, for your email campaigns to taste success, you must keep the customer at the fore, something that a customer journey map helps you accomplish with ease. If you are diligent with your data collection efforts and clear about your goals, you will have no trouble building an insightful customer journey map. And that, eventually, will help you create email marketing campaigns that truly pack a punch. We hope the insights shared above help you in this endeavor!