Creating a Customer Journey Map (CJM) has become a part of the digital ‘marketing arsenal’ of every digital marketing spruiker around.
Most miss the mark by a mile.
The idea of a sales funnel, apparently powered by ‘commercial gravity,’ combined with a journey map misses the essential uncertainty, indecision and sometimes chaos of conflicting ideas, information and emotion that accompanies every major consumer purchase. These stresses are also present in B2B procurement, but differ in that to a degree, the choice is justified on more impersonal grounds.
Consumers simply do not go through an orderly, logical process to arrive at a decision in cases beyond the everyday purchase.
Trying to build such a map in the safety of an office, buried in reports and statistics is ineffective.
You must do more. You must at least make an attempt to understand the conflict in the stories they are telling themselves as they sort through the options. That sorting process will be different for every person, in every set of circumstances.
It is a great start to have a persona assigned to your CJM. Susan, the 35 year old mother of two, with a professional degree and responsible job, keeping the home together while hubby plays golf and complains of a cold, is a start, but just a start. To flesh it out, you need qualitative behavioural information that provide insight into the choices they might make in differing circumstances.
For instance, the purchase of any item from a new car to a pair of shoes by ‘Susan’ will be influenced by the sort of day she had in her professional job, the prospect of a teacher/parent interview regarding her wild 10-year-old son, or the thought that hubby did not like golf much, but it was better than being at home looking after the kids on a Saturday.
Let’s look at the general failures I see, and attempt to fill them in.
Role.
What is the role of the target persona in the purchase? Are they the decision maker, an influencer, conduit of information, a champion of the purchase, or importantly in many b2b decisions, an opponent of the purchase? Each will require a different flow of content at different stages of the purchase process.
Mindset.
In addition to the role played, every person will have their own set of behaviours that will exert an influence on the way they interact with the purchase process. They may be anxious about the purchase, curious, sceptical of the benefits you articulate, and the ease of implementation. Importantly, the power of incumbency, particularly in B2B is enormous, so the risk of change will emerge in many circumstances as a very high barrier. We know loss aversion is a powerful psychological driver of behaviour.
Touchpoints.
How do you reach these people with the right information at the appropriate time in the journey? This is a hugely challenging task. The general advice that you just email them every day is in my experience counter-productive in the absence of emotionally engaging material being sent. Mostly this step fails badly. Automated emails are now recognised for just that, automated, and treated accordingly.
Identifying the touchpoints an individual or closely defined group of individuals may have, and tailoring the communication to that point has been enabled by recent technology. However, it appears to me that this opportunity is being wasted in most cases by identifiable automated content. The further through the process a lead moves, the greater the impact of a human in the process.
Calls to Action.
What is the best CTA at any point, for any individual? A casual website visitor may be reluctant to give an email for detailed information prior to being engaged at some level. So, give them a stripped down information with a CTA for more detailed information, or opportunity to speak to an operator. Similarly, at every level in a sales funnel there will be multiple choices a potential customer can make and you need to offer an incentive, or CTA at each one to ease their way towards a transaction. This process will vary enormously and often be influenced by many outside factors you will have no chance of understanding. For example, someone who is having a good day is more likely to give you their email address in return for a white paper than that same person having a bad day.
Conversion. Generally, this term is applied at the end of the sales process when an order is received. It is far more productive to consider a ‘conversion’ to occur when a potential customer moves one step forward in the process. These points of ‘conversion’ are the make or break points in the process, and recognising them delivers huge advantage. Most sales processes require multiple conversions, and usually several feedback loops and possible ‘re-conversions’ to be effective. Being sensitive to these human behavioural nuances will be enormously productive for your final conversion to a transaction.
I recommend to clients that they see the process not as a funnel, but a series of concentric circles leading to the final conversion that is the transaction. Even in the case of an established customer buying multiple times, the process will be similar. However, the more times the process is followed, the more automatic it becomes in the absence of some factor that disrupts the process.Competitively, seeing those disruptions occurring in the relationships your competitors have with customers you would like to service, is the key to breaking the powerful chains of incumbency.
