The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.”

― José Saramago, The Stone Raft

Creating customer journey maps is one of the hottest trends in user-focused marketing today. Understanding how to use them allows businesses to maximize product potential by informing intelligent web design that interprets, predicts, and aligns web properties with the needs and desires of their user base.

Journey maps also increase the agility of websites and apps, allowing them to be both proactive and reactive to consumer desires and behavior.

Customer journey maps give marketers and product managers the ability to create websites, apps, and other digital products fine tuned to the needs of their customers, while also driving those users toward business goals. There’s no doubt, learning to create and use customer journey maps is an essential skill for entrepreneurs.

What is a customer journey map?

Customer journey mapping relies on the basic principle of cartography—creating a simple visualization that effectively communicates a complex reality.

A customer journey map is a detailed visual representation of the customer purchase and retention journey. It is a tool that helps to identify the customer’s desires, goals and actions they take to achieve them, all aligned to key business drivers.

The customer journey map gives new business leaders a tool to discover where business goals align with customer goals. With this information, they can better identify all relevant consumer touchpoints that shape their decision to choose, purchase, and continue to use products and services.

The map works both as an alternative to, or in conjunction with, traditional sales funnels. The sales funnel puts more focus on what businesses are looking to accomplish, while a customer journey map focuses on the state of mind of the customer and what the consumer seeks to accomplish through their interactions with a business.

The task then becomes to align your information, calls to action, and funnels, to the customer’s natural path as they interact with and move from channel to channel.

Building a customer journey map

Building a customer journey map requires four key points of information:

• Customer Profiles/Personas
• Behavior Stages
• Customer Goals
• Touchpoints/Channels

Customer Profiles/Personas

Personas are a commonly used tool to describe the relevant characteristics of a target customer. It’s a fictionalized summary created by gathering details of typical customers through interviews, surveys, and contextual inquiry.

Customer journey maps include personas as a way of illustrating how each customer type moves through a typical customer journey. In the map each persona type is generally presented as a specific person going through the stages.

For example, you may divide your key personas into mindsets and demographics such as single professional men, newlyweds, or baby boomer couples who are slow to adopt mobile devices.

Behavior Stages

Behavior stages show the typical steps that a customer takes as they choose and use a product or service. Customer behavior stages can vary from company to company or between different brands or products. User research combined with analytics will reveal the behaviour stages for a given customer journey.

An example of a common customer behavior stage progression could be:

Discovery → Research → Comparison → Selection → Conversion → Renewal

While in the past customer journeys were thought to be linear, today we know that customers can move through different stages in a circular or non-linear fashion.

Customer Goals

Customer journey maps should include customer goals for each of the behavior stages. Understanding people’s motivations as well as how goals change over time helps to create more effective and personalized engagement in each stage.

Mapping out customer goals helps uncover where customer goals intersect with business or product goals, helping to focus efforts on maximizing engagement and conversion potential while supporting an exceptional customer experience.

Touchpoints/Channels

Touchpoints are where the customer interacts with a business along their journey. Many of these interactions will correspond with behavior stages (see above).

At each of these touchpoints you should map the emotional (what is the user’s state of mind), social (what does the user need to discuss or share), and functional (what task(s) does a user need to be able to perform) requirements of the target personas.

Photo: © vadymvdrobot, YFS Magazine

With each of these considerations, you’ll learn more about how to communicate with your customers, how to support their needs, and what information, tools, and interactions you’ll need to help them reach the next step in their journey.

For example, if a customer has anxiety about a company’s credibility during the trial phase, marketing and product teams who are aware of these emotional considerations can make adjustments to alleviate these concerns, whether in the language used, the information communicated, highlighting security and safety, showcasing testimonials, and so on.

Your roadmap to customer experience success

Your end goal is to define the media and interactions that will best drive users to the next step in the customer journey and towards business goals. It’s essential when working through this part of the exercise that channel owners and stakeholders collaborate with the user’s journey in mind. Work together to understand how a customer can best move from marketing and sales driven awareness to product, retention, and support.

From step to step, touchpoint to touchpoint, the journey map becomes your roadmap to ensure the customer experience is effective, efficient, consistent, and joyful from start to finish.

Applying the customer journey map

The customer journey map is a highly effective tool to better understand and communicate customer needs and the actions your business needs to define to help users meet these needs. The map illustrates the relevant inputs that should inform key business interactions, media, content, and design decisions for a more streamlined customer experience.

When maps are used effectively, companies see an increase in conversions and engagement, while reducing customer support requirements. The end result? Happier customers who are more likely to purchase, renew, and advocate for your product or service.

This article has been edited and condensed.

Lee Dale is the co-founder of Say Yeah!, Toronto’s multichannel experience design studio. Say Yeah! specializes in user interface design with a focus on improving customer experience. We work across channels with an emphasis on web and mobile to ensure that digital products provide a great customer experience across all touch points. Since co-founding Say Yeah!, Lee has worked with numerous organizations big and small including Virgin Gaming, Kanetix, theScore, and many more. Their work has also helped their clients secure investments and beneficial partnerships with organizations such as Indigo, Microsoft, and Rogers. Connect with @sayyeahto on Twitter.

View article at: yfsmagazine.com

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Published as “Correlating marketing with mobile products: Your path to conversions & engagement” in: Direct Marketing Magazine by Lee Dale, February 2016

With over two billion smartphone users projected in 2016, the mobile space is growing far more competitive, with increasingly savvy consumers expecting more from mobile experiences.

While ad spend for mobile is projected by eMarketer to reach $101.37 billion in 2016, an increase of almost 50% from 2015, alignment between marketing and mobile product experiences seems to be decreasing.

Increasing the amount of spend on mobile marketing is not nearly as important as improving the quality of engagement as users move from marketing channels to your site, app, or other mobile product. The evidence, as highlighted by Google: one in four apps are never used and 29% of smartphone users will switch to another site or app if their needs aren’t satisfied.

Let’s look at three key phases where marketing must be aligned with product to reduce abandonment and increase engagement.

1. Product discovery phase

The product discovery phase is the foundation for all ongoing efforts to drive customer engagement. This is the most critical phase for aligning marketing and product, as the tone of the customer experience is set during these early customer touchpoints and product aspirations are defined by awareness-focused marketing initiatives.

To move from awareness to engagement, marketing-led product introductions must align with the real world value of the product. As product experience and value is defined by the audience the product serves and how the product is designed to meet the goals of those target users, it’s vital marketing understands and is able to frame a story reflective of the product narrative.

To accomplish this, the key task at this phase is to have marketing and product teams work together to understand the primary use cases of the product and ensure that the promise being marketed to the user is delivered by the product itself.

2. First use phase

The key to succeeding in this phase is to ensure a natural segue between the product marketing and first impression of the product. The transition from marketing to product can be as instant as clicking from an ad or direct email to a website, or it could involve going from in-store to a mobile site on the commute home, or installing and launching an app after a visit to the app store.

In each case, moving from marketing channel to product should feel familiar. Where the user first lands in the product needs to correlate with the marketing that lead the prospective user to the product in the first place.

Capturing that look and feel in product begins with identity standards for logo, colours and value statements shared amongst marketing and product teams, along with considering how the introductory marketing campaign will tie in with the related product landing page.

That sets the tone for your product launch, but with both marketing and product continually iterating to drive awareness and engagement, ongoing marketing campaigns and product updates need to be coordinated to align product first use with current marketing language and visuals.

There are two first use aspect at play: users who have had past interactions with a brand bring a bias to the table based on their experience, and users who are new frame their expectations of the product through the introductory marketing channel. When there’s a disconnect between those experiences or expectations and the product, it’s shown that anxiety, doubt and frustration build. This leads to abandonment. Ongoing collaborative planning between marketing and product is your path to ensuring conversions at this critical handoff point, where users are moving from a marketing channel to becoming a product user.

3. Engagement phase

Once a user is in the product, the focus shifts to retention. Engagement tactics drive retention, which is established through an ongoing series of interactions.

For products that encourage new behaviour, self-discovery is the enemy of engagement. This is where an onboarding process becomes the most important tool for establishing an affinity to the product. Onboarding takes the user from spectator to participant by outlining product capabilities, values and goals, while encouraging interaction.

Ongoing engagement involves consistent, worthwhile communication and interaction with product users. This engagement should be aligned with the value of the product so that it is not perceived as spam. Ongoing engagement may occur across a variety of channels, including targeted email, in-app notifications, OS notifications and in-site messaging.

Opening up two-way engagement through live chat and on-site support services shows you value your customers and encourages valuable feedback for your mobile products.

In this phase, marketing has the opportunity to drive bottom line value by leveraging communications best practices to connect with users as they work through a site, app or other mobile product. Whether communicating with new users who are looking to get the most out of a new digital product, helping experienced users reach their goals faster or introducing an unexpected new feature, working with the product team on in-product messaging not only helps drive retention, it also helps marketers become better storytellers during the product discovery phase.

Each phase plays a role

Creating a marketing plan that is aligned with mobile products across each marketing channel results in more effective and profitable campaigns. Marketing and product teams who consider the discovery, first use, and engagement phases will see these results with higher conversions and more engaged users.

You can get started now by reviewing how your current marketing initiatives compare to the first use experience with your product, then get marketing and product working together to craft an even more compelling story across each phase.

Lee Dale helps companies bring digital products to market that make a bottom line difference, ensuring that all consumer touch points in a product lifecycle meet their promise for the business and its users. As co-founder and director of product strategy at Say Yeah, Toronto’s multi-channel experience design studio, Lee delivers award winning digital products, each with a focus on driving real-world business value while engaging users in unexpectedly magical ways.

View article in issuu.com/dmn.ca

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In the digital design world, there’s an essential part of fulfilling the promise of a digital product for a consumer, such as a website that users have to work through. An essential part of the design process for interactive digital media is to map out the user journey and ensure that the design of your product makes the journey as easy to follow and as rewarding as possible.

So what does a user journey look like beyond digital? The user experience journey is the path a user takes when interacting with a brand, whether through a product or service offering. Regardless of the engagement model, the journey begins with a consumer’s first exposure to a brand. This exposure may come in the form or traditional media (print, web, and other advertising media).

In each of these cases, media plays an important role in the customer user experience, and may even lead the customer experience, but it’s just a piece of that experience. And if you’re not considering all of the customer touch points, you may be disconnected from a key piece of the customer journey puzzle, where content, design, and interactions are shaping expectations.

It may often seem, when working in isolation on a particular piece of media, that once you complete your work it is a successful project. However, it’s important to recognize that expectations set with other media or customer interactions that may not be reflected in your work can cause friction for customers. This is precisely because the customer views every interaction through the same brand lens, regardless of medium. One company; one set of expectations.

This is why it’s important to frame your work around the customer journey, taking the customer’s lead in coming up with design solutions that tell the same story and set the same expectations across all touchpoints.

Consider these truths:

1. Customer needs transcend departments, as the customer interacts across different digital and physical media or other touchpoints, whether as part of a buying process or for ongoing customer service.

2. When different departments are telling different stories, dealing with issues in different ways, or following different rules, this compounds frustration for customers.

It’s on us as designers to meet the real-world needs of users across all the touchpoints in the business. By mapping out and following these touchpoints, we can begin to see how consumers try to move between them, identify the challenges they face along the way, and find ways to communicate with them to help make that journey more rewarding.

Armed with this knowledge, if you’re working on a print piece or even branching out into digital media, you’ll have the information you need to design the right media. You’ll understand the purpose of that media within the context of where and when a customer is likely to engage in that media. And you’ll be able to create more effective work by understanding how that media leads to and from other channels.

With that in mind, let’s look at a couple of scenarios where a customer journey moves from digital to physical (or vice versa).

Retail stores: sure there’s a website, but is the design of the in-store experience reflective of the expectations being set online, and vice versa. Does this then hold true for new buyers, for returning customers, for customers who may be looking for help with a return, a gift, or availability of a product. Each of these scenarios is a different journey.

Focusing on returning customers, the media that help bring them back, from marketing storytelling, to promotional media, including email, physical mailers, and POS displays. All of this media has to play its part in the user journey to help ensure that happy returning customer.

Serviced based organization: the primary user journey here is based on the sales cycle; what media does the customer need to see in order to complete a sale. A website may play a key role, but so could a brochure, pitch deck, and other forms of print media. When designing each of these pieces, you have to ensure that a consistent story is being told with clear calls to action to help move the customer through the purchase funnel. depending on where i In other words, where the customer the buying process should greatly influence your design.

In each of these scenarios, you’re responsible for conveying the right detail and information to a customer who expects to move seamlessly between digital and real world channels, if you understand where they are in the journey, then you can integrate the customer’s specific needs into your design.

To help you through the user journey process, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does the media I’m working on serve a customer’s needs based on where they are in their journey?

2. Does the media work within the context of the other media or service the customer’s received along their journey? Does what I’m designing make sense with what the customer just saw or is about to see? With an interaction they’ve had or can expect to have?

3. Now that I have a better understanding of the customer’s needs, can I identify better ways of communicating with the customer through the media I’m responsible for?

4. Does this better way of communicating translate to other channels? And if so, have I shared this information with the other departments responsible so we can collectively improve that customer journey and streamline our communication efforts?

Answer those questions and you’ll be able to not just do better work, but also help out other departments in better understanding and reacting to the customer journey.

About Lee Dale

I help companies bring digital products to market that make a bottom line difference, ensuring that all consumer touchpoints in a product lifecycle meet their promise for the business and its users. Since co-founding Say Yeah, I’ve worked with numerous organizations big and small including Tourism Toronto, Kanetix, Virgin Gaming, and many more. Our work has also helped our clients secure investments and beneficial partnerships with organizations such as Indigo, Microsoft, and Rogers. I have also given talks related to business, technology, and user experience design in Toronto, Montreal, and at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

You can see more articles from Lee on the Digital  Insights blog.

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Yesterday Foursquare opened up its advertising platform to businesses. Between the ad creation and dashboard (pictured above), businesses can now target promotions and see the direct results of those activities.

Foursquare is fast becoming a great local discovery engine for consumers.

With the ability for fans to add tips and businesses to promote specials, I’ve found it’s been great as my go-to app for finding great local spots at home and abroad.

More from Austin Carr at Fast Company.

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