A customer’s relationship with a brand doesn’t start or end when they purchase a product. A lot goes into the decision to purchase goods or remain loyal to a brand — and as the shopping experience becomes more and more digitalized, consumers are not only placing more value on the products they purchase, but also on the experience that comes with making that purchase. According to a Forbes Insights and Arm Treasure Data survey, 74% of consumers said they are likely to buy a product solely based on their experience with the company. 

One way businesses can improve their customers’ experiences is by using a marketing practice known as journey mapping, which allows service and marketing teams to obtain a more in-depth understanding of who their customers are and how they interact with the brand.

What is Journey Mapping, and Why is it Valuable to Businesses?

Put simply, a journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s relationship with a brand. A consumer’s journey begins as soon as they become a prospective buyer and continues as they make purchases, view advertising campaigns, and contemplate future purchases. By creating journey maps, companies can create a more personalized experience for customers and obtain:

• The ability to optimize the customer onboarding process
• A better understanding of customer personas (who they are, what they want, what they need, their goals and anything standing in the way of achieving those goals) as consumers move through the buying funnel
• A greater understanding what customers want — i.e., which needs are being met and which aren’t 

According to a 2020 research study conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, journey mapping improved organizations’ abilities to create alignment among internal teams, elevate the overall customer or user experience, and persuade management or other stakeholders to invest efforts in fixing existing problems.

Why Journey Mapping Matters in the Age of Digital Business

Getting to know a customer and their relationship to a brand enables businesses to gain crucial — and previously unobtainable — insights. Having a better understanding of consumers’ shopping habits also allows companies to create a more customized experience for consumers. Moreover, by creating a journey map for its customers, businesses gain several advantages, including:

• Gaining a better understanding of customer expectations 
• Anticipating changes in consumer behavior
• Being able to personalize customer experiences
• Ensuring maximum interaction with customers at all points in their journey 
• Understanding the differences in a buyer’s habits as they move from prospective customer through the buying funnel 
• Using one consistent voice across every marketing channel, from SMS to advertisements

Of course, journey mapping takes considerable time, effort, and resources to do well — especially if companies need to manually plot their consumer experiences. Fortunately, tools such as Salesforce’s Journey Builder can reduce the manual lift required to execute top-tier customer experiences.

Journey Mapping with Salesforce Journey Builder

With Journey Builder, companies can create and edit journey maps in real time. The tool allows its users to drag and drop different engagement activities, like purchases and service case closures, into an in-progress journey map. Marketing and customer service teams can reach out to customers through a variety of channels, including SMS, email, push notifications and in-app messaging, all from one central location. 

Journey Builder further helps brands: 

• Strengthen relationships with their customers via satisfaction surveys 
• Create custom journeys based on certain demographics like age or location
• Change a customer’s journey in real-time
• Foresee trends in buyer behavior 
• Analyze what marketing tactics do and don’t work for specific customer groups 

Journey Builder also leverages Salesforce’s CRM AI technology, Einstein, in its path optimizer tool. This AI functionality allows users to experiment with and test different activities and events within journey maps. For example, a company can test-run two different email campaigns with path optimizer, find out which one performs better and use the winning campaign to reach out to customers. 

In today’s digital world, consumers have access to thousands of brands at their fingertips. In order for a company to ensure they’re the number one choice, it’s important to create a personalized customer experience that reels consumers in and keeps them coming back. Salesforce’s Journey Builder can help companies accomplish just that. 

If you think Salesforce’s Journey Builder would be a good fit for your business, contact us today to learn more!