A customer digital journey covers the connected online touchpoints a customer experiences, from initial brand awareness to the final purchase and beyond. It encompasses every virtual possibility, from websites to social media, emails, and mobile apps, highlighting the critical brand interactions that influence the decision-making process.
This article provides a broad overview of digital customer journey mapping, a contemporary tactic that generates incredible insights and segment opportunities. Using AI-enhanced mapping tools and data analytics, customer journey mapping identifies obstructive and favorable touchpoints impacting customer experiences. Moreover, it rates the brand’s message personalization, website design, SEO-centricity, and other internet components (that underlie touchpoints) on accelerating or weighing on customer motivation.
Finally, the story is incomplete unless it covers the six crucial stages of the customer journey digital transformation – awareness, consideration (or interest), conviction, buying, repeat buying (retention or loyalty), and brand ambassadorship (advocacy). Unfortunately, we’ll discover that many journeys derail before the loyalty phase, sometimes with disastrous ROI consequences.
What is a digital customer journey?
Following the definition above, a digital customer journey includes customers interacting with several digital touchpoints to further their interest in brand commitment as a solution, ending in a pledge of long-term loyalty. It generally involves a zigzag pattern of:
- Darting in and out of websites and social media
- Opening emails and apps
- Moving between computers and mobile devices
Tracking customers’ digital actions, feelings, and thoughts related to the above continues until consumers buy their last item. Termination generally signifies one of two dynamics:
- Churn (abandoning the ship for competitive brand): For example:
- Die-hard Adidas users unexpectedly switch to New Balance.
- This can develop into a severe strategic worry if it gains momentum.
- Loyal customers growing out of the product category: For example:
- Teens who use a branded online maths education app to upgrade high school skills pass the SATs and move on to college.
- Under these circumstances, termination frequently transforms into brand ambassadorship as the leavers influence emerging teens to take the same education route.
Digital journeys that run smoothly between touchpoints eventually merge with consolidated customer loyalty and retention, establishing a profitable value proposition that doesn’t require substantial investment (relative to onboarding prospects as first-time buyers.). On the other hand, marketing strategies containing obstructive touchpoints (i.e., converting to brand-induced pain points) derail journeys prematurely, costing companies an arm and a leg. To find out more, read on.
Why are digital customer journey maps important for digital marketers?
When one clears all the noise around a digital marketing strategy, the primary objective is to address customer pain points more effectively and memorably than any competitor and still make a profit. Many B2C and B2B marketers assume their audiences know their pain points when, in reality, they don’t always. In other words, customers are aware that somehow there’s a gap, a need, but why they feel it escapes them.
So, the opportunity exists to connect your brand to newly highlighted pain points, create awareness, and promote your value proposition as the best solution. As strange as this may sound, just saying it when nobody else is establishes a meaningful difference.
For example:
- Coca-Cola identified its brand as putting a spring back in your step (targeting consumers feeling fatigued or rundown), promoting an ice-cold Coke as “The Pause That Refreshes.” The slogan held the high ground as an enduring differentiator for decades.
- Similarly, Nike’s “Just Do It” connected its brand as the #1 solution for people feeling hesitant or fearful of pursuing ambitious goals, lacking self-empowerment, and looking for a release from being in a rut.
- These slogans (combined with imagery) created market leadership through a pain point connection in the audience’s minds and hearts.
- In short, if personalizing your brand as described resonates with the audience, it will create a meaningful difference despite competitors’ relative pricing, product, and distribution sameness.
How bad are obstructive touchpoints, really?
Dysfunctional touchpoints restrict CX’s progression to brand loyalty and ambassadorship. According to Paddle, quoting a Forbes report, acquiring new customers versus retaining the ones you have is likely to cost between 5 and 25 times more.
So, is it true that touchpoints frequently go rogue? Consider some typical examples:
- Faulty chatbots constantly irritate your website audience, resulting in a high bounce rate.
- Scathing reviews of a company’s malfunctioning call center (such as the following) disengage prospects in the blink of an eye:
- Employing rude or impatient agents.
- Regular routing to the wrong agents.
- Queuing callers for an hour or more without periodic updates on progress.
- A technical glitch at checkout fails to recognize a promotional discount. The net result is customers, one after another, abandoning the cart.
- Incompetent online technical support kills the sale every time.
- A relatively inflexible return policy
Several problematic interactions may threaten the CX daily. That’s frightening when one considers that it takes only one repetitively defective touchpoint to upset the entire apple cart. Covering touchpoints from A to Z should involve a methodology that strives to convert prospects to first-time buyers and the latter to brand loyalists in a smooth, uninterrupted process. I propose that digital journey mapping is the go-to defense primed to detect the bad apples so you can minimize or entirely erase them from customers’ experiences.
Digital journey mapping tools
Imagine tracking a representative sample of customers zipping between touchpoints, moving offline, back online, and offline again several times an hour or daily on a manual system. With the internet at the forefront of our lifestyles, digital AI-powered software offered by companies like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Sogolytics can do it for you substantially more accurately and in a fraction of human time.
Their connection to sophisticated data analytics generates essential insights into what’s working in your favor and what’s not in real-time. Thus, these innovative technologies with language and sensory algorithms disallow negative customer interactions to gain traction and blemish your value proposition at any point in the six stages of the customer’s digital journey. See more on this below.
The six stages of the digital customer journey
Customers’ digital and non-digital journeys on a brand’s railroad involve traveling through distinct stages, one leading to another in a natural progression. In this sense, marketers are traffic controllers, ensuring seamless passage throughout by removing threatening obstructions from derailing CXs. The journey stages are as follows (in sequential order)
1. Awareness – This describes prospects realizing there are physical, emotional, or cognitive pain points in their lifestyles and connecting your brand as one of the candidates to resolve them. Much depends on a target segment interacting with at least one of the following:
- Social media PPC ads
- The front page of popular Google searches (based on your SEO competency)
- Word-of-mouth recommendations
- Other promotional initiatives (such as PR articles)
The absence of these touchpoints indicates that arriving at first base is highly unlikely.
2. Consideration (or interest) – Here, your messages and content engagement leap to the forefront, creating or extinguishing prospect interest after attracting audience attention. If successful, it’s a step up from awareness, placing your brand on a candidate shortlist.
3. Conviction – Defines when customers decide your brand is the only choice, convinced it holds the solution to their pain. Reaching this juncture often involves:
- A back and forth with chatbots and live agents in calling centers
- Perusing website services pages
- Scanning customer reviews online
All these interactions create a network of touchpoints carrying the customer to the buying cart with momentum.
4. Buying for the first time – This critical brand test frequently implodes marketer’s best-laid strategies. Unless you’re extra-vigilant, any number of things can go wrong. Like what?
- A faulty buy basket and payment process
- Slow delivery
- Difficult-to-follow instructions
- Perceived benefits do not match promises
- Subpar service packages around the product (e.g., warranties and after-sales support)
5. Repeat buying (retention or loyalty) – If you can pass the “buy for the first time” test with flying colors, you’re off to the races. According to reliable research, loyal customers (versus brand newbies) typically:
- Spend 31% more per purchase (indicating a willingness to pay higher prices)
- Purchase the brand 64% more frequently
- Spend 67% more overall
When entering this stage, your only responsibility is to ensure unexpected disruptions don’t interfere with the brand trust you’ve built over the journey. Failure to do so will lead to replacing lost customer loyalty (a significantly more costly situation as we have highlighted above).
6. Brand ambassadorship – This is undoubtedly the most credible and resilient driver of your brand reputation. Why? Aside from energizing sales revenue, consistent repeat buyers are primary word-of-mouth brand advocates. According to a Nielsen study, 92% of consumers trust friends and family recommendations above all else in the promotional arena as an influence on their purchasing decisions. touchpoints that lose this customer category end with a double whammy hit to the bottom line – something to avoid at all costs.
How to optimize the digital customer journey
Examples of companies that exemplify customer journey digital marketing at its best are Netflix, Amazon, TikTok, Apple, and Microsoft. How do we know this? They’re market leaders demonstrating the most engaging touchpoints with incredible ambassador numbers promoting their brands. It signifies they have minimized the negative touchpoints and churn from their horizons and capitalized on those that connect to customers as robust pain point solutions. For example:
Google’s value proposition is providing people with data access more accurately, seamlessly, and quickly than competitors. How?
- By presenting its captured audience with a far-reaching AI-centric search engine that users rely on to find answers to almost any question that pops up instantly, no matter where its members are inquiring from.
- The company examined every touchpoint, from generating relevant content to navigating the internet efficiently, staying abreast of current events via news aggregation, personalized search results, and more.
- Getting to the top in this highly complex space (and staying there) involved technology innovations, such as rating sites on keywords aside from their content value.
- Many businesses hang on to Google’s coattails, following its guidelines to emerge as solutions for consumers looking to resolve pressing needs.
- One might say Google is the ruler of the pain point resolution arena for thousands of eCommerce businesses that rely on its algorithms to take them to SEO heaven.
That’s not to say Google has no obstructive touchpoints among its several verticals (like Google Maps or Google Docs). However, the operating teams within the company constantly monitor every performance aspect, looking for insightful metrics and ways to bypass or minimize these pitfalls.
They emerge triumphant most of the time. The Google lesson is knowing your customer from end to end has no substitute. Journey mapping is the tool for realizing encouraging results and establishing customer experiences that bolster customer retention and minimize churn.
Ready to start mapping?
Sogolytics is at the forefront of customer journey digital transformation and strategies to develop brand loyalists. Its software solutions produce results in a fraction of HR time, providing a sound overview that covers every digital touchpoint, no matter how dizzying the zigzagging turns out to be.
Talk to our team today for a no-obligation journey about your digital customer journey mapping.
FAQs
Q: What is a digital customer journey?
A: A customer digital journey covers the connected online Touchpoints a customer experiences, from initial brand awareness to the final purchase and beyond (see more below). It encompasses all digital Touchpoints like websites, social media, emails, and mobile apps, where each interaction influences customers’ decision-making process.
Q: How does digital transformation affect the customer journey?
A: It takes the brand through critical journey stages – awareness, consideration (or interest), conviction, buying, repeat buying (retention or loyalty), and brand ambassadorship (advocacy). Progressing through them without obstruction has different ROI consequences. Early derailment (i.e., before loyalty) can have a negative impact.
Q: Why is customer journey mapping important?
A: It creates the opportunity to connect your brand to specific pain points, create awareness, and promote your value proposition as the best solution.
