The role of customer journey mapping in personalisation

By Arunima Singh

We live in a digital marketing age where brands constantly strive to tailor their offerings to meet the customers’ individual needs. This quest for personalisation has resulted in the adoption of various strategies among which customer journey mapping stands as a significant tool.

Customer journey mapping is a marketing tool used to visualise and understand every small step a customer takes while interacting with a brand right from the first step of purchase until the post-purchase support. A typical customer journey involves various stages like awareness, consideration, decision-making, advocacy and retention.

Personalisation on the other hand has played a pivotal role in devising commendable marketing campaigns and customer journey mapping serves as a foundation for personalised marketing efforts. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience. Businesses identify the various pain points and opportunities and tailor their messaging and offerings for individual customers accordingly.

Some benefits of customer journey mapping in personalisation are listed below:

Enhanced customer experience: A detailed understanding of the customer journey enables businesses to create seamless experiences so that it can resonate with the audience

Increased ROI: Customer journey maps help in creating personalised plans and campaigns. Personalised campaigns have a higher chance of converting quickly.

Targeted messaging: Creating a map of the customer journey helps in understanding the customer at a deeper level and creating targeted messages for them

Brand loyalty: Delivering personalised experiences to customers help build brand loyalty and long-term relationships.

E-commerce giants like Amazon and OTT platform Netflix also offer personalised solutions to their users. Amazon traces its customers’ patterns and behaviors and offers shopping solutions accordingly. On the other hand, Netflix’s algorithm is set to take note of the customer choices and recommend customised series and content according to their taste.

Moreover, along with the various benefits offered through customer journey mapping, there are quite a few challenges and risks such as the need for robust analytics capabilities and data privacy concerns as well. Also, maintaining consistency across channels can be a tiresome and challenging task.

Some of the best practices for effective customer journey mapping are as follows:

Iterate and Refine: Businesses must constantly monitor and update their maps reflecting on the changes in market trends and behaviours because customer journey mapping is quite dynamic.

Collaboration across teams: Collaboration across teams including marketing, customer service, and sales is a must for customer journey mapping. This ensures consistency and alignment.

Collection of relevant data: It is essential to gather relevant data related to the customers. We can gather important information from various sources including website analytics, CRM Systems, Customer Surveys and more.

Embracing Customer Feedback: Taking into account customer feedback is quintessential for creating customer journey maps. We need to actively understand customer feedback and response through surveys, reports, feedback forms, and social media engagement in order to refine our customer journey maps

There are numerous ways customer journey mapping fuels personalisation. Some of them are:

Persona Development: The first step is to define your customer persona. You need to segment your ideal customer in terms of demographics, behaviors and psychographics. Now each persona will have a unique journey and requires personalised tailored efforts.

Identifying touchpoints: It is crucial to identify all those places where your customer identifies with your brand. It can be in-store experiences, social media, email interactions, website, or even service calls. These are opportunities that help you personalise the experience.

Mapping customer emotions and pain points: By having a deep understanding of the customer’s pain points and emotions at different touchpoints helps you tailor and personalise messages accordingly. You can recommend content and ways to interact basis the emotions and pain points of your customers.

Opportunities to personalise: Once you identify the touch points and emotions you can leverage opportunities to offer personalisation at various levels. This could include content personalisation, tailored website content and messages, targeted discounts and deals, personalised emails and website chats, as well as ensuring a consistent brand experience across all channels including apps to physical stores.