5 Easy Steps to Map Your Customer Journey

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Step 1: Draw your customer journey on paper.

Believe it or not. This old-school method of leveraging pen and paper will work well when you are trying to map the perfect customer journey. All you need to do is grab a pen and paper, or even a whiteboard, and draw the flow of your customer journey. While drawing the flow of the customer journey, decide on aspects like…

• “How do you want your audience to get introduced into the journey?”,
• “How many times will you be messaging them?”
• “How long do you want to process this specific journey?”

Drawing the outline of your journey by having these questions in your mind will help you revisit your journey goals and enforce clarity in the upcoming steps.

Step 2: Decide on the entry sources.

There are multiple entry sources through which your customers may enter the journey. One of the common ways through which customers enter the journey is through APIs. You can also trigger Salesforce events straight from Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud. For instance, when a potential customer moves from marketing to sales, you can have that transition as an entry point for your journey.

Any change to an existing audience can also contribute or become an entry source to your journey. Let’s take an example where a customer who bought an iPhone 12 has checked for the upgrade policies on your website. In this scenario, a person who already purchased a product from you wants to further build an affinity with you through a product upgrade. You can consider that as a fairly unique entry event and trigger journeys through which the specific customer can enter the journey as an individual.

Note: Unlike Automation Studio, in Journey Builder, you can allow your customers to enter the journey as individuals too apart from entering them as batches.

Step 3: Decide on the activities and actions that make up your customer journey.

A major part of your journey will consist of various small to big clusters of activities like messages, flow controls, and exit points.

Messages: As far as messages are concerned, your journey can include multiple types of messages and interaction sources like emails, SMS, push or customer service calls.

Flow Control Activities: When it comes to flow control activities, there are various optimizing options available inside Journey Builder. Like Decision Split, Engagement Split, Random Split, Path controls, and wait statements. Even while you are ideating the journey for your customers you can decide on the stage where you’ll want customers to go through an engagement or a decision split. You can also decide where a wait state should occur. The wait state can be set for a specific duration, date, or even based on an attribute.

While setting up the journey, you can also think of the areas where you can possibly try A/B testing customers to know and promote the most engaging path. For example, you can test-run two different emails and set an engagement metric to find which has a better open rate among your customers and promote that email message in the succeeding paths.

Exit Points: The final activity in your customer journey will be the exit point. Setting up exit criteria while mapping the journey will help you filter out and deliver the utmost optimization to the customers.

Let’s consider an example where you are setting up a customer journey for the audience who have abandoned their carts for a long time. In this journey, you can have an average of up to 3 wait stages. But once your customer purchases an item from the abandoned cart, you can exit the customer in the middle before taking them to the next two wait stages. Setting up appropriate exit criteria will not only enable you to streamline the journey but will also restrain you from sharing irrelevant messages with your audience.

Step 4: Determine the data that will be backed up.

Once you have mapped your journey, the next step you should take is to decide on the data you’ll need to back it up. For each point in the customer journey, determine the data you will be backing it up in Marketing Cloud. If your data is not stored or coming into Marketing Cloud, you can add it, or if required you can even modify your journey strategy.

Step 5: Build and Deploy in Marketing Cloud.

Once you are done with the planning and ideating process for your customer journey, you can easily build the journey in Marketing Cloud by leveraging its drag-and-drop functionality. You can also compare the journey flow with the outline that you’ve already mapped on paper to check whether all the components are in place.

To ensure that all the scenarios are functioning well, test-run the journey by reducing the wait state. For these, you can leverage a data extension that is used only for testing purposes. If anything is not working the way you expected, you can correct or make changes in the flow to ensure that the journey is working fine.

By following all the above-mentioned steps, you will be able to best engage your customers and drive home all the benefits that you expected out of your customer journey.

Need help with building your customer journey?

It’s no doubt Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder is the perfect tool that drives heightened engagement and accelerates customer retention opportunities. But to get the most out of this platform and implement perfect journeys you need to know how to strategize and optimize its features. Our CRM experts at zeb have a wide array of expertise in driving business goals through Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

With proper planning, strategy, and testing we will help you build journeys that your customers would love to be a part of.