What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is simply (or not so simply) a visual representation of the customer journey, aka the buyer or user journey. It assists marketers in telling a holistic story of all customer interactions with a business or brand across all touchpoints, from online and social media to POS. A journey map can also help B2B business leaders gain insights into diverse customer interaction behaviors as well as pain points, which can lead to improvements in nurture campaigns, prospect qualification, and the customer experience.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping is naturally the process of creating a journey map. The allows marketers to gain insights into common customer interaction behavior and pain points and how to optimize and improve them.
The first step is to map out all customer touchpoints, from website to social channels to events and sales team interactions. Then, for each buyer persona, a journey is created across these various touchpoints. The customer experience should be included for each touchpoint in a customer journey map, including what actions a customer can take at that touchpoint and also how the business responds to each touchpoint.
Why Data is Essential
For years, "intuition" played as much of a role in customer journey mapping as data. Institutional insights into customer intent and expectations were given too much say. Often the result was internal marketing assumptions and goals became intertwined with actual customer behavior and sentiment. In today's data-driven marketing environment, customers expect more finely tailored experiences delivered at the right time. Companies need dependable data to meet these modern customer expectations. Therefore, a customer journey map must be built off of trustworthy data and not insider intuition or projection.
Snowflake for Marketing Analytics
The Snowflake Data Cloud can play a critical role in surfacing the data insights necessary for effective customer journey mapping.
The explosion of MarTech tools has also led to an explosion of new marketing data point and data sets. However, with larger tech stacks, data can quickly become fragmented and siloed, and many marketing teams are struggling to obtain insights, deliver personalized engagements and experiences, and boost tech stack ROI.
Snowflake’s platform virtually eliminates data silos to create a single repository for a single copy of your data. As a result, marketing teams can extract deep insights and deliver timely, relevant and consistent customer messaging and offers. With Snowflake, deliver faster marketing insights, increase relevance, and improve marketing ROI.