Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Experiences (Part 3)

Part 3: Prioritise, Implement & Test

Now that we understand the importance of the customer journey and have mapped our touchpoints with an emotional state, it’s time to make some improvements – but where to start? The easiest way to decide where to spend your energy (and time) first, is to look at which particular improvement will have the greatest impact. For example, there’s no point spending time improving your “New Client Welcome Email” if you don’t have any new leads in the pipeline yet. Instead, focus on something higher up the funnel – such as a new piece of content to bring in new leads and then, as these people start to convert and filter down the funnel, you can keep ahead of them and work on content that they’ll get later in their lifecycle. That way you’re putting effort into areas where it’s needed most, but still remaining ahead of your customers as they move through your customer journey map. Once you’ve made changes and published the new content, it’s also very important to measure and test your changes. Use tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar to (literally) ‘see’ what people are doing on your website and with your content, and make further improvements if required. You may also find that customers aren’t locating your content, because it doesn’t describe their problem in a familiar or relevant way. In these instances, use Google Search to find related search phrases and be sure to weave these into your content so you’re capturing as many potential customers as possible. Similarly, Google Trends is a great tool to find out what people are searching for on particular topics at certain points in time. As long as it’s relevant, writing about a trending industry topic is another good way to get traffic. Testing your changes is also an important part of the process. Try different titles on your content, different button colours on your lead-generating web pages, etc – and compare the results to a previous iteration to see which performs better. Of course, only change one variable each time, so you can ensure the test is accurate. From there, simply chip-away at the remaining changes with a view to implementing and testing each one as time goes on. Good luck!