Do a search for Disney’s level of service and you will find endless stories of how Disney’s staff (aka ‘Cast Members’) have gone above and beyond for their customers. 

For example…

There are tons of stories like this on the internet. 

And it’s no wonder that Disney became the Gold Standard in terms of customer experience…

Boasting an impressive 70% customer retention rate and 4.7 star ratings awarded by over 500,000 reviewers. 

Your brand can have the best products/services in the world. 

However, a poor customer experience can prevent brands from growing to the next level. 

And with retail brands, customer experience can mean the difference between life and death of the company. 

According to Salesforce research, 66% of customers expect brands to understand their individual needs. 63% of them won’t even buy from brands with poor personalisation. 

So, the lesson here is simple – invest in your brand’s customer experience and don’t cut corners. 

Understanding the buyer’s journey and customer’s journey is how you and your team can engineer the best customer experience to drive people from being a stranger to a loyal fan/promoter of your brand. 

The Buyer’s Journey is all about getting a complete stranger to make their first purchase decision with you. 

It has 3 stages – Awareness, Consideration, Decision. 

Then, once the customer has made their first purchase…

The Customer’s Journey follows up from there to build a solid relationship with the customer so then the customer makes repeat purchases and becomes a loyal fan. 

The Customer Journey has 4 stages – Onboarding, Ascension, Advocacy, Promotion. 

Both journeys are transformational journeys customers go through to solve specific problems they have. 

Both journeys require that you make them feel seen, heard and understood to advance them up the stages as efficiently as possible. 

The better you and your team can do that at every stage of the buyer’s journey and customer’s journey, the higher the chances they become loyal to your brand. 

That’s the game we play here.  

And I wrote this article as a supreme resource to turn back to whenever you’re…

Because without the customer, you don’t have a business. Period!

What it is: The journey starts here and it’s when a customer becomes aware they have a problem and must find a solution to it (eg. losing weight, back pain, etc). 

This is where they do research via blog posts, social media posts, videos or asking their friends/family for advice. 

Your Objectives: Customers at this stage are only looking for information so this is not the place to sell them. 

Your objective is to create ads and/or educational content that gives them clarity on their problem, why they have it and what they can do about it. 

Here are some ads/content ideas: 

This is your brand’s first impression.

And as they say, “you never have a second chance to make a first impression”. So make it count. 

Customers will have graduated this stage when they have finally understood what the problem is, and they now have a clearly defined goal.

For example, let’s say someone struggles with back pain. 

After doing some research, they found out that back pain is just a symptom of a problem. 

The real problem is that they are sitting down everyday for too long. 

And they find that the solution is to have a sit-stand desk. 

Now they have a clear solution to look for – a quality sit-stand desk. 

Now they will research different sit-stand desks. 

Your Challenges: Scroll through your Facebook feed alone and you can easily drown in the sea of content.

The challenge then is to hook your ideal customer’s attention in a sea of endless information and content.  

And brands will need to know how to rise above all that noise.  

This means creating ads and content that stops the scroll and hooks people’s attention within the first few seconds. 

This also means creating educational content that: 

You can do this by digging into a pain point they want to get away from…

OR by revealing a dramatic story that depicts a transformation that they themselves want…

OR by starting your first few sentences with something shocking, even controversial. 

Some metrics to track at this stage: Keep track of engagement metrics such as search volume, open rates, click through rates, likes, comments, shares, etc to see how engaging your ads, content and website are. 

Also look at metrics such as bounce rates & session views to see how many people are leaving your website and how long they are staying there and reading your content. 

Test different hooks (the first few sentences of your ads/posts) and see which ads/posts get the most engagements. 

Over time you will start to see what gets the most attention and what doesn’t. 

And, of course, the holy grail of getting attention that all marketers strive for is creating a post or video that goes viral.

What it is: You’ve hooked their attention and now they’re interested in your brand. 

They could be: 

However, they’re still not ready to buy yet. 

It’s at this stage where the customer is committed to researching all the available solutions to their problem. 

They’ll come up with a long list of solutions/options. 

Then, through research and their own judgment, they begin to make that list smaller. 

Once again, you’re not asking for the sale yet. 

You’re just inviting them to get to know the brand and what it has to offer. 

So then when they’re ready to make their final decision, they will choose you. 

Your Challenges: If they leave your website without subscribing to your email list…

Or they leave your social media page without following, then chances are, they will never see your brand again. 

You must get them invested into your brand as efficiently as possible. 

Get them to subscribe to your email list (& even your SMS list). 

That way you have a more personal line of communication with them. 

With social media platforms, you have less control as they can take down your account or reduce your reach at any time, making it harder for you to reach your customer base.

But with your email list, you have much greater control over the relationship building with your customer base.  

So to get people to subscribe to your list, you have to incentivise them with a lead magnet. 

The lead magnet has to be engaging, valuable and persuasive enough to get the customer to give you their email address (& even their phone number if you want to take it further). 

Here’s a list of common email subscription incentives/lead magnets:

Choose which lead magnets make the most sense for your brand.

You can split test different lead magnets by running an equal amount of traffic (50/50) to the landing page to see which one gets the most email subscriptions. 

Now, once your customers subscribe to your email list, you will give them the lead magnet + an automated email welcome series. 

The purpose of this automated welcome series is to: 

Once you’ve gotten them to subscribe to your email list and you’ve send them an automated welcome series…

The next challenge after that would be to rise above all the noise on their email inbox. 

This means you got to write email subject lines that catch your customer’s eye and gets them to open your emails. 

Subject lines like these. 

And even if your customers opened your emails at least once, you want to establish a valuable relationship with them that gets them excited to read your emails. 

That way, your subject lines may not be as eye-catching, but they will still be looking for your emails because they want to hear from you. 

You create this valuable relationship by writing emails that:

If people are bored, they won’t even read your messages. 

That means you won’t be able to educate them to see how your brand is the ideal solution. 

And if they’re not reading your emails, they’ll be reading your brand competitor’s emails. 

Your emails will also have a lower deliverability score which will then send your emails all the way to the spam folder, leading to lower open rates. 

If you want successful email marketing, you gotta master KLT – Know, Like, Trust. 

This means that they know what you stand for, they like your brand presence & develop a personal connection & they trust that your brand has the solution they need. 

Now, what if the customer hasn’t even subscribed to your email list and they’re about to exit your website? 

Well, unless they follow or engage with your brand elsewhere, you could potentially lose them forever. 

There are multiple reasons why a customer may leave your website: 

So, to reduce people leaving your website too soon without subscribing, you want to implement solutions such as: 

Some metrics to track at this stage: 

Email subscriptions – how much is your email list growing every day/week/month?

You can measure the strength of your incentives/lead magnets by looking at the percentage of website visitors who subscribe to your email list. 

New & Returning Visitors – how many new visitors are you getting every day/week/month? Is your current customer base visiting your website multiple times? Are they frequently engaging with your emails? 

The more they engage, the more likely they are to move onto the next stages of the journey.   

What it is: after going through many potential solutions, the customer is starting to gain enough clarity to make a final decision.

Then, they purchase a solution they think will lead them to the best outcome. 

At this stage, they’re looking for information on how your product works, how your past customers have succeeded with your solution and what their experience may look like if they decide to choose your brand. 

For some industries, it takes longer for the customer to get to the purchase decision as it requires more of an investment (eg. deciding which computer to get, deciding the house they want).

For other industries, it can take just one day (eg. deciding which bread to get from the supermarket). 

Your Objectives: It’s simple. Get that first sale. 

When a customer purchases from you once, they’re more likely to make the second purchase, then the third, fourth, fifth and so on. 

So to give yourself the best chances of high conversions, you will start with a ‘tripwire offer’. 

This is a no-risk, cheap option that solves a pressing problem as simply and conveniently as possible. 

Their first purchase also needs to be so valuable that they can’t possibly ignore you afterwards. 

Make them think, “wow, I’m getting this at such a cheap price. I wonder how great their more expensive products/services are going to be”. 

And to boost the likelihood of your customer making that first purchase, here are some marketing materials you can deploy: 

Your Challenges: a big challenge across any industry is customers abandoning their carts and not completing their purchase decision. 

For example, a customer adds an item to their cart, leaves the add to cart page and they don’t return. 

In fact, the average abandon cart rate was 70.19% during 2023. 

Customers not completing their purchase costs the business time, money and energy. 

This is especially the case with customers who book calls/appointments with sales agents and they don’t show up for them. 

So, one of the biggest challenges here is getting the customer over the line. 

Here are some methods to reduce these abandoned purchases: 

Some metrics to track at this stage: 

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – if you do advertising, then this is one of the key metrics to look at. How much are you getting per customer? And are you profitable or at least breaking even?

As long as you’re not incurring a loss, you can continue to advertise to get new customers. 

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) – this is a measurement of how much money a typical customer spent (or is expected to spend) with your brand. 

Not only does this metric reveal who your highest-value customers are…

But you can use this metric as a way to strategise irresistible offers and greater incentives to move customers through your journey even faster. 

For example, Dollar Shave Club has an irresistible starter set offer where they give you 2 blade razors, a diamond grip handle and 3 shave aid samples all for just $4.50 (just one of these items alone can cost up to $9).  

Plus, they get free shipping, costing the business even more. 

However, their LTV is high enough that they can justify this irresistible deal. 

They expect new customers to become customers for life with their brand after they’ve tried their product once. 

So they can afford to take a hit on their initial profits. 

What it is: the customer has made the purchase. Now what? Do you just move on? 

Well, not quite. 

In fact, this is just the beginning of your relationship with your new customer. 

According to Qualtrics, customers are 2.7x more likely to return after a positive digital experience. 

So it’s not enough to just get a customer. 

You must nurture the relationship so you have a HAPPY customer. 

Not only is a happy customer much more likely to buy again in the future…

They are more than happy to spread the word about your brand to their friends and families. 

Regardless of how Digital Marketing evolves, word of mouth marketing will always be king. 

So you want your customers to become advocates and promoters (these are the last 2 stages of the journey). 

Your Objectives: To win happy customers, you must make sure the customer has the best experience possible with your brand. 

That doesn’t just mean the quality of your product/service and its ability to solve their pain points. 

It also means the support they get from staff members. 

That whenever a customer has a question or concern, it’s easy for them to get quality support. 

And this is super important right after a customer has made the purchase. 

What you want to do is have a proper onboarding process where you hold their hand, make sure they get the best results and have the best experience with your products/services. 

Here are some ways to create an onboarding experience that blows the socks off your customers: 

A word of warning about communities though. 

Many communities tend to drop in engagement due to lack of community management. 

I’ve been to many exclusive Facebook groups where barely anyone speaks to each other. 

This happens because the community creator didn’t do enough to keep the culture engaged from the start. 

And when the community goes silent, it defeats the purpose of having one altogether. 

Once again, when it comes to onboarding a new customer, look to companies like Disney as the gold standard when it comes to the customer experience. 

Your Challenges: refunds are the main challenges here. 

For instance, the average online purchase return rate is 18.1%. 

Some of the reasons why customers ask for refunds: 

When it comes to refunds, there are some things we can control and some things we can’t. 

We can’t control whether someone decides to hit and run. 

But we can reduce refund rates by following these rules: 

Metrics to track at this stage: 

Refund rates – just because a customer makes a purchase, doesn’t mean the sale is over. Stay vigilant. You can increase monthly revenues just by reducing your refund rates alone 

Accounts created/Subscriptions rate – the number of people who give you their contact details (both for a free or paid offer) will showcase just how irresistible your offers are to them. How many new customers are you getting? And just as important, how many of them are you keeping? 

Customer service inquiries – people will reach out with all sorts of questions, concerns, feedback, etc. Note them all down so you can continue to improve the customer experience at all stages of the journey

What it is: the customer has made a purchase and they’ve been properly onboarded. What’s next? 

Your Objectives: now, it’s time to ascend your customers up your brand’s offer ladder. 

You can do this by upselling – selling a more expensive, upgraded version of the first offer they purchased. 

Or you can do this by cross-selling – selling a different, but complementary offer to the first offer they purchased. 

Ascending your customers is crucial for business longevity. 

It’s also crucial for solving more of the customer’s problems. 

Here’s a rule of thumb when coming up with ways to ascend a customer – every solution creates a new problem. 

For example, with Dropbox, the free version gives you a small amount of data storage. 

But if you want more storage, you can choose from the following plans.  

They also have enterprise-grade security solutions and greater live support for those who want to integrate Dropbox into an enterprise-level team. 

Here’s another example. 

You sell kitchen knives. 

The customer buys a standard 6-10-inch chef’s knife. 

But you know that they would benefit from having multiple different kinds of kitchen knives so they can cook all sorts of vegetables, meats, fruits, breads, etc. 

So you cross-sell them a multi-package deal of different kitchen knives at an exclusive discount. 

You may also upsell them on a 6–10-inch chef’s knife made out of higher quality materials such as carbon steel or ceramics – which lasts longer and doesn’t need to be sharpened. 

Because the customer initially decided on a cheaper chef’s knife made from lower-quality materials such as stainless steel or plastic – which needs more sharpening. 

As you can see, every solution creates a new problem. 

This gives you the power to create endless solutions and offerings. 

Because everyone of your offerings/solutions will create new problems for the customer. 

And your brand can be the one to solve those problems too. 

The customer is happier and your brand makes more money. Win-Win. 

Remember: people would rather save time and energy working with just one brand vs having to find solutions with multiple brands. 

So think, how can your brand be the one-stop shop solution for all of the customer’s pain points? 

Your Challenges: the challenge is getting them to bite on your upsells and cross-sells. 

Customers may buy once and may not want to talk to you ever again. 

So your messaging needs to make it clear how your upsells/cross-sells are natural progressions of the first purchase they made from you without overselling them. 

To do this, you’ll create marketing materials such as sales pages, VSLs & email automations that sell the value of these upsells. 

You can also send them to a thank you page with a book-a-call function so they can book an appointment to discuss the next steps with you (or one of your sales agents). 

And on that call, the sales agent will ask questions to learn more about the customer’s pain points and what they want to achieve. 

Based on the customer’s answers, the sales agent can then make suggestions to what higher tier products/services make the most sense for their situation. 

Now, in order to increase your upsell/cross-sell take rates, you’ll want to:

Now, if you have multiple different types of customers (eg. those who want to lose weight and those who want to build muscle)...

You will need to have multiple offer paths dedicated to them. 

If someone bought a weight loss program from you and you got multiple offers and ways to support people who want to lose weight, then it would make sense to upsell them on those other weight loss offers. 

Same thing with the people who focus more on muscle building. 

Again, your higher-tier services have to make sense and be a natural progression after their first purchase. 

Metrics to track at this stage: 

Average Order Value (AOV) – the most important metric in e-commerce which tracks the average dollar spent whenever a customer places an order on a website or application. 

A lower AOV means that your customers prefer to make smaller purchases. A higher AOV means that they make bigger purchases when they place an order. 

So if you have multiple upsells and your AOV is high, that means, many of your customers like to purchase your upsells along with their first purchase. 

Upsell/Cross-sell take rates – how many of your first time purchasers are purchasing your upsells/cross-sells? 

When you increase these numbers, your overall AOV increases. 

When that increases, then you have more budget for ad spend and marketing spend to get more customers. 

You will also know more about your customer’s interests, which will give you more insights when creating new offers in the future. 

Product/service usages – which of your product/services are they using? Are they really consuming your product/service or are they not even using what they bought from you? 

See, it’s not enough for your customers to purchase your products/services.

You want to make sure they’re actually using them. 

Now, of course, you can’t force them to use what they bought. 

People have different reasons as to why they’re not taking full advantage of your offer (eg. procrastination, busy with other things, they forgot about your offer, etc). 

But you can at least encourage them to use more of your products/services. 

Because the more they use it, the better their results will be. 

And the better their results, the better the relationship they will have with your brand.

The better the relationship, the more likely they are to buy your more expensive offers. 

For example, you sell a weight loss offer and you give customers access to an online dashboard where they can access their offer. 

You can see from your end how many people are logging in and how much of your weight loss offer they are using. 

You find that 40% of your customers have only completed 30% of your weight loss training. 

Which means they’re definitely not receiving enough of the benefits that you promised them. 

Some customers may even think, “hang on, I’m not getting the results you promised me from this offer. I demand a refund”. 

It’s silly because they have only gone through 30% of your weight loss training, yet they’re already asking for a refund because they think your training does not work for them. 

These things do happen. 

So one way you motivate them to use more of your weight loss offer is to send them an automated email that triggers based on user behavior. 

If they have completed 30% of your weight loss offer for example, you can send them an email that motivates them to complete the rest of your weight loss training. 

What it is: the customer has made at least one purchase from you. 

Now, you have a chance to get praise from them (AKA a review, testimonial or case study).  

These can be used in ads, social media content, landing pages, sales pages, VSLs, lead magnets, emails, webinars, sales calls, etc. 

And the more customer praise you get, the more credible you will be to future potential customers. 

So you want to stack the odds in your favor by gathering as many of them as you can. 

Remember: customers today have access to information online.

They can weigh multiple options at once and look for customer praises before even making a purchase decision. 

Gathering lots of customer praises makes it easier to attract new customers and lowers the cost of acquiring them. 

So here’s how you can start gathering them. 

Your Objectives: To give your customers the best experience with your brand. 

Then, have a process to acquire reviews/testimonials/case studies from them. 

The happier your customers are, the more likely they are to sing your brand’s praises. 

It’s important to note that not all customer praise is equal. 

The most common type of praise is a text-based testimonial. 

However, these text-based testimonials can be easily manufactured. 

People may not trust these testimonials as much as they would an audio or video testimonial from your customer. 

The best type of customer praise that I’ve seen is an in-depth case study interview. 

The video case study interview is the most ideal because you can interview the customer’s experience from not knowing your brand to becoming a loyal fan of your brand. 

So when potential customers watch the video, they can relate to the one being interviewed and see the transformation they went through with your brand. 

Their objections and concerns can be easily dealt with – thus boosting future conversions and sales. 

Your Challenges: one thing to keep in mind is that just because someone likes your brand, doesn’t mean they’re inclined to give you that review/testimonial/case study. 

This is especially true if you want them to get on a 30 minute case study interview with you. 

That is a considerable time commitment that some customers may not want to give (even if they did have a great experience with your brand). 

So to increase the amount of reviews/testimonials/case studies you get, you can offer them an incentive such as: 

Also, whenever you see customer praise in your email inbox, social media DMs and within your online community, screenshot them right away and build a library of them. 

You can also have automated emails that run at a specific period of time (eg. 30 days after purchase) that ask for the testimonial/review/case study. 

Metrics to track at this stage: 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) – implement a survey in your journey where you ask, “on a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this product/service to a friend?” 9s and 10s are prime promoters. 

7s and 8s are considered passive (they are willing to repurchase but they refer less often than promoters). 6s or less are detractors. 

Your NPS = percentage of promoters minus percentage of detractors. 

Positive reviews vs negative reviews – how many positive reviews or negative reviews are you getting? Check for sites such as trustpilot. Check for any Youtube reviews of your brand. 

Customer Satisfaction Score – implement surveys throughout the journey on how satisfied they are with the website experience, customer support and the products/services they bought. 

Ask questions like “was this website easy to navigate?”, “how did you feel about the customer support?”, etc. 

Returns/Cancellations – monitor refund rates regularly. Why are people refunding? Do your customers feel like your brand has failed to meet their expectations? 

Renewals / Reorders – on the opposite end, how many of your existing customers came back to reorder or renew their subscriptions? And why? 

When you know what works, keep doing it so you get consistent results.

What it is: Who are your best promoters? 

It’s not marketers nor sales agents. 

And it’s certainly not your mom (unless your mom is a world-class salesman). 

No, your best promoters are your customers. 

After all, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends which makes word of mouth marketing the ideal. 

People would rather trust the word of their friends/families instead of random strangers on the internet. 

Consumers want to have certainty that other people with similar problems to them are getting their problems solved by your brand. 

Your Objectives: If stage 6 was about your customers saying good things about you, stage 7 is all about your customers going out of their way to send traffic to you. 

They can do this by promoting your brand via: 

Your Challenges: this stage requires more initiative from your customer’s part. 

They are going out there and promoting your brand to others which takes more time and energy. 

So you will need to incentivise them to go the extra mile with an enticing affiliate program or referral-based program.

Entice them with: 

If you want the most people participating in your affiliate/referral program, you’ll need to come up with something irresistible. 

And often, an irresistible reward will require you to give bigger rewards, which means you’ll need to put in more of your brand’s resources. 

So first, calculate your resources and make sure it doesn’t eat away at your profits.

Second, calculate your customer lifetime value to see how big you can make the rewards – an expensive prize may be worth it because the customer lifetime value could be 10x that of the cost of the prize. 

Third, make it easy for them to promote your brand. 

For example, let’s say you’re a software company selling software to business owners. 

You have customers who absolutely love your brand and they want to promote it. 

Not only do you give them big rewards if they promote your brand…

You also make it easy for them by creating templated messages they can send to their networks. 

They don’t have to spend effort or energy promoting your brand to others.

They just need to copy and paste your templated message to their networks. 

So it takes them roughly under 1 minute to win a big reward. 

I’d say that’s a hell of a win win for both you and the customer, right? 

And it guarantees that more of your customers or potential customers become your promoters. 

Metrics to track at this stage: 

Affiliate/referral program metrics – when your affiliates/promoters are promoting your offers, take a look at clickthrough rates, conversion rates, sales, refund rates, etc. 

If one of your affiliates/promoters has a high refund rate for example, that may indicate that they are promoting to the wrong people. 

Have a look at the 10 affiliate metrics you need to track to make your affiliate programs better. 

Here are some questions to help you audit and optimise any of the 7 stages of the journey.

The Customer’s Goal: 

The Customer’s Attitude: 

The Customer’s Engagement: 

The Customer’s Unmet Needs: 

Other things to think about: 

Aside from the questions above…

What’s really important for auditing your customer journey is you and your team going through the funnel both on laptop and smartphone as if you are the customers yourselves. 

This funnel test ensures that no elements in the funnel are breaking. 

Everytime something new is added to the funnel, I would do this test. 

It’s time consuming but it’s non-negotiable. 

The last thing you want is for a potential client worth $5000 to leave your website before booking a call because the application form was broken. 

And then that client never comes back to your website. 

So you’ve lost a $5000 client just because your application form was broken. 

Now, what would really help to audit and improve your customer journey is gathering the right kinds of data. 

Data on how your customers think, feel and what their experience is like for each stage of the funnel. 

But how do you gather the right kinds of data in the first place? 

How do you collect the right data? 

Do you just send out surveys all day? 

While surveys can be useful in volume, they are very limited – they don’t give you the whole picture. 

Your customers will likely not reveal everything to you. 

They may not be aware of how they felt at the moment. 

They may not want to hurt your feelings. 

So they might tell you their experience was great only to cancel their subscription or abandon their carts later. 

“Do as I do, not as I say”, as the saying goes. 

So how do we get accurate data then?  

First you gather data from your website, social channels, third-party sites, customer calls, chat transcripts, frontline employee feedback, operational sources, etc. 

All of these data sources put together may show you patterns and a cohesive story as to what is going on in the customer journey stages. 

If you want a breakdown of all the different data to look at for each stage of the customer journey, this is the best breakdown I’ve seen online: Customer Journeys: How to Keep Customers Connected and Coming Back - Salesforce.com 

Note: surveys can be useful with large sample sizes and if you have multiple surveys scattered across the journey (but that’s a topic for another time). 

What’s better than one person working on the customer journey stages? 

It’s the whole team working on it. 

Imagine how much easier it would be to improve upon your customer journey stages when the whole team knows what’s going on and where the potential gaps are? 

So how do you get your whole team in-sync with the customer journey? 

You create what is called a ‘Customer Journey Map’. 

This is a visual view, showing each and every single action they take on your funnel and where they are dropping off so you know which stages to prioritise. 

Here’s an example: 

By having a visual like this, you and your team are in the best position to fulfill unmet needs that customers have at every stage of the journey. 

For instance, your customer has an issue with a software tool they just installed. 

A great customer experience would mean that the software team can come in to help them with the issue. 

And the marketing team would know NOT to send marketing materials to them about how great the product is UNTIL the issue has been fixed. 

So how do you start building your customer journey map?  

More leads? More sales? More followers? More subscriptions? 

Lay out your weekly, monthly and yearly goals for the brand. 

That way, you know what the starting point and the end point of your customer journey looks like. 

Your customer persona is a key picture of who they are. 

You want to build one out for each segment of your customer base. 

If you’re a B2C brand, you may have different segments of the customer base. 

For example, you own a coffee shop. 

One of your segments involves coffee enthusiasts who go on Instagram searching for new coffee shops. 

Another segment may involve students who like doing their studies in coffee shops due to the relaxing ambience. 

Making customer personas for both will help clarify your messaging to both these segments. 

If you’re a B2B brand, you will have one persona for each of the key decision makers your company needs to deal with. 

This may involve the CIO, executives, managers, tech personnel and the call center assistants, etc. 

From there, you would prioritise these personas in terms of business value.

So the CIO for example, would have more purchasing power than a single call center assistant. 

It would make sense then to invest more energy into building the relationship with the CIO. 

Here’s what a typical customer persona looks like. 

This map will lay out all of the touchpoints between the customer and the brand from start to finish. 

It depicts the transformational journey that the customer base will go through with you to get their pain points solved. 

You can use diagrams, tables, charts, or stories to build the map. 

On the map, you will include the following: 

Here are some examples of what the map can look like: 

When drawing the customer journey map, I like using softwares such as Figma or Miro as they’re very user-friendly and simple to use. 

Here’s a simple template from Miro that you can use to create your first customer journey map. 

Remember: this is an ongoing process. It’s not something you just do once and then never turn back to again. 

As you gather more relevant data on how your customers interact with your brand, you will gain more clarity on what to add (or subtract) from the overall customer experience. 

Gather the opinions of everyone on the team that is involved in building the experience for any of the 7 stages. 

This means the product developers, call assistants, all marketing and sales departments, the CMO, etc. 

Have regular meetings where you and the team look at opportunities for improvement and what stages to prioritise. 

In fact, here’s a resource that may give you some new ideas. 

Qualtrics did a study where they took 22 industries (from automotive to food delivery) in the US and gathered feedback on at least two things that need to be improved with their customer journeys. 

You can view that study here: U.S. Consumer Journeys Needing Improvement Across 22 Industries | XM Institute

If you had to improve at least one of the stages today, which of them would you choose? 

And which platform/channel would you and your brand’s team work on? 

If you break down the buyer/customer journey, you’ll quickly see how complex it can be with so many moving parts.

So we want to make it easier for ourselves by knowing what to prioritise at any given moment. 

Here are some questions to help you gain clarity: 

One thing to note is that it’s about finding the right balance between meeting expectations and not over-exceeding them to the point where the costs are too high. 

For example, a budget airline does not need to give a premium experience. Leave that to the premium airlines. 

The budget airline just needs to meet its own customer’s expectations. 

Understand your industry’s expectations and work with the resources you currently have. 

In 1998, Netflix took over the entertainment market by mailing out DVDs to people’s letterboxes. 

People loved it as they could order whatever DVDs they wanted from the comfort of their home without needing to drive to video stores. 

A decade later, high-quality video streaming became accessible to the public. 

Netflix took advantage of this by offering a whole suite of movies and TV shows directly to your device and it solidified their success even further. 

In other words, Netflix made it more convenient for people to enjoy their movies and tv shows. 

Do you see a pattern here? 

An important element to the success of all 7 stages of these customer journeys is creating convenience for your customers while producing high quality products/services. 

Nowadays, technological trends and disruptions happen on the regular. 

Be on the lookout for these tech trends as they may reveal new opportunities for you to better serve customers in each stage. 

P.S. If you’re a business owner or hiring manager, first off, I hope this article blew you away. 

Second, if you would like my help to optimise your own digital marketing funnels, then let’s have a chat. 

Shoot me a message over on my LinkedIn profile with the word ‘History’ so I know you came from this article. 

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