A customer journey map is exactly what it sounds like – a graph, illustration, or other representation of how your prospects become clients.
These maps help you to better understand your prospects’ needs and target your marketing efforts. They also help you pinpoint areas where your conversions may be falling short. We’ll give you a template that will help you create a basic customer journey map and explain how to gather the data needed to fill it in.
No time to read? Watch our video overview:
The Opportunity Cycle
Here at Pinney, we base the customer journey on what we call the opportunity cycle – essentially, a marketing funnel. Here’s what that looks like:
In a nutshell, the blue and green triangles represent the buyer’s journey from someone who doesn’t know you to someone who buys a policy from you. The red triangle represents that client’s journey from a regular customer to someone who’s an advocate for you – leaving reviews, generating referrals, etc.
But as you can see, there’s a lot this funnel doesn’t tell you:
- How does a prospect get to the beginning of the funnel – the “awareness” stage?
- How do you get a prospect to move down the funnel?
- What do you have to do to turn a client into an advocate?
That’s where a customer journey map comes into the picture. You can use it to start answering these questions and filling in the gaps.
Download the Customer Journey Map Template
We created a customer journey template based on our marketing funnel. You can download it and use it or tweak it to fit your business:
Fill in the Template
The template walks you through each stage in the opportunity cycle, from suspect to prospect to client. Each stage includes two columns to fill out, with the following information:
- What your prospect is thinking
- Your call to action for this stage
- What will make your prospect take action
- Methods & networks you’ll use to interact with them
- Content you have for them at this particular stage
You might be wondering…where am I supposed to get some of this information? You might not know, for example, exactly what your client was thinking during the consideration stage.
One good way to get this info is to go straight to the source and ask your client. Make a new client survey part of your onboarding process, or incorporate a few questions about how they discovered you into your meeting agenda (if you’re doing Zoom or in-person meetings).
The more you know about (a) how they found you, (b) where they found you, and (c) what made them finally decide to take action, the better you can complete this template and direct the most effective marketing messages to your prospects.
Take Action Based on What You See
As you fill out the template, you might notice gaps in the content you have for prospects at a particular stage. We’ve talked to many agents who spend most of their time in the top two parts of the funnel (the blue and green triangles) and hardly any time at all in the red triangle, with their actual clients. That means they didn’t have any content prepared that asked clients for referrals or reviews.
On the other hand, you might have plenty of content for suspects as they’re just discovering what life insurance can protect, and you might have a stellar onboarding program ready and waiting. But what’s in the middle of the funnel? How are you continuing to educate your prospects and urging them to take action?
Keep in mind that the content you have available for each stage doesn’t have to be long or intense – it can be a series of social media posts, a worksheet, a brief free guide, a blog post, or an email.
Your opportunity cycle (marketing funnel) may also look different than ours. If so, just choose the Word doc version of the customer journey map and relabel the stages to better fit your business.
That’s our look at how to create a customer journey map!
We hope the template is helpful for you. If so, drop us a shout-out in the comments so we know you want more templates in the future.
