Why Ignoring Your Prospects and Clients is Costing You Money

What is the customer journey?

The customer journey or the “Customer Engagement Lifecycle” as some would call it, is the journey your prospect, then ultimately your client, takes when interacting with your company. It can be browsing your social media, checking out your website, even as simple as interacting with your email series or with you on a phone call.

The customer journey starts the moment your potential client makes contact with your brand. If you want to make sure they keep interacting with you and ultimately make a purchase, you’re going to have to make sure there are no holes in the journey ahead.

This journey tells the story of your customer’s experiences with your brand. Everything they do to interact with your company contributes to their journey. Whether they’re interacting with you on social media, via email, over the phone, in person, or even just on your website. Even after they’ve made a purchase, they’re still on the journey with you.

Now we’re not saying you’re doing this on purpose but hey we all get busy and tend to let things fall off the radar. That call that was not returned, an email that was missed or a review that was not responded to. We don’t mean to but when we’re trying to run a successful business things happen.

Mapping out the customer journey for your particular business will help you make sure you’re not ignoring any of your prospects. It’ll ensure that no prospect or customer slips through the cracks.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a strategy that helps businesses gain insight into their customers’ pain points. It helps you learn how to optimize and personalize your customer experience.

By mapping out their journey, you’ll be able to create a visual story of your customer’s interactions with your brand.

This lets you see your business from the eyes of your potential clients. It helps you improve the customer journey so you don’t lose out on any possible leads.

Mapping your customer’s journey has a lot of advantages, including:

• Optimizing your customer onboarding process
• Staying in contact with every client and being there when they need you
• Understanding the differences in buyer personas
• Filling in gaps in your buyer journey
• Ensuring that no prospect gets missed or overlooked

How can the customer journey help you stop ignoring clients?

Let’s say you send out an email series to all your newsletter subscribers. They’ll receive that email, open it up and read what you have to say. They’re incredibly interested in what you’ve written and the advice you’re giving in your email from start to finish.

They’re sold on your services by the end of the email and want to work with you. So far, the customer journey has been perfect, and you’ve hit every mark, but when they get to the very bottom of the email, there’s no CTA (call to action).

The lack of a call to action at the bottom of the email will create a standstill for your prospect. They don’t know what to do next, so they’ll close the email. If you for example, in this scenario had added a call to action that read ‘contact us today’ or ‘call us for a quote,’ then the prospect might actually contact you rather than doing nothing. Sometimes we have to lead them a bit.

Analyzing the customer journey and pinpointing any major holes or cracks in your marketing strategy process will help you fine-tune your efforts. It’ll help ensure that not a single potential client slips through the cracks in your customer journey. 

So the next time you compose an email, update your website copy, or post an ad, remember to view it through the eyes of your potential client. Take a look and see if there’s anything that would stop your client from leaving the path they’re on without converting.

This is just one example of how to look at just one aspect of any business process.

How do you map out a customer journey?

Mapping out a customer journey is an easy and effective strategy to use for your business.

Here are four simple steps to follow to help you understand how to effectively map out and understand your customer journey.

1. Always focus on the customer intent

Remember to put yourself in your customer’s shoes when planning out the customer journey. Your clients are why your brand exists, so you have to consider their needs before anybody else.

Many people forget this detail and focus on their marketing, SEO, social media, and branding strategies without taking into account how your prospects and clients are interacting with your brand.

Start by asking yourself:

• Are your clients satisfied with their experience?
• Is your website easy to navigate?
• Can they get all the information they need?

These are all questions you should be asking yourself! If the answer to any of these is no, you have some work to do!

During our research of auto restoration, performance, race, and restyling aftermarket shops, we noticed that 55% of shop websites looked unprofessional. These days 94% of your visitor’s first impressions come from your website design alone! From the start this may ruin the customer journey and makes people feel uneasy about working with you. 

If your website isn’t up to date and easy to use, you’re going to lose out on money by not paying attention to the needs of your prospects.

Remember that if your brick-and-mortar store looks bad on the outside, clients are just going to drive on by. The same can be said about your website. So, make sure your website looks attractive to your potential clients.

This is just one example but there are so many other customer touchpoints besides your website that you’ll want to look at.

2.  Pay close attention to customer touchpoints

Every single time your potential clients come in contact with your brand – whether it’s before, during, or after they’ve converted – you have an opportunity to improve your profits.

All these interactions are known as touchpoints.

Examples of touchpoints are:

• When your user interacts with an ad on social media
• Comments on social media
• Visits your website
• Fills our a contact us form on your website
• Has a phone conversation with you, or
• Leaves a review on your Google Business Profile

By paying close attention to these different touchpoints, you’ll be able to identify the cracks within your customer’s journey and fix them.

Suppose there are no obstacles for your customer to face. Then they’ll have an easy and pleasant time interacting with your brand.

This will improve the chances of you getting and keeping them as a returning customer, which is a lot more profitable for your business.

3. Create a graphic to guide you….–>

Please head on over to the Motorhead Digital Blog for the rest of this article.

The Motorhead Digital team are digital marketing expert with over 25 years of experience. They’re focused on supporting automotive aftermarket restoration, performance, and race shops. Their signature Site, Location, and Maximizer™ programs will supercharge your digital marketing including website design, social media, SEO search engine rank, content marketing, and your entire online presence so you attract better leads who want to spend more money with you. You can reach Motorhead Digital at (585) 766-9785, via email, or online at MotorheadDigital.com.