If you own or manage a business, you know it can be challenging for your company to understand the minds of your customers. It might be you are wondering why your customer spends so long browsing your offer, or why they spend time adding products to their cart, only to close the tab and not purchase.

Whatever your concerns may be, the root cause is that you most likely don’t have a clear grasp of the journey your customers take with your company.

The customer journey is the process by which a customer interacts with a company in order to achieve a goal.

Here are 6-steps that shows you how you can use data to map the journey your customers take when they visit your website.

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Before you begin to create your map, ask yourself why you are making one in the first place. What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it specifically about? What experience is it based upon?

Based on your conclusions, you may want to create a buyer persona. This is a fictitious customer with all of their demographics and psychographics who represents your average customer.

2. Profile your personas and define their goals

With your buyer persona in hand, the next step is research. You can gather a lot of valuable information about how your customers think and feel by asking for their feedback, using questionnaires and surveys. The important thing to remember is, only ask actual customers or prospects who are interested in purchasing your goods and services.

Some revealing questions you can ask include:

• How did they hear about your company?
• What first attracted them to your website?
• What problems are they trying to solve?
• Have they ever interacted with your website with the intent of making a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led them to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy is it for them to navigate your website?

3. List out all the points of contact

Points of contact are all the places on your website that your customers can interact with you. This step is essential in order to create an accurate customer journey map, for the simple reason it gives you insight into what actions your customers are performing.

4. Actions

List out all of the actions your customers perform throughout their interaction on your website. This can include a Google search for your keywords, or clicking on an email from you.

5. Emotions & Motivations

The emotional motivator behind each of your customer’s actions, is usually caused by a pain point or a problem they want to fix. Knowing what their problems are, will help you to provide the right content at the right time.

6. Make the necessary changes

When it’s all said and done, the data you collect and analyze, should give you a clear picture of what your customers are looking for, and more importantly, how responsive your website should be to those needs. Knowing this, you can then make the appropriate changes that will achieve these goals.