What is a customer journey — and why should a small business care?

Let's say someone sees an ad for your business.

What do you want them to do?

Visit your website? Learn a little more? Sign up for an offer? Make an enquiry? Come into your store?

And once they've done that, what's the next useful step?

That's really how I like to think about customer journeys.

Rather than trying to map every possible interaction someone could ever have with your business, start by asking:

What's the next best action for this customer?

Then:

And what can we do to make that action easy, useful or appealing to them?

Over time, those individual interactions start to form a journey.

This is an important one.

It's very easy to think of the customer journey as everything that happens before somebody becomes a customer.

Awareness → consideration → conversion. Job done.

Except hopefully it isn't.

What happens immediately after somebody buys from you can be just as important as what happened before.

How do you welcome them? What information do they need? What is their first experience of your product or service like? Do you stay in touch? Is there something else that might genuinely be useful to them? Is there a reason for them to come back?

A good customer journey isn't just about getting the first conversion.

It's also about the next conversion — and the relationship you're building in between.

Most businesses don't have one neat customer journey that everybody follows.

You might have several different types of customer, and they may need quite different things from you.

That's where customer segmentation becomes really useful.

You might segment customers based on what they buy, how often they buy, their behaviour, their demographics, how valuable they are to the business, or something else that's meaningful to you.

And different customer groups may warrant different journeys.

A brand-new customer probably doesn't need the same communication as someone who's been buying from you for five years.

Someone who buys every month doesn't necessarily need the same message as someone who bought once twelve months ago and hasn't been back.

The better you understand the customer, the more relevant you can make the journey.

You can also think about journeys based on what is happening in the customer's relationship with you.

For example, you might have a welcome journey for someone who's just become a customer; a nurture journey for someone who's interested but isn't ready to buy yet; a retention journey designed to keep existing customers engaged and coming back; or a re-engagement journey for customers you haven't heard from for a while.

There are plenty of others.

But — and this is important — you don't need all of them.

Which journeys matter most depends entirely on your business and what you're trying to achieve.

If you're getting plenty of new customers but very few ever come back, I'd probably be more interested in retention than building an elaborate welcome journey.

If you have lots of enquiries but people take three months to make a decision, a nurture journey might deserve more attention.

Start with the business goal, then decide which customer journey is worth working on.

I've worked with customers and customer journeys across a number of different businesses throughout my career, and it's an area of marketing I particularly enjoy.

The businesses might have been different. The customers might have been different. The technology, budgets and scale might have been very different.

But a lot of the thinking transfers surprisingly well.

Who is this customer? What do we know about them? What are they trying to do? What would be useful to them now? What would we like them to do next? Is there anything making that unnecessarily difficult?

Those questions are just as relevant to a small business as they are to a big brand.

A larger business might have sophisticated CRM platforms, huge customer databases, automated decision engines and teams of people working on this stuff.

You don't necessarily need any of that to get started.

Sometimes it might be an email sent at the right time. A useful follow-up after someone makes an enquiry. A better welcome for a new customer. A reminder when somebody might be ready to buy again. Or simply making the next step on your website much clearer.

That's one of the things I like about customer journey thinking: you can borrow some very useful big-brand marketing principles without needing a big-brand marketing budget.

You don't need to lock yourself in a room with a stack of Post-it notes and map 75 customer touchpoints before you're allowed to improve anything.

Start with the information you already have.

Look at your website data. Your sales. Your email data. Your enquiries. Your customer database. Reviews and feedback. Questions customers regularly ask.

And, importantly, talk to your customers.

How did they first hear about you? What made them decide to get in touch? Was there anything they weren't sure about? What happened after they bought? Why did they come back?

You may find the journey customers are actually taking is quite different from the one you assumed they were taking.

And that's useful to know.

Once you start looking at the journey, you'll often spot places where there's… nothing.

Someone makes an enquiry and then waits. Someone buys for the first time and never hears from you again. Someone abandons a purchase and there's no follow-up. A loyal customer gets exactly the same communication as someone who's never bought anything.

Or someone reaches a point where you know what you'd like them to do next, but you've given them no obvious reason or way to do it.

Those gaps are often where the interesting opportunities are.

You don't necessarily need to redesign the entire customer experience.

Sometimes improving one or two important moments can make a meaningful difference.

I'd keep it simple.

Pick one group of customers and one journey that matters to the business right now.

Work out where that journey begins.

Map the main interactions they currently have with you.

Look at what the customer is likely to need at each stage.

Decide what you'd ideally like them to do next.

Then look for the places where you could make that journey clearer, easier or more useful.

Make a change.

And — regular readers may be starting to spot a theme here — look at the data and see what happens.

Because a customer journey isn't something you map beautifully and then admire.

It's something you use.