The consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry, valued at over $2 trillion, is experiencing rapid shifts due to intense competition and evolving customer preferences—what they buy, where they buy it, and how they buy it.
To remain competitive, brands must adapt to these changes by aligning product offerings and messaging with customer values. This requires a deep understanding of the entire buying journey and the ability to respond quickly to changing behaviors.
Customer journey mapping is essential in this context, as it provides detailed insights into how consumers discover brands, interact with them across various channels, and make purchasing decisions.
By leveraging these insights, brands can ensure a seamless, consistent experience, whether customers shop in physical stores, online, or via mobile apps. This deeper understanding of the journey allows companies to not only meet customer expectations but also stay ahead of competitors in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
Why CPG Companies Need Journey Mapping
Customers shopping for CPG products have endless brands to choose from. They’re happy to experiment with a variety of different products, making decisions based on trends, pricing, personal values, and impulse. The only way to capture and retain the attention of these customers is to understand them.
Customer journey mapping offers organizations an opportunity to understand every stage of the evolving customer lifecycle.
The Customer Journey Map (CJM) is the series of interactions a customer has with a provider of goods or services over their relationship. Companies create visual representations that plot customer interactions on a map across each lifecycle stage, overlaid with data gathered through interviews, surveys, and other customer feedback.
“It’s important to include quantitative data such as website analytics, CRM data, social media, transaction data, and UX testing to validate and enhance what you collect in customer feedback for journey development,” states Robyn Tambe, Strategy Manager at OneMagnify.
The CJM serves as a visual means to identify the customer’s experiences as they interact with a particular product or service, while highlighting improvement opportunities. After a map is developed, based on cross-collaboration between various team members, companies can analyze opportunities to improve the customer experience and develop a roadmap for change. Comprehensive customer journey maps allow companies to gain insights into what drives awareness of their products and services, what prompts customers to choose one brand over the other, and what convinces them to remain loyal to the same company, year after year.
An added benefit is that the journey maps can connect parts of the organization that can typically get siloed, like sales, marketing, customer service, and IT. More importantly, these exercises ensure business leaders in the CPG industry can make intelligent, data-driven decisions, rather than simply guessing at which strategies will deliver the best outcomes, or which customers will drive the most profits. An end-to-end customer journey mapping strategy allows consumer goods companies to:
1. Access Deeper Insights into their Audience
McKinsey research found personalization drives 10-15% increases in revenue. Customer journey maps enable a comprehensive approach personalization, providing insights into every touchpoint companies have with their customers, looking at everything from initial brand awareness to post-purchase and retention.
A comprehensive customer journey mapping solution allows companies to understand what customers think, feel, and do at each stage in the customer journey, identifying bottlenecks and opportunities in the process. At the same time, it can help businesses to understand and segment their audience more effectively, with customer profitability analysis insights, and predictive behavioral modeling.
This helps organizations to enhance and personalize each shopping experience, marketing message, and promotion to the needs of each segment they serve, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
2. Improve Customer Experiences
While CPG consumers are more sensitive to factors like price, they still crave an exceptional customer experience. 43% of customers say they’re willing to pay more for convenience alone.
By performing a customer journey mapping exercise, companies can identify the most important moments for customer interaction, whether they’re visiting a store in person, communicating with a sales rep, or interacting with a marketing campaign. Once they have a clear view of the journey, companies will uncover ways to streamline and eliminate pain points like complex checkout processes, improving satisfaction and loyalty.
Plus, they can ensure organizations are delivering a consistent experience in the omnichannel landscape. A comprehensive customer journey map empowers businesses to create best-practice guides for interacting with customers wherever they are.
3. Increase Revenue and Customer Loyalty
Using journey map insights, businesses can identify the best cadence and messaging to reach customers at each phase, improving chances to cross-sell or upsell products and services, based on their knowledge of each customer’s needs, preferences, and purchasing habits.
Organizations can use map insights to implement comprehensive retention strategies to boost loyalty and reduce churn, analyzing the reason for churn with end-to-end analytics. By constantly monitoring and optimizing the customer journey, businesses can identify negative experiences that cause turnover, and even experiment with new strategies, like loyalty programs.
Companies can even analyze customer feedback, such as reviews and testimonials shared by customers at different stages of the journey, to find ways of improving customer service and sales interactions, or optimizing marketing campaigns. These insights can even help businesses develop new products or improve existing offerings based on the needs of their audience.
Gaining a Competitive Edge with Journey Mapping
In a retail environment where countless products and prices are similar for many organizations, customer experiences can be a key differentiator for CPG vendors. Leaders who develop powerful, personalized customer journeys stand apart from the competition. They also unlock the data CPG organizations need to make significant decisions for growth, using tools to access direct feedback from customers and quantitative data about churn rates, loyalty, and more. With the end-to-end insights offered by a comprehensive customer journey map, business leaders can more effectively train team members on how to interact and empathize with customers. They can understand which pain points their customers face throughout the buyer journey and implement new strategies to streamline sales and increase conversions.
“We recommend that all organizations engage in a cross-functional journey mapping exercise, regardless of size or industry,” says Tambe.
“These initiatives extend beyond documenting the current customer experience, and the insights gained should shape your business strategy and improve future customer interactions.”
Customer journey mapping can even help businesses reduce operational costs by providing insights into which channels and strategies drive the most revenue and allocate resources accordingly.
Maximize the Lifetime Value of your Customers
With a comprehensive solution for customer intelligence and journey mapping, businesses can gain a crucial edge in the competitive CPG market. Vendors like OneMagnify offer end-to-end digital strategies that combine customer journey mapping with customer sentiment analysis, persona development, primary and secondary research, and more, to give CPG businesses the tools they need to optimize customer experiences.
With these offerings, organizations can maximize their impact in the CPG landscape, optimizing every touchpoint in the customer journey on a consistent basis, driving sustainable profitability and growth.
Don’t run the risk of losing customers to the competition. Use customer journey mapping to take your results to the next level.
