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Tracking customer journeys is the lifeblood of most businesses in today’s world.
Keeping a funnel full and optimizing for maximum conversion is paramount. A streamlined customer journey visualization can help your business enjoy the following:
To gain in-depth insights into the performance of your sales pipeline, we recommend you use a customer journey visualization.
The chart is specifically designed to help you visualize the journey taken by leads before they convert.
If you’re an ardent user of Excel, you cannot access the graph because it lacks customer journey visualization native support.
It turns out you don’t have to ditch Excel for other pricey visualization tools. There’s a viable option, which entails installing a particular add-in in your Excel to access ready-to-go customer journey visualization.
In this blog post, you’ll learn:
Before jumping right into the how-to guide, we’ll address the following question: What is a customer journey visualization?
Definition: A customer journey is a path that online users take on the way to purchase.
There are several steps that make up a complete customer journey, namely:
Please note that the steps (mentioned above) may vary depending on a company’s sales model.
Any business owner knows the pain of just missing a sale. After weeks of pitches and demos, the prospect drops out of the sales funnel without buying.
It happens.
But it happens less often if you optimize your funnel continuously for a higher conversion rate and revenue growth. Many small business sales funnels are more like sieves, with holes left by patched-together spreadsheets, sticky notes, missed appointments, and forgotten follow-ups.
To optimize your funnel for growth and reduced drop-off rates, create a Sankey Diagram. This customer journey visualization can help you determine the following if you’re a college admission officer.
As you can see (above), the number of participants in the college’s funnel drops as potential leads move through each stage.
In the coming section, we’ll take you through types of customer journey visualization.
The customer journey visualization is based on the AIDA model, which can be broken into the following steps
A-awareness
I-interest
D-decisions
A-action
Leads and prospects are those individuals who just got awareness of your product. The above-mentioned phase usually results from advertising, referrals, Google searches, social media, etc. The individuals pass to the next stage (interest), once your message fulfil the requirements of target market.
Prospects know that you exist. Now, they will decide if you qualify for their standards or not. They might explore your pricing, company, reviews, and other products.
Prospects might compare you with your competitors. It means you have attracted them, but they are doing last minute research before deciding.
Now your lead got sufficient knowledge to make purchase or not. By offering promotions, case studies, or information that increases your authority, can convert prospects to leads.
To motivate them to action, principle of scarcity can be used.
With help of smooth whole customer journey, you can change leads into buying customers.
There will be high probability of landing the sale, if you move leads fast and smooth in every step. If someone did not buy. You can use the information of leads to stay in touch.
Time has proven that Sankey Diagram is the best chart for visualizing customer journey.
The chart is amazingly easy to read and interpret.
In the ensuing section, we’ll take you through the benefits of customer journey visualization.
Customer journey visualization shows progress through a series of linear and interconnected stages that are aligned with the awareness, interest, desire, and action (AIDA) model.
Besides, it’s best suited for visualizing sales data because it’s amazingly easy to read and interpret.
Businesses use a customer journey visualization to show how the number of potential sales prospects gradually separates from buying customers. The declining number of participants at each stage is reflected by the size of the flows in a Sankey.
For instance, let’s imagine 1,000 people have visited your website. Of the 1,000 users, 600 of them clicked on your advertisement. And 300 users downloaded your product catalog.
By tracking the process over time, you can set goals to have fewer people drop off at certain or all stages.
The top of the customer journey visualization represents the awareness stage. In this stage, the target market does not know your brand and its offering.
As you trickle down to the interest stage, the number of online users decreases before turning into prospects. In the desire section, where prospects turn into leads, a further reduction is recorded.
The last section is the action. It’s the area where leads turn into customers and brand evangelists. Optimizing customer journey entails patching up the areas with significant drop-off rates.
Keep reading because, in the coming section, we’ll take you through how to visualize a customer journey using Sankey Diagram in Excel with the help of the easy-to-use Sankey Diagram Maker.
Excel is one of the go-to data visualization tools for businesses and professionals.
However, the spreadsheet tool lacks a customer journey map, such as the Sankey Diagram.
We’re not recommending you do away with the spreadsheet app.
You can turn Excel into a reliable data visualization tool loaded with ready-made and visually stunning customer journey visualizations, by installing third-party apps, such as ChartExpo.
Why ChartExpo?
ChartExpo is an add-in you can easily install in your Excel.
With many ready-made and stunning visualizations, ChartExpo turns your complex, raw data into compelling, easy-to-digest visual renderings through advanced visual analytics that tell the story of your data.
The application produces simple and clear visualization designs and charts in Excel with just a few clicks.
Yes, ChartExpo generates ready-made customer journey visualizations that are amazingly easy to interpret, even for non-technical audiences.
This section will use a customer journey visualization, such as Sankey Diagram, to visualize the data below.
| Lead Source | Lead Owner | Duration | Lead Status | Leads |
| Website | Website Visit | 1-2 Minutes | Qualified | 39 |
| Website | Website Visit | 1-2 Minutes | New | 73 |
| Website | Website Visit | 3-4 Minutes | Nurturing | 156 |
| Website | Consideration | 1-2 Minutes | New | 46 |
| Website | Consideration | 3-4 Minutes | Qualified | 104 |
| Website | Consideration | 3-4 Minutes | Nurturing | 41 |
| Website | Purchase | 1-2 Minutes | Qualified | 73 |
| Website | Purchase | 1-2 Minutes | Nurturing | 46 |
| Website | Purchase | 3-4 Minutes | Nurturing | 43 |
Similarly, you can use the ChartExpo add-in for Google Sheets to visualize the customer journey using the Sankey Diagram in Google Sheets.
In the following video, you will learn how to create a Sankey diagram to visualize the customer journey in Excel.
The top of the customer journey represents the awareness stage.
As you go down to the interest stage, the number of online users decreases before turning into prospects. In the desire section, prospects turn into leads.
The last section is the action. It’s the area where leads turn into customers and brand evangelists.
A customer journey is a path that online users take on the way to purchase. There are several steps that make up a complete customer journey, namely:
By tracking the customer journey over time, you can set goals to have fewer people drop off at certain or all stages.
Tracking customer journeys is the lifeblood of most businesses in today’s world.
So, always keeping it full and optimizing for maximum conversion is paramount. A streamlined customer journey visualization can help your business enjoy the following:
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