If you are a marketer, optimizing for conversions is probably etched in bold in your job description. After all, getting users to complete the desired action on your website – be it clicking on a PPC ad, filling up a form, subscribing to the blog, or making a purchase – is the primary objective. The more efficiently you can drive conversions, the more you end up saving in terms of time, money, and effort.

Needless to say, every little tweak you make to your website to convert a visitor into a customer or a passive user into an active one, …

Customer journey mapping is extremely popular and more companies are turning to this practice. In fact, a recent Google search of the term “Customer Journey Maps” turned up 5.3 million results.

What are customer journey maps, and why are they such a big deal?

In short, customer journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s relationship with an organization. They are supposed to allow marketers to understand customer needs and address them effectively.

Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, customer journey maps are not easy to design and often fail to meet their objective.

Personas, proposed by Alan Cooper, a noted pioneer software developer in the late 1990s, is a method that has gained increasing attention over the years. In fact:

Personas have now become the new standard and a fundamental part of a UX designer and conversion optimizer’ toolkit.

But, many marketers have tried them and given up, so it begs the question:

Are personas as useful as we think?

The most serious limitation of the personas method is that it is difficult or impossible to verify if they’re accurate.

What’s more?

If only CRO was so easy: find the exact point at which the user loses interest in a page. Figure out why. Fix it. Eat a bagel.

If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’re familiar with the obstacles that prevent this dream from fruition.

For over a decade we have worked hard to figure out ways to simplify this. CRO is never that easy. But identifying problems and figuring out why can be easier than one thinks.

You already know usability is one of the most important conversion-driving factors on a website. That’s why you’re here. And while there are many strategies out there that can help businesses evaluate their site’s learnability and usability, it can be hard to do accurately without the help of real users from your audience.

Cognitive walkthroughs are one proven method to overcome this obstacle and limit bias in your website assessment.

When it comes to understanding your customer’s experience, there’s really no easy way. Many turn to customer journey maps. There are positives and negatives that come with customer journey maps, and like any other marketing research and documentation, it comes down to two things:

Identifying the goal and purpose behind it, Knowing how to actually apply and use it.

If you go with customer journey maps, we highly recommend you keep the two criteria in mind.

The French proverb ‘le client est roi’ sums up the key to success for all marketing initiatives. “The customer is king,” marketers know it all too well. They are fully aware that their success and failure depends on how much their customers are satisfied. As a matter of fact, most companies are aware of the fact that knowing your customers intimately is the only way to please them. But it’s complicated to “really” know customers. Trying to extract that data in a meaningful way is not so apparent.

The struggle is real.

But why do companies struggle so much to …