They say to fathom someone’s circumstances and their actions, you need to walk a mile in their shoes. This is absolutely true when you are trying to understand customers’ journeys, studying customer journey maps, and striving to lead the customers to a favorable outcome for both them and your business.
According to a recent survey conducted across marketing, analytics, and customer care professionals from various industries worldwide, today’s businesses value a journey-based approach to measure and improve customer experience, CX. Among the high-performing companies, 93% feel customer journey management is crucial compared to 63% of underperformers. Also, 68% of these high performers have an employee or even a team to manage and improve CX.
Why is Customer Journey Management Crucial to eCommerce Businesses?
The focal point of any eCommerce business is to anticipate the customers’ needs and desires and leverage that to market and sell a product or a service to them. Hence, from the business development perspective, customers’ buying behavior is one of the most crucial factors.
So, what can be done to figure out the customers’ buying behavior? Most businesses develop customer journey maps, analyze the positives and negatives, and research and document facts, inferences, and predictions.
Some of the distinct benefits of developing customer journeys (maps) are:
- Identifying consumer pain points
- Facilitating customer retention
- Enhancing marketing efforts
- Helping understand the consumer better
Identifying Consumer Pain Points
You can analyze how customers feel at each point of their journey, including what they need, where they face problems, and even where they abandon the customer journey. It also will let you know about various customer queries giving you insight into how you should address them.
Facilitating Customer Retention
A well-curated customer journey map should take post-purchase experiences into consideration. This will give you the knowledge regarding why customers leave, giving you data to base your customer retention strategy and decrease the churn rate.
Enhancing Marketing Efforts
Customer journeys can help you figure out where you need to improve your marketing efforts. These will give you data about your customers’ various decisions and which platforms they tend to use the most. You can efficiently create marketing campaigns tailored to address their requirements on those platforms.
Helping Understand the Consumer Better
Once you are aware of the various touchpoints of your customers, it will be easier for you to understand how your buyer personas will navigate through your conversion funnel. This will aid you in personalizing your marketing strategies and rendering relevant and personalized customer experiences.
Understanding customer journeys through customer journey maps helps you get into the customers’ heads, gaining valuable insight and reading into their common pain points. Your job is to dissect the data and use it to craft engaging marketing campaigns, high converting product landing pages, work on personalized customer service, and more.
What are the Stages of eCommerce Customer Journey?
Here is a ballpark visualization of the stages of the eCommerce customer journey from a practical perspective:
- Discovery
- Interest
- Intent
- Purchase
- Engagement & Advocacy
Let us explain in detail how these stages relate to the customer and your business.
eCommerce Customer Journey Stage 1: Discovery
Here is when the customer learns about your business or a product.
You can leverage this stage to learn about where the customer is coming from, what led them to your eCommerce store, what pages they are landing on, and what product they navigate to. This will give you knowledge about the customer’s requirements and what they are looking for in your online store.
eCommerce Customer Journey Stage 2: Interest
At this stage, the customer discovers something of interest and keeps browsing the product and its variants or alternatives in your store.
You may figure out a way to reduce the bounce rate across your main pages at this stage. Also, you might want to give the customers a reason to browse more products. This stage will allow you to learn how to help customers find what exactly they are looking for.
eCommerce Customer Journey Stage 3: Intent
At this stage, the customer adds products to the shopping cart or the wishlist. But they are still only considering a purchase.
You might be able to identify the features of your landing and product pages that are working to your advantage. Also, you will know the reasons responsible for the potential customers to add products to the shopping carts and wishlists. This stage is also where email marketing and remarketing may enter the journey, notifying and luring interested customers who are not ready to convert.
eCommerce Customer Journey Stage 4: Purchase
This stage is also known as the Conversion stage when the customer completes the purchase.
Here is when you can build a long-term relationship with your customers while identifying opportunities to serve them in the future. You can also run a post-purchase survey to get quick feedback about what worked and what did not for customers who have just finished buying your product.
eCommerce Customer Journey Stage 5: Engagement & Advocacy
During this stage, the customer comes back for repurchase, engages on various channels including social media, reads your blogs and articles, subscribes to the newsletter and customer only discounts and upsells, and promotes your brand.
You want your customers to be as engaged as they can be post-purchase. This marks an excellent time to encourage them to participate on social media, get them to sign up for emails, subscribe to your loyalty program, and share helpful resources. It is an opportunity to bring your customers back to browse and buy more products and advocate your eCommerce brand.
How to Develop Customer Journey Maps?
- Establish your buyer personas
- Align your buyer’s goals with your business goals
- Map out all ‘touchpoints during your customer’s journey
- Identify customer pain points and moments of delight
- Visualize your customer journey
- Update and improve
Now that we have covered the basics of the customer journey, let’s create comprehensive customer journey maps to understand your customers’ needs and improve the overall customer experience on your eCommerce store.
Establish Your Buyer Personas
This one is obvious. The first step in developing a customer journey map is to understand your customers. And to do that effectively, you need to create personas, get into their shoes, understand their behavior, likes, dislikes, affinities, and the reasons behind their actions. Although every customer is unique, these personas provide your valuable input for journey mapping.
Customers behave differently at different stages of the journey. Everyone interacts differently with your business, so it would be worth mentioning that you need to develop multiple personas after ample research of the market and the industry’s customers. You can go into detail about buyer personas for the eCommerce industry by reading our blog on buyer personas.
Align Your Customers’ Goals with Your Business Goals
Before you start customer journey mapping, it is advisable to establish your business goals. All your marketing strategies and customer communications should hover around these goals and help your eCommerce business achieve those.
However, it is not always possible for your customers and business to have the same goals. For example, your business goals might be to sell as many black sneakers as you can by the end of the quarter, but your customer’s top concern might be buying shoes that match their style. Color could be their second or third priority. In this case, you have to consider how your marketing and communication strategies can align your goals by helping the customers reach theirs while getting you closer to yours.
Map out all ‘Touchpoints’ During Your Customer’s Journey
Touchpoints refer to any points of contact between the customer and your business. Make a list of these moments and group them based on where they happen during the customer journey: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.
Now you need to find the communication touchpoints you missed. This will swamp your team with a lot of details and micro-interaction. You can classify and prioritize moments that lead you closer to achieving your business goals.
Identify Customer Pain Points and Moments of Delight
Identifying both negative and positive experiences of your customers’ pre-purchase, purchase, and the post-purchase journey is crucial to journey mapping. You need to determine the touchpoints, technology, and people involved in these experiences.
Was it the navigation, or the glitch in the payment gateway, or your customer support executive was really rude or extremely delightful? All these questions and more will help you gather intel to improve your customer’s journey and fix the roadblocks.
Visualize Your Customer Journey
It is time to go beyond writing your customer journey. Create a visual map of the customer journey and communication touchpoints. This exercise will help your business and teammates take a bird’s eye view of the entire journey.
Various tools available in the market can help you visualize and draw your customer journey map. You can use this map to capture the entirety of the picture and list improvements and additions in the touchpoints. Also, implement and test these improvements, take feedback, go back to the map, reassess, tweak and improve.
Update and improve
Your customer journey map should not gather dust on the shelf once it is completed. Your customers are constantly changing, the technology is continually evolving, and your customer journey map should too. Consider it as a crucial document that should grow and develop with time.
If time and resources permit, update your customer journey map every half-yearly or so. This map should also be tweaked accordingly whenever you launch new products or introduce significant changes in your services.
Understanding the nitty-gritty of customer journey management and leveraging it to enhance CX across all touchpoints can be a little daunting. To help you through, Krish, in association with Adobe, presents you with an exclusive webinar, “A Practical Approach towards Customer Journey.” You will be hearing from seasoned experts who have spent the majority of their professional lifetimes enhancing customer experience.
To register for the webinar, click on the link or the register now below.
How to Use Customer Journeys during Holiday Season?
According to a holiday retail survey, digital commerce will remain strong among households, and the average online spendings will increase by 5% YoY during the eCommerce holiday season 2021.
And with a digital experience-driven environment, it would only make sense to leverage such an opportunity and execute your eCommerce holiday plans ahead of time based on customer experience and your customer journey map.
- Awareness Pre-Holiday Season
- Consideration by Your Holiday Customer
- Conversion during eCommerce Holiday Season
- Retention Post-Holidays
- Advocacy of Your Brand Post-Holiday Season
You have to make sure to deliver a flawless customer experience during each of the customer journey stages. Given that Holidays are the busiest shopping season of the year, you do not want it to become a missed opportunity.
Awareness Pre-Holiday Season
According to Shopify, the most compelling new customer channels include paid Facebook ads of 72.5%, paid Instagram ads of 58.8%, PPC is 56.9%, organic Instagram searches are 41.2%, and organic SEO 35.3%. Use these channels to spread your word effectively. Give the customers a valid reason to purchase by addressing their pain points. Render free resources, like holiday blogs, holiday gift guides, and relevant holiday content that will catch their eye. Corroborate with influencers and do not shy away from paid ads during this season.
Consideration by Your Holiday Customer
This stage is all about making your customers feel that they are making the right choice and choosing you above all the noise. Optimize the touchpoints. Make sure you test your eCommerce store load times and prevent a tremendous bounce rate. Also, optimize your eCommerce store to cater to the traffic surge because of the holiday crowd. Capture your visitor’s attention ASAP. Decorating your eCommerce store in the holiday spirit would be a good idea. Display product reviews; it is known to increase conversion by a whopping 270%. Be proactive and offer smart discounts. In case of cart abandonment, utilize your personalized holiday email marketing strategy to revive the cart and lead to conversion.
Conversion during eCommerce Holiday Season
Conversion or not, this is the moment of truth for your business. Make sure to capture every bit of data or feedback to leverage in the future and improve everything from your customer support to your UI/UX. Make your customer support foolproof with 24×7 service, live chatbots, and empathetic customer support executives. Do not forget to observe customer behavior and patterns and understand their concern while leading them to conversion. Make sure to provide a seamless checkout experience. According to research, on average, around 21% of the shoppers abandon their carts only due to long and over-complicated checkouts. One more point to add to the list is free shipping. It can work wonders for Holiday conversions.
Retention Post Holidays
What after gaining new customers? Make sure the delivery of the product is an incredible experience. The next step would be to make returns easy. 67% of the shoppers click on the returns page before finalizing the purchase. Ask for post-purchase feedback, and improve the customer experience based on that. Attract your customers with loyalty rewards. Post reviews and testimonials on your eCommerce store and social media. Finally, get your team involved. Customers love it when they see a human face behind a brand.
Advocacy of Your Brand Post Holiday Season
Feel free to treat your customers as micro-influencers. Get a community space and lead them to engagement. Make sure you share quality and relevant content that your customers feel is worth sharing further. Offer premium services to your existing customers and let them be known to the masses. You can also leverage hashtags on social media to spread the word around.
Happy Developing Customer Journeys – Keep those Conversions Going!
Customer journey management is one of the pivotal factors for any eCommerce business, let alone during the holiday season. It is worth investing resources in customer journey management and customer journey maps. You should be at your feet while managing the journey on an ongoing basis. Consistency is the key here. Strive to render a positive customer experience every time throughout the journey. If you are looking to partner with an eCommerce Agency, Krish TechoLabs is the best option.
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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
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