If you've been in business any length of time, you know that it's not enough to create a great product and put it out there in the world.
You also need to have a great marketing strategy to get the word out and bring customers through your door.
And one important part of any marketing strategy is understanding your customer journey.
In this article, we'll show you how to create a customer journey map for ecommerce and highlight the benefits of doing so. So read on and learn how to create one for your own store!
What is a customer journey map for ecommerce?
A customer journey map for ecommerce is a roadmap that guides businesses in creating omnichannel experiences for their customers.
This type of map takes into account the various touchpoints a customer has with a company, from awareness and discovery to purchase and loyalty.
Businesses can formulate strategies to improve the customer experience by understanding the customer journey. This, in turn, can lead to increased sales and customer retention.
Overall, customers value your website performance, your product selling, communication, prompt response, and how you respond to their inquiries.
The 5 best ways to create an ecommerce journey map
What are the best ways to create an ecommerce journey map?
This is a question that many businesses ask themselves. Below are five ways that you can create a journey map for your ecommerce business:
1. Create customer personas to help you envision
Before you step onto the journey map, creating your customer personas is recommended to help you identify what your customers might want and search based on their preferences.
It would take time to pick the right way for your customer, but still, it's worth the time to put into for your different types of customers.
A compelling buyer persona helps select recent customers who have already purchased products from your business.
You can ask customers for some questionnaires to better understand the customer personas.
For example:
- Why did they buy the product(s)
- How they research
- The criteria that helped them make the purchase decision
- Why they choose your website
- Their experience and improvement recommendations
The small start and giving importance to the customers' most reliable and critical buyer personas help you elevate your business.
The ultimate goal would be to use the existing customer journey data to drive more sales to your business.
2. Understanding how users move through your site
This step is essential for your business to identify the visitors who move on your website.
You have the best product to showcase and attract more customers, but they still don't show any interest in purchasing the product. This behavior pattern needs to uncover.
Google Analytics behavior flow report helps you analyze customer behavior patterns. But it would help if you examined some of the segments to understand why it's happening.
Observe if they are first-time customers, visitors or returning visitors, or purchasers of your website. Alternatively, you can create a custom segment for visitors that include a long session where they don't show interest in purchasing the product.
Moreover, you can observe in which section many users leave your website without any conversion.
Examine where the page visitors are landing most of the time. Most prominent websites use the awareness stage of the customer journey map before conversion.
If your business uses Shopify, you can use the Hindsight add-on to observe user behavior.
Also, you can use Google Analytics to understand the way people visit your website. Examine their every step and keep them in your funnel.
Another option is to look at a heatmap tool like Hotjar!
3. Using the conversions report in Google Analytics
Primarily, users search for their preferred product on different websites. As they reach different touchpoints to find the right purchase, optimizing the user's experience gets critical. People find other channels or social links to find the specific product.
But why and when do customers use multiple channels to purchase the product?
Fortunately, Google Analytics gives you accurate data for identifying the users' paths.
The report shows the multiple channels buyers are constantly moving on and how they reach your website.
Make sure you note their moving channels and their choices for the order before purchase. If you notice that social media plays a significant role, you can write down this to your buyer's journey. You can observe the social data for later usage.
Shopify users can easily find the Google Data Studio report to find the analysis course to help find the metrics that lead to a sale.
You can see the average session any user takes on before making a purchase and how many days it takes to purchase from the average point of view.
Another option is adding a 'how did you hear about us' survey on, for example, the thank you page. You can learn more about this here!
4. Create a focus group of your ideal customer
Focus group plays an important role in the ecommerce customer journey. A Focus group typically defines the small group of people you share ideas and questions about the product, service, or business.
You may question yourself, why are focus groups important?
Focus groups can give you valuable information and data about your business. The information and data collection is important as it helps you build meaningful strategies.
Let's find out the stages of creating a focus group:
- Pick your topic for discussion. Don't just elaborate on the topics. Take a few cases to discuss within the shortest possible time.
- Identify your questionnaire. After the topic selection, pick some questions to collect the necessary information and data.
- Identify the group's questionnaire. Right after selecting your questionnaire, organize them on the focus group questionnaire.
- Appoint participants. This could be a challenging task, but reach out to existing customers, publish your purpose on social media, promote through ads and offer incentives to collect participants.
- Supply the consent form. Before starting the discussion, you can inform the participant what your purpose is and provide a handout. The handout must contain the objective, participant's rights, detect compensation, event's contact information, and participant's sign area.
- Introduce each other for discussion. Have all the participants introduced to each other and ask them if they have any insights regarding your product information.
- Ask questions, and hear everyone. Ask your questions and give your insight, take feedback from the participants and let them ask the question to each other.
- Meeting time. Set an ideal time for the meeting, for example, 45 minutes. If the discussion is too long, it may create resentful behavior from the participant.
5. Identifying the customers' goal and pain point
Pain points are the obstacles to your business, and you need to identify and recover from them. It would be best to understand what the customers want to achieve.
Take the survey or interview different customer groups, get feedback from users, study email for customer support, identify customer questions, and use the analytics tool to gather information to identify the customers' goals and reduce the pain points.
Another great tip is using the 1- and 2-star reviews tactic (you can learn more about that here).
4 tactics to improve the customer journey experience
Research shows that about 75% of companies identify their ultimate objective of improving their business to enhance customer experience.
So, improved customer experience is one of the requirements to develop your business.
Let's go over a few great tips and tactics for an improved customer journey experience:
1. Understand your customer and business
You can bring some customers in front who regularly provide service for your company.
If the organization or the company knows how to handle customers' issues, they need to identify and connect with the users and help them understand the situation.
You can create segments and personas or profiles of every customer to give them a name and personality, such as Julie, 24 years old and a top contributor.
Focus on your prospective customers and the experience you're providing to them. This will ultimately increase recommendations, lower churn, and create a profitable business.
2. Setting up analytics and knowing how customers respond
Tracking user behavior while visitors land on your webpage is the most used function among many reputed business organizations.
So, you can set up analytics to find out what's your customer behavior while choosing to purchase a product.
The tracking gives you a bonus of observing what customers say against what they can do.
3. Train up your client service and support team
Training your client service and support team lets you define the standard for your customer satisfaction level.
When you train up your client service and support team, your sales, support, and marketing team deliver excellent help.
But your whole team needs to have product knowledge for dealing with customers and soft skills for providing better and faster customer support.
Moreover, AI chatbots can help you elevate customer support as the technology improves. Chatbots deal with automated queries and answer customers' questionnaires instantly.
So, you don't need to get worried about collecting users' information.
4. Social proof makes a business more trustworthy
This is the most used function in many popular ecommerce websites. The social proof provides a more solid build to your business.
As prospective customers watch the previous customers' feedback, it influences the new customers for conversion.
Why do you need an ecommerce customer journey map?
Statistics show that B2B customer makes their purchase based on the previous customer approaches, such as their concerns, wants, and requirements. So, customer journey mapping is the key here.
If you're not convinced yet that you need one, let's go over a few more reasons now:
1. Helps optimize the customer onboarding process
The customer onboarding process is the post-product purchasing scene that leads new users to a product or service that shows how to use the product and get the product's overall value.
Customer journey mapping helps identify every step of your customer and optimizes the onboarding process to introduce the product to customers in concrete detail.
The onboarding process is the initial stage of establishing good relations with new customers and helps them stay with the company for a long time.
Let's look at the significance of customers' onboarding process:
- Customer lifetime value. The customer onboarding process helps increase the customer's lifetime value. Lifetime value explains a customer's total time during the service with your brand.
- Reduces churn. Churn measures the amount of customers' data, accounts, contracts, etc., that has been lost over time. As the customer gets guidance and support, the optimized onboarding process helps to reduce churn.
- Permanent customers. New customers become more fascinated to purchase the products and become permanent or returning customers for an optimized onboarding process.
- Top referral source. The onboarding process makes the customer a leading referral source because of your quality product and service. They share their experience over various social networks.
2. Improves buyer’s journey design and conversion
The buyer's journey defines the ways buyers purchase products. Customers go through some steps to buy the product, including awareness, interest, consideration, and decision.
The customer journey map includes customers' interest in a specific product, consideration, and decision to purchase the expected product broadly. So, this immediately helps create the improved buyer's design and leads to conversion.
The buyer's journey includes four stages. Let's check out the points below:
- Awareness. The first step of the buyer's journey is awareness. This journey consists of the customers' issue of selecting a specific product. Buyer finds the problem, and when they discover the right product, they see it as the solution to their issue.
- Interest. At this point, the buyer asks questions and researches over their asking, such as reading articles and searching on Google to find information.
- Consideration. This stage is the most essential. The buyer already has the diagnosis and explores the options to solve their problem. They try to find the solution here.
- Decision. It's the decision time. The buyers are aware of their problem and their solution. The buyer is all ready to purchase the product. But it's still hanging there and might get canceled by the customer if any defect is found in the product.
3. Assists in exceeding customer expectations
Customers tend to purchase the most demanding products. The customer journey mapping helps you know what customer demands purchasing specific products.
Also, journey mapping assists you in observing all the steps of customers, which product they rapidly visit, and helps you arrange the product in customers' demand.
You can focus on the below points to improve the expectations of your customers:
- Efficient service at first. We may have used many companies' services and returned to use the service again. Why does it happen? One word; efficient and quality service. Most companies provide efficient service while maintaining quality above anything else.
- Connect with customers. Most companies use different communication systems, such as chatbots and social networking websites, to connect with customers to get their feedback.
4. Helps in understanding the differences in buyer personas
The buyer persona expresses the fictional illustration of the ideal or target audience.
With a clear picture of whom you're marketing to, improving the effective and targeted content tells you the buyer's goals and challenges.
Customer journey mapping explains who your ideal customers are, the challenges customers face when purchasing, and their decisions based on other purchases. It helps you to understand the buyer persona in a more detailed manner.
The fact is, you need to know which marketing and selling process will be effective for sale.
Let's go through some points of importance for the buyer's persona:
- Analyze your buyer personas. The personas mainly start with research. If you know who most of your clients are, take a look, and focus on the existing customer and whom you would like to work with in the upcoming days.
- Focus on goals and challenges. Offer buyers the marketing content and sales service that makes them ease and understand the service. Focus on customers' demands and find their requirements to provide a solution.
5. Assisting plans and reducing pain points for the future
To develop customers' product purchasing journey, you need to understand the customers' situation and their troubles. The prospective customer may face specific issues while purchasing products. This is called the pain point.
As a customer journey map shows how buyers perform in every purchase, it allows you to point out the pain points and execute effective plans for your customers.
Understand the goals; identify the touchpoints and engagements of your customer. List and plan some of your findings and insights that you have gained.
- Pain points. What are the issues customers face? Observe if they want to see it improved. Customers may face problems purchasing products, inquiring about their issues, and finding out their troubles.
- Emotional reaction. What are the processes that make customers satisfied? What kinds of elements would make them happy? Find the satisfaction factors that customers find helpful while purchasing and apply the factors to make customers happy.
- The objective of the customer. What are their goals? What do they want to achieve? Please find out the product and service customers are willing to purchase and their purposes in buying products. Keep tracking their objectives.
Conclusion
That's all!
As you can see now, the ecommerce customer journey map is an essential part of understanding the target audience and customer experience.
Focusing on better service will help you hold and gain customers and bring more leads, drives, and sales.
If you have any questions, don't forget to leave them in the comments below!
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