After choosing a platform for your business, you should think about the last purchase you made online. Why? Even if you're not aware of it, every business based on online sales has something called the “customer journey.”
How long did it take you to decide and click 'buy'? How many different pages, ads, emails and online stores did you check before you finally charged your wallet with an online purchase?
Suffice it to say that a typical customer journey is anything but linear. A small number of customers make a purchase immediately, and every brand faces the challenge of adapting its eCommerce marketing strategy to anticipate customer movements both online and offline.
So, what can you do to stay ahead of your competition? Let's talk more about what the eCommerce customer journey entails and how to map your customer's path to purchase.
What is the eCommerce customer journey?
Occasionally, a customer will take a relatively straight path to purchase. They will search for a product, find your item, and complete the purchase along the way.
But much more often, customers will be “bounced” between different touchpoints. They will see between 1,000 and 5,000 ads in a single day as they scroll through their phones, check email or listen to Spotify. Then, when they decide to buy, they will probably jump between your website and competitors' stores such as Amazon and eBay, from the Bosnian-Herzegovinian OLX, Oreo, www.mojbrend.ba, www.uspoloassn.ba, www.penyplus.ba and others.
The eCommerce customer journey is the sum of all these interactions. It begins from the moment a customer becomes aware of your brand/store to the moment they finally make a purchase.
Some customers will convert within a few days — while others may need several months or years. Tipping the scale toward the former outcome will require understanding the basic stages and touchpoints along the customer journey and knowing how to make the best impact on your customers.
5 stages of the eCommerce customer journey
The overall journey of your customers can be divided into five key stages.
01. Awareness
Your customer encounters your brand for the first time. Whether through ads, social media, word of mouth or SEO – they become aware of your products. However, as mentioned earlier, many will not decide to buy right away. Some may not even want to buy anything.
At this stage, you want to make sure you understand how people find your brand and who they are. Are they the customers you expected to be your ideal customer? How do demographics, acquisition source and other factors affect which steps your target audience takes?
Although many visitors at this stage may only “browse the website,” you'll at least build some kind of brand recognition. Then it's time to do something with it: revise the target audience, learn more about their interests and direct them toward the products most relevant to them.
02. Consideration
At this point, your customer needs to show genuine interest in your product. They have looked at a specific product or set of products and are deciding whether it's worth buying from you.
Some will try to decide whether your product is a need or a want for them. Others may check the product specifications to make sure the product/service is worth the price. Others may be looking for answers or checking options against competitors' pages.
In any case, you'll want to track which product pages people spend the most time on, which products they compare and which other brands are on their radar. How can you convince them your product is better? What can you do to build their trust in your brand or encourage a purchase?
03. Conversion
Hopefully, your customer buys on your website—assuming the purchase process is simple and customer-friendly.
Your number one goal here is to ensure the purchase process is seamless. Create a simple purchase flow, offer multiple (and secure) payment options, state your return policy and provide all the information customers need to feel supported by your brand.
Customers should know when they can expect their order and any fees associated with their purchase. Don't let any unwanted surprises or a lack of information lead customers to cancel their orders early.
04. Retention
Once a customer makes their first purchase with you, they will ideally become a repeat customer. A positive customer experience—including excellent customer service, on-time delivery and a multichannel marketing strategy—can work together to build customer loyalty.
Keep in mind that even though you made the first sale, you will have to keep earning the customer's trust over and over. Be consistent in your messaging. Inform customers often. Offer incentives or use strategies for upselling and cross-selling.
05. Advocacy
Satisfied customers have the potential to attract other satisfied customers. Customers at this final part of the customer journey are (hopefully) so satisfied with your product and/or service that they are eager to spread the word to their friends and family.
Of course, this is not a passive activity. You'll want to proactively nurture brand ambassadors by creating customer loyalty programs, hosting giveaways, expressing gratitude and taking other steps to inspire advocacy.
What factors influence the customer journey?
Your customers are a moving target. Between their unique preferences and backgrounds – plus their previous experience with brands – there are many factors that shape the way they shop.
As you track the different ways customers interact with your brand, consider how trends like the ones below can have a major impact on the customer journey.
· Social and economic changes – e.g. the recent pandemic. These events tend to spur changes in purchasing behavior and expectations, as both companies and customers adapt to a new reality. With each change, consumers become smarter and potentially more selective about what determines good value and how to spend their own money.
· The convergence of online and offline shopping – “Omnichannel” retail is no longer just a concept. Today, the boundaries between the offline and online worlds are increasingly blurred. Brands should expect the customer journey to include a greater mix of online and offline touchpoints, regardless of whether the purchase originated online or not.
· Corporate responsibility – Brands today are expected to be responsible toward the community. Inaction or a difference in values can shape a customer's engagement with your brand at any point of the customer journey.
· Choice paralysis – Too great an offer of brands and products online can frustrate consumers. Make sure your website is organized in such a way that customers know exactly where to find what they're looking for. Make it easy for them to filter and/or compare similar options. The last thing you want is a lot of disorganized options – or bad page design – to steer your customers away from a purchase.
Mapping the customer journey: why it's necessary
Although mapping the customer journey is an imperfect science, the benefits are undeniable. Mapping can help you achieve multiple goals, including:
· Clarifying how customers interact with you – By carefully mapping your customer journey, you can gain a clear understanding of your customers and their habits. The map helps you see things from the customer's perspective, not from your business's perspective.
· Improving customer retention rates – The map helps you determine when and why potential customers drop off. For example, a poorly written message or one displayed in the wrong place at the wrong time can be all it takes to cause customers to fall back on their journey. By making strategic changes and reducing friction in the customer experience, you can enjoy easier customer acquisition and retention.
· Sharpening your focus and organization – This exercise will force you to put everything on the table – from all your marketing campaigns to all the possible interactions a customer can have with your brand. From there you can determine the health of each channel, who owns which touchpoint and realistic goals for each event.
· Increasing revenue – When you understand in detail how customers interact with your brand, you can more precisely tailor your communications, offers, content and promotions to influence sales. It's all too easy to rely on assumptions or old habits when engaging customers. A journey map helps in understanding and overcoming biases and unnecessary points you may not have known existed.
How to map the customer journey for your eCommerce?
So, how do you actually map the customer journey? Here are five steps to get started.
Step 1. Describe and define your target group
Before you create a map, you need to clearly define the types of target customers. Do you want to engage parents, young adults or consumers with specific hobbies?
Your target group should contain as much detail as possible. Make sure you base the details on real data – not invented, false or idealistic data. Talk to different stakeholders, interview your clients, monitor social media or perform user testing.
In other words, don't build your target group based on how you, on the basis of your own assumptions, think the customer should look. Create your ideal customer profiles using real data you have collected from the places where they hang out and from direct conversation with your target audience.
Step 2. Focus on the main persona of your map
Now you can decide which set of customers you want to analyze as part of the journey mapping process. The map will look different for each type of customer you target, and trying to address them all at once will cost you high eCommerce investments with no results when it comes to sales. To start, choose the most common persona (i.e. the most valuable or largest cohort). You'll collect data more easily this way, plus take meaningful actions from your journey map.
Step 3. Analyze on-site behavior
As an initial step, check the behavior on your website and note the main pages people enter your site from, where they exit or bounce, and which convert the most. Tools such as Google Analytics and others can help fill these gaps.
To be more precise, be sure to filter your data by the criteria most relevant to your customer persona: geographic location, new vs. returning users, devices and more.
You may already start to see areas where people leave/drop off and opportunities to optimize your website. You can additionally gain insight into what your customer is more interested in buying based on where they linger on your website (keep in mind that this can be greatly influenced by how accessible the page is from other segments of your website).
Step 4. List all other customer touchpoints
List all the ways your target customer can interact with your brand, both on your website and off it. Include points such as:
· Blogs
· Social media
· Emails
· Ads
· Browse pages
· Publications
· Pop-up stores
· Banners on the website
· Physical stores, if any
· Marketplaces where you sell
· FAQ
· Live chat
· Loyalty program
· Seasonal promotions
From here, you'll want to list all the possible actions someone could take from each channel. For example, when someone interacts with a blog, they may subscribe to your newsletter, download a piece of content you're promoting, click to another blog – or even request a demo. Alternatively, your visitor may give up on you and never return.
The purpose of this exercise is to audit all the CTAs you include on a single page, as well as links and other messages that can influence visitor behavior. The goal is to examine whether reality aligns with expectations.
When you compare your list of expected behaviors with the data you've collected from Google Analytics and other sources – are the results aligned? How can you better define the purpose of each channel and align your goals with the visitor's intent?
Step 5. Visualize the journey
Finally, you can document all your findings into a single, easy-to-understand map. The scope of your journey map can vary depending on your goal. For example, you can show the complete customer journey or refine only the part where you see the most room for improvement.
The map can cover everything, from the customer's emotions, through their actions, to the roles and responsibilities within your team at each stage. It can also serve as a tool for predicting customer behavior and keeping your team organized and efficient.
However, there are several types of journey maps you can create:
· Current-state map – This shows how customers interact with your brand today. You can use it to compare behaviors between two different customer segments or to discover how customers' emotions and behaviors differ depending on how they find your products.
· Future-state map – This illustrates the ideal journey you want your clients to take. It helps your team rally around specific goals and identify critical points on the customer journey.
· Day-in-the-life map – This is similar to the current-state map, except that it doesn't begin and end with customers' interaction with your brand. Its goal is to understand all their everyday activities and lifestyle, with the aim of developing new, meaningful touchpoints.
· Service blueprints – This takes a simplified version of one of the above maps and then adds details about the different people, technologies and processes that take place behind the scenes. The purpose is to audit and optimize how your team functions in the background to support the customer journey.
It's your turn
There is no right or wrong way to create an eCommerce journey map. The framework outlined here is only meant to provide a good starting point. Once you have a baseline, you can continue changing and reworking your journey map to fit your unique business.
Remember that the customer journey is constantly evolving. Reassess your eCommerce journey map once a quarter or at least once every six months.
The goal is to optimize the customer journey and define assumptions to test so they can be revised against the real state, thinking and expectation of the customer.
Agilitas d.o.o. offers agency consulting services in the domain of developing digital businesses. We provide comprehensive eCommerce business development services and work dedicatedly to achieving the success of our partners, accelerating their journey into the future of technology and sales.
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