The rapid growth of e-commerce means that the traditional customer journey is no longer linear. There are many small decisions that customers face between their first interaction with your brand and becoming repeat customers. It is your responsibility to meet their needs through personalized marketing messages and product recommendations.
What is the customer journey in e-commerce?
The customer journey in e-commerce is the complete experience from start to finish for the customer, from the initial interaction with the brand’s online store to the final purchase. This includes browsing, product selection, payment, and post-purchase support. Understanding and optimizing the customer journey in e-commerce helps businesses enhance engagement and increase conversion rates.
Stages of the customer journey
Awareness – Consideration – Acquisition – Service – Loyalty
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map in e-commerce is a chart that illustrates how customers interact with your business across various channels, including online, retail, and communication with your customer support team. These maps tell you where users are coming from, how many days or visits it takes to move from one stage to another, what the user goal is at each stage, and how each segment behaves.
3 Steps to Map Customer Journeys Using Data
Although managing customer experience is at the top of every company executive’s list, designing a strong retail strategy and managing customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle is almost impossible. Instead, a much better approach is to identify your most valuable customers (i.e., personas) and map their journeys stage by stage.
1. Observe How Customers Interact with Your Online Business
Understanding how users move through your store is critical for generating sales that follow a psychological model. For example, why are sales low if you offer a discount code to all first-time visitors? The offer (or capability) may be great, but consumers still lack the motivation to purchase. In this case, it does not matter how much you reduce prices on products.
This common scenario can be uncovered using the Channel Exploration Report in Google Analytics, which will allow you to identify the path you want to review. Or the Path Exploration Report, which gives you insight into your user journey.
Just make sure to examine different user segments, whether they are first-time visitors, repeat visitors, or buyers, or create a custom segment for visitors with long session durations but no purchases.
Look for trends, such as specific drop-off points where many users left your site without converting. Conversely, look for similarities in behavior. What page do most first-time visitors view after landing on the homepage? In the first stage of the e-commerce customer journey map, you will start to notice that most of these first-touch pages revolve around building awareness before going through to conversion.
You can also install session recording and replay on your Shopify Plus store to capture visitor sessions. You will get heat maps and will also be able to see user behavior as they move from page to page.
A detailed session history can generate ideas about which pages align with each stage of the customer journey. For example, your blog or story pages may be perfect starting points to educate users. Hiya Health uses its story page to build awareness and leverages it as an external force to push consumers from stage to stage.
Page
Hiya Health about how the brand started when its founders were shocked by the contents of children’s vitamins.
2. Analyze the top conversion path report to understand the platforms people use at each stage
A multi-channel strategy or multichannel strategy is critical because ready buyers do not suddenly appear on your website. It often takes multiple touchpoints across multiple channels or platforms before they make the final click.
People may find your business through a referral on social media. They might read your tweets or browse your Instagram account. Then they may return to your site for more – all of this
Source: https://www.shopify.com/uk/enterprise/customer-journey-map-ecommerce
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