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 buyers. 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 beginning to end for a customer, from the initial interaction with the online brand store to the final purchase. It 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 visual representation that outlines how customers interact with your company across various channels including online, retail, and communication with your customer support team. It tells you where users are coming from, how many days or visits it takes to move from one stage to another, what the user’s goal is at each stage, and how each category behaves.
3 Steps to Map Customer Journeys Using Data
Although managing customer experience is at the top of every executive’s list, designing a comprehensive retail strategy and managing the customer experience throughout the customer’s lifetime is nearly impossible. Instead, a much better approach is to identify the most valuable customers (i.e., personas) and map their journeys stage by stage.
1. Monitor How Customers Interact with Your Online Business
Understanding how users move through your store is crucial for generating sales that follow a psychological model. For example, why would sales be low if you’re offering a discount code to all first-time visitors? The offer (or capability) might be great, but consumers still lack the motivation to purchase. In this case, it doesn’t matter how much you reduce prices.
This common scenario can be revealed using the Channel Exploration report in Google Analytics, which will allow you to specify the path you want to look at. Or the Path Exploration report, which gives you insight into your specific user journey.
Just be sure to check different categories of users, whether they are first-time visitors, repeat visitors, or buyers, or create a custom category for visitors with long session durations but no purchases.
Look for trends, such as specific drop-off points where many users leave your site without converting. On the opposite side, look for similarities in behaviors. What page do most visitors view first after landing on the homepage? In the first stage of the customer journey map in e-commerce, you’ll start to notice that most of these pages touched for the first time revolve around building awareness before payment for conversion.
You can also install session recording and replay on your Shopify Plus store to record visitor sessions. This will provide you with heatmaps and allow you to see user behavior as they navigate from page to page.
A detailed session history can generate ideas about the pages that correspond to each stage of the customer journey. For example, your blog or story pages are ideal starting points for educating users. Hiya Health uses its story page to build awareness and leverages it as an external force to push consumers from one stage to the next.
Hiya Health’s page about how the brand started when its founders were shocked by the contents of children’s vitamins.
2.
Analysis of the Top Conversion Path Report to Understand the Platforms People Use at Each Stage
The multi-channel strategy or multi-channel approach is crucial because ready-to-buy customers do not suddenly appear on your website. It often takes multiple touchpoints across various channels or platforms before they make the final click.
People might discover your business through a referral on social media. They may read your tweets or browse your Instagram account. Then they might return to your website for more – all of this before they hand over their credit card.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/ph/enterprise/customer-journey-map-ecommerce
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