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 interacting with your brand for the first time 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 their initial interaction with the online brand 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 diagram that illustrates how customers interact with your company across various channels including online, retail, and contact with your customer support team. These maps tell you where users come from, how long or how many visits it takes to move from one stage to another, what the user’s goal is at each stage, and how each segment behaves.
3 Steps to Map Customer Journeys Using Data
While managing customer experience ranks highly on every executive’s list, designing a comprehensive retail strategy and managing customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle is almost an impossible task.
Instead, a much better approach is to identify your most valuable customers (i.e., personas) and map their journeys one stage at a time.
Create customer personas to envision what the ideal customer might experience while searching for your product. To get a good start, identify recent customers or brand loyalty program members who have purchased a product on your website. Conduct interviews with them to understand the following questions: Why were they looking for the product they bought on your site? How did they search for the product? What criteria helped them make the purchase decision? Which competitor sites did they visit while evaluating products? Why did they choose your site? What was their experience on your site when purchasing the product? What could be improved?
Start small and prioritize the customer personas that are most important to your business. The real key, however, is to use the data you have to map the customer journey in e-commerce based on psychological principles to increase sales.
1. Monitor how customers interact with your e-commerce business
Understanding how users navigate your store is crucial for generating sales that follow a psychologically informed model. For example, why are sales low if you offer a discount code to all first-time visitors? The offer (or ability) may be great, but consumers still lack the motivation to purchase. In this case, it doesn’t matter how discounted the products are.
This common scenario can be revealed using the Channel Exploration report in Google Analytics, which allows you to focus on the path you want to examine. Or the Path Exploration report, which gives you a view of your user journey.
Just ensure that you examine different user segments, whether they are first-time visitors, repeat visitors, or buyers, or create a custom segment for long-session visitors who have made 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 paying for conversion.
You can
Also, install session recording and replay on your Shopify Plus store to record visitor sessions. You will receive heatmaps and will also be able to see user behavior as they navigate from one page to another.
The detailed session history can generate ideas about the pages that correspond to each stage of the journey. On a
Source: https://www.shopify.com/au/enterprise/customer-journey-map-ecommerce
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