Customers are the driving force for an eCommerce business, and making them happy is the foremost priority. When there are millions of online stores out there, do you wonder how to get noticed? To keep your customers coming back and retaining them, one needs to put themselves in the customer's shoes and see things from their perspective.
Winning the customer's heart so that they can trust you, no matter what, is not an easy task and requires efforts by the organization or brands. An alluring customer experience with your brand is an amazing feeling, and when they fail, it leads to abandoned shopping carts and bad reviews.
The eCommerce customer journey map helps understand the different stages that a customer goes through when they are making a purchase. This way you can eliminate the poor experience and have a structured organization.
When businesses can't convert their visitors to customers, they must identify the root cause of the problem and map their customer journey for a better experience!
Mapping the customer journey enhances and mends the broken part of the customer experience that your developers might have skipped during your e-commerce app development.
What does eCommerce Customer Journey mean?
The customer journey simply refers to a tool that helps businesses visualize the experience of customers when they interact with your brand. The map helps you rectify how the customers experience your brand versus how you think you do. It will clear their misconceptions and help you deliver better and beyond their expectations.
The customer journey is the most crucial aspect and decides the fate of your business. It does not simply end with delivering your project to the customers, rather it includes positive feedback and review, referring to your friends, and more.
Benefits of Mapping a Customer Journey
Highlighting the customer journey offers meaningful insights and lays the foundation for groundwork, and provides tangible frameworks.
1. Enables a better experience
When you can address your weaknesses, you can surely improve upon them and offer a better experience to your customers. A seamless experience helps the prospects and the customers to stay in touch, communicate and make the purchase. It leads to a better sales cycle and more loyal customers for your business growth.
2. Offers the needed context to customers
With a customer journey map, you will gain valuable insights and knowledge about the existing customers. It ensures a better return on the investment and equips everyone in the organization to engage the prospects.
3. Position the company for better results
With a customer journey mapping, you can position your brand towards better outcomes and results. Around 90% of the businesses using the customer service mapping said that these programs are vital for business growth and deliver a positive impact on the same.
4. Pave ways for customers to achieve goals
When the businesses finally know what their customers are looking for, you can enhance your business touchpoints while ensuring an efficient sales and purchase process. It allows businesses to achieve their goals timely!
What are the stages of a customer journey?
1. Awareness Stage
It is the first stage where the user encounters the brand, which can be via online advertising, social media, Google search, word-of-mouth recommendations, and more. In the awareness, stage businesses must remember a user is not to buy. Rather, it helps customers look for solutions to their problems and makes the target audiences aware of your brand.
2. Consideration Stage
The second stage is the consideration stage, where the user gets the solutions to their problems and doesn’t know where they can be solved. They are at the consideration stage and compare products or services to those of your competitors. Businesses must be able to offer a seamless user experience that is easy to navigate.
3. Acquisition Stage
It is a make-or-break moment. At this stage, the customers will decide how to move ahead when they add the product to the cart while giving the payment information and clicking purchase. It is a process until the products are received by you. Businesses must ensure to make the experiences straightforward.
4. Service Stage
It is a stage where the customers receive the products, exchange products, return them or get help with the products making the process easier for them. After delivery, the customer experience must be seamless for the customers to retain them. Businesses need to offer a simple ordering and after-sales service experience.
5. Loyalty Stage
The ultimate goal for businesses is to retain their customers and create repeated businesses. Acquiring a customer is a difficult task and can cost up to 25 times more than retaining them. Send your customers discount coupons, emails, vouchers, and other greetings, and always ask for their feedback!
Crucial steps that help you map the customer journey
Customer journey maps can be either detailed or precise. Though the level of complexity can only be determined by the platforms your customers use, there are different paths they might take. Here is a process outlined for a complete journey.
1. Set your goals/target
Businesses must know what they wish to achieve and set targets accordingly with the help of customer journey mapping.
2. Building a buyer persona
It refers to the customer data that helps you identify patterns and creates a mesmerizing experience that satisfies each major buyer.
3. Identify the pain points
Considering both emotional drive and business challenges is vital for the businesses that will help you determine what brings more customers and offer solutions that can be solved.
4. Identify Key Touchpoints
Businesses must be able to map out all the crucial and known touchpoints that help them rectify where their potential buyers are stuck and what makes them leave in between. You will be watching this information for a more optimal experience, reduced friction, and better conversions.
Tools that help create a better customer journey map
1. Analytics
Analyzing the customer behavior is vital that will help identify traffic sources, the time, demographics, and the steps of how the customers reached your platform. You can gain experience from both positive and negative experiences.
2. Heatmaps
A data visualization tool that helps you understand your customer's behavior when they interact with your website. It uses color codes for the aggregate data where the majority of visitors click.
3. Survey
When you conduct the surveys, you can gain better insights into the customer experience, ask open-minded questions, and elaborate on your skills that require room for improvement.
Your Journey starts now!
By now, you must be very clear about how important it is for businesses to be able to track their customer journey. You must be able to present to your potential customers, no matter what stage you are at.
Customer journey mapping isn’t a one-time thing. It will continuously help you receive data about improving the customer experience at every touchpoint. It is time for your business to become a customer-centric store and boost your profits. Reach out to us for more details!
