How to Map a Customer Journey in E-commerce

How to Map a Customer Journey in E-commerce

It is getting harder to get people attention on e-commerce nowadays and even worse online because of all the noise and hustle. Considering all this, getting a customer attention and transforming into long-term relationship feels totally impossible especially when you are working on a large scale.
So what can be done?
According to Brian Solis in his book  X: The Experience When Business Meets Design he says,
“Experiences are more important than products now. In fact, experiences are products.”
“People increasingly share their experiences with companies and products in our connected economy, and we can either be active participants in creating and nurturing desired experiences or spend more and more time trying to react or make up for bad experience”.
The experience of the customer with your company’s brand is no more than an adventurous journey which can be made more consistent and reliable through data.
Focus on the Customer’s Journey, not the Lifecycle
As stated by the VP of E-commerce at Home Depot Canada:
“[A connected experience] is all about ensuring the customer enjoys the experience of shopping with you, that you have the right products, which those products are available when they’re looking for them and that when they have a question or a concern that someone is there to help.”
Although the theory about focusing on the customer wants and need sound great, it is virtually impossible to come up a strong, multiple-channel retailing strategy that manages every customer’s experience in such a huge customer lifecycle. Hence a better idea is to choose the best loyal customers and map their journey over the whole customer lifecycle.

Customer Journey through Maps in e-commerce

Harvard Business Review describes a customers journey map as,
“A diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it is a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination.”
“The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated — but necessary — such a map becomes.”
According to the stages of change model, a person’s success and failure depend on just one mistake from the external force. A message was given at a wrong time or an offer made at the right step can either led the people to flee your product or attract customer’s’ attention respectively. And customer journey maps make sure all the data is straight and help analyze customer’s behavior at different stages and much more.
It is best to regulate and adjust the customer journey maps on monthly or quarterly basis in order to achieve best results so that you can answer questions like; “ how to add more value to a customer throughout their journey?” and “ how to customer can be assisted in achieving their goals at each stage?”
The CMO Liza Landsman of the company Jet, which create a revenue of 1$ billion in its first year of the business, explains,
“Jet’s target audience is represented across almost every age and socioeconomic cohort, although it over-indexes among millennia’s who have children and are college educated, and slightly over-indexes on baby boomers.
“Our audience cares about value, they care about convenience, they want to make their life simple, and they care about service—all things we’re focused on profoundly.”
Personas to a Customer Journey Map through Data
Customer personas should be the first thing you should create in order to know about your customer thought process regarding your product. The task is not easy and can take up a lot of your time but it’s still worthy of doing in order to recognize different buying processes if different customers.
As Silver Pop and IBM Company explain it is very important to identify and interview the recent customers who have bought your product on your website.
Starting small in the start and prioritizing a customer person is very important, however, even more, important is to create a customer journey map on the basis of psychological principles to generate profit through sales.

Step 1. Analyze Customer movement through your website traffic flow report

Understanding your customer’s thought and psychological behavior while moving through your store is very crucial to generating profit through sales.
Google Analytics, through hits Behavior Flow report, can help in understanding customer psychology.
In order to understand the psychology of your user, make sure to identify different types of users. For example, if it is using your product for the first time, if it is just a visitor or if it is returning visitor.
Notice similarities and differences between behaviors of customers. See where they land the first time they visit your website, what is the first they click the most, locate the drop-off points.
Record visitor’s sessions during which they have visited your page, using Hindsight on your Shopify Plus store. It helps in generating ideas regarding which page connects with which stage of the journey.
Another way is to use live chat and coupons provided at the end of the blog post to trigger the convert awareness to action. In order to better understand the way people navigate on your site use Behavior Glow report in Google,

Step 2. Find where users land on your website by analyzing Conversion Path Report

It is very crucial to create a multi-channel strategy in order to optimize people’s experiences. As you cannot get readymade buyers, you need to grab their attention through different platforms and provide them with several touch points through different forums and channels which urge them to buy your product and pull the trigger.
There are several social media and other digital sites where people can come across your product, for example, they can find your product on Instagram,  go through your Facebook page, read your tweet on Twitter before they actually go to your actual website to buy find more information and also to buy that product.
So besides knowing the typical path of customers on your website, it is also important to understand why the customers go through several other sites before buying that product.
Thanks to Google Analytics, you can find this data for free. The report gives detailed information about your user’s path which they choose, before landing on your website. How are they getting educated about your product through different social media channels and what made them choose your website at first place?
If your customer is very regular bout visiting social media sites then you can adjust the customer journey by adding that to your buyer’s journey like Pura Vida.

Step 3. Customize your funnels in accordance with needs of your users

Your relation with your customer is extremely important for the customer to decide to purchase your product. This includes understanding the psychology of the buyer and providing value at each stage of the journey in order to create strong connections.
By performing analysis on the data you will get the information about the customer wants and need and after that it’s your duty to provide them with the offers and content that matches their desire. The customer won’t buy the product if triggered incorrectly.
In order to map test different contents and offers at each stage, you have to first map your customer’s journey. For example try different remarketing campaigns using creative videos, blog posts, and offers. It might be wise to have weekly storytelling email which may arouse “call-to-action” in your customers.
Apps like remarketing Journeys and Klaviyo which are offsite apps and Onsite personalize platforms like Nosto and Google Optimize can help in these tests too.