What is ecommerce customer journey mapping? How is it essential?
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”– Bill Gates
This line says it all. Your unsatisfied or unhappy customers show you the right path to improving and growing your online business.
Every business revolves around its customers, similarly an ecommerce business as well. The motivation behind a product or a business is its end-users. So, when this one facet is important like anything, then obviously a business ought to pay attention to its customers as a priority.
To make the business strategies, you try to understand your customers. You comprehend their shopping behavior, their interests, what issues they face at your online store, etc. This entire process of knowing your customer and making the right strategies is a complete cycle, which is known as customer journey mapping.
Customer journey is a path of experiences that a customer goes through while every step of shopping. When a person comes to your landing page from where he/she starts his/her journey with you until the checkout. They expect a smooth and engaging experience with the kind of products or services they are looking for and being an ecommerce owner, you ought to provide the same for them.
The customer journey can be natural, or it can be designed by you in a way that the best experience provides to your customers for getting the desired outcomes. Designing a customer journey can accord you the long-craved aftermaths like increased conversion and revenue. To better understand your target customers, you may need to develop an effective ecommerce customer journey strategy.
Let’s learn more about the customer journey and how to map it for the desired outcome.
Customer journey mapping – A critical factor for ecommerce shopping
Customer journey mapping is a process to know your customers and create a map of the customer experiences at separate phases of their shopping journey. This assists you as a business to see your brand and products from customers’ perspectives and give insights to improve them. You also get to know the major pain points of your existing and potential customers. These pain points are the culprits behind a higher bounce rate.
The process of customer journey mapping helps every ecommerce business to improve the overall performance of the store. When you know the issues, you can optimize the store according to the problems and provide a better-personalized experience to the customers. It is time for retailers to create more unique ecommerce stores and think of them as their own ecosystems. Personalize your ecommerce store to give your customers exactly what they want, it grows the customer shopping experience, sales, and loyalty.
Do you know, what are the points to consider in customer journey mapping?
Buyer’s persona
Buyers’ persona is an imaginary representation of your ideal customer who is going to use your ecommerce store. Using the buyer’s persona, you can create the brand and marketing strategies to attract customers. When you create a customer’s persona, you try to understand how your customer will behave and what they will expect from your ecommerce store.
Moreover, think of all the stages of the customer journey and then create the buyer’s persona accordingly. It will surely help you to smooth out the customer experience.
Business objectives
Once you understand your customer’s persona, then the next step is to set your objectives. You know what your customer might expect from your store. So, set your objectives and have a clear vision to achieve the objectives. You have data from different resources like customer surveys, asking several questions to customers in distinct phases of their shopping journey, customer support emails, user testing data, and many more: this aids in setting the objectives and targets of your ecommerce store.
The touchpoints
There are touchpoints on your website when a customer interacts with you. For example: adding a product to the cart, opening an email newsletter, engaging with any of your social media posts, etc. You may notice that the touchpoints you have on your website are not sufficient or they are too much. If the touchpoints are fewer, then how will you engage a customer for a longer time on your website? And if they are more than you need, it may hurt the website’s performance. So, identify the touchpoints and add or remove them as per the need. Make sure all your touchpoints are up-to-date and updated enough to provide a seamless ecommerce shopping experience.
The map types
The type of customer journey map you want to fabricate is related to your business objectives. You think about a map as per your ecommerce business goals and objectives.
You might create a map, where you can think of customers’ actions, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, which they will experience with your brand in his/her current state. Or a map in which you can visualize the experience of their actions, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors when they will interact with your brand in the future. There can be a situation when your customers use your products in their day-to-day life. Here, you think of their habits and interests.
If you have your ecommerce store’s clear objectives and the information from different resources, then you can decide which type of map you will create.
Plotting the customer journey map and earning the customer loyalty
When you have gone through all the above steps successfully, then start plotting the customer journey step-by-step and focus on the customer’s actions. Your careful vigilance and improved process give them a satisfactory experience. That enhances their loyalty to your brand and store.
Keep on updating
It is an ongoing process. Likewise, your customer behavior, customer’s needs and shopping behavior keep on changing and evolving, your customer journey mapping ought to change with time.
So, these are the steps to consider while mapping a customer journey. But why do you need to map their journey?
Importance of customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping is important because it is a planned strategy to persuade your customers. You can optimize the customer experience with the help of customer journey mapping. When a customer thinks of starting his/her shopping journey with an ecommerce store, he/she goes through three significant stages, and they are – awareness (when does the customer feel the need to buy), consideration (when does a customer consider a few brands to satisfy his/her need) and decision (when does he/she buy a product).
These three stages are part of a customer journey mapping. Mapping is important for every ecommerce store irrespective of its size. Customer journey mapping aids you to provide an optimized experience to your customers. Through customer journey strategy, you understand your customers more. You comprehend what are the satisfactory points for them and what are all the pain points. Based on that, you work on your website and improvise the store for betterment.
Customer journey mapping also improves your ROI. When you start knowing and understanding your customers, you provide them with the kind of products or experiences they are looking for. It increases your return on investment and that is not in terms of money, but it reduces the churn as well and the onboarding cost of new customers.
Hence, customer journey mapping helps your ecommerce store to perform better for each targeted customer and enhance your profits.
Wrapping it up
When you start mapping your customer’s journey, you come across pain points when the customer’s needs do not get fulfilled. You focus on providing them with a personalized experience and making them feel special. Your effort results in customer loyalty and hence enhanced conversion.
Customer journey mapping is a critical yet beneficial approach for your ecommerce business. As we read above, it enhances the revenue and ROI and improves your brand image.
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