A Beginner Guide to Utilize eCommerce Customer Journey

Does every customer meet your brand with the same perception? They do not; their perspectives vary, and so do their choices.

Like this, the customer journey cycle follows different moods. But the route is always the same: your brand.

You cannot manipulate the user journey, but you can furnish the route that your customers follow your directions. That’s where the success of customer journey mapping resides.

What is customer journey

A customer journey refers to the connection of a customer’s touchpoints with a brand to obtain information, contacts, products, or services. It is not necessarily aligned or full-fledged all the time.

A user’s contact and conversation with a brand, ignoring or considering a product, purchasing or recommending — each of them is a part of the customer journey.

A customer journey is a group of moves a customer makes during a relationship with a brand.

Stages of Customer Journey

A customer journey is based on a few sequential steps that take the customer closer to the brand.

If you can connect the steps, you can connect your buyers intensely with the brand. Failing to detect one buyer journey stage will break the harmony of your brand management.

Awareness

In terms of customer journey, brand awareness is the primary touchpoint of customer-brand communication that opens the window to be informed about the first impression.

Suppose a potential customer, for example, sees you in a particular media that carries enough info about the solution your brand offers to a user. In that case, the user will detect your entity wherever you appear.

Brand awareness is where your customer decides to continue learning about you or stop there.

Consideration

Information without impression doesn’t create any long-term results. Consideration is the stage when information gets mixed with impressions. 

In this stage, your customers consider you while not stopping to search for other options. So, you need to stand out in some manner so that the consideration can turn into a constant selection.

Decision-making

Decision-making is the stage when you have the chance to win the first game. It defines whether your product, service, and marketing strategy are impressive.

It initially refers to the purchase decision to convey the trust your brand ensures to a user’s instinct.

This touchpoint should contain enough information to add value to the user’s life, eliminating all confusion and helping the user avoid being puzzled when comparing it to competitors. Present it with enough social proof, testimonials, and overall brand value.

Consider your buyer’s perspectives towards making the decision to purchase:

Problem Recognition: does your product possess the solution?

Gathering information: have you provided clear and complete information?

Alternative evaluation: where do you stand among the competitors?

Purchase decision: do your customers have proper brand trust in you?

There are a few ways applying which you can help the buyers decide on win-win conditions.

• Add a comparison table on relevant web page showing the competitive value
• Spread custom welcome email to new users
• Highlight the most relevant data along with analysis
• Show the level of brand trust people possess for your brand

Retention

No decision is permanent, but you can make it stable for longer.

Good service or product doesn’t make sure that your customer will proceed on the journey with your brand. It’s a combination of a well-built support system, proper value you show the customers, an impressive customer engagement process, etc.

Recommendation

In this stage, your customers turn into fans. 

It’s desirable to imagine that your customers who bought products from you while spending their own money, are advocating for you to help people follow your brand.

But all high desires come with high prices. Customer recommendation is a costly gain for a brand. It might not cost you money, but it can test your patience, efforts, and consistency.

Importance of mapping customer journey in eCommerce

Drawing an ideal e-commerce customer journey map keeps you one step ahead while experimenting with marketing strategies that increase conversion. 

Every new customer might possess a new mindset while shopping from or wandering an e-commerce store.

Mapping customer journeys helps you make effective decisions and supportive changes in your e-commerce business.

Customer journey mapping helps you understand the level of patience, expectation, and and doubts of your customer.

How to Utilize eCommerce Customer Journey

Once you have connected the dots of the customer journey, you can easily put your marketing pillars where your customers have gathered, and show them how you can simplify their lives. 

Along with strategizing the marketing goals, you can utilize the customer journey in troubleshooting, business development, supply chain control, etc.

Let’s dive into how you can utilize your e-commerce business’s customer journey.

Draw a sustainable sequence

Drawing a proper sequence of the customer journey is the first requirement to make your customers follow your directions.

One wrong turn can ruin the whole journey, making the buyers forget your brand name. Don’t let your competitors take over your prospects from halfway.

• Start with problem-solving info
• Educate about your brand
• Help customers build trust
• Clarify the confusions

Recognize  the crucial touchpoints

Your customers don’t have the same reasons for the same actions. 

Let’s take cart abandonment as an example. 

There might be different reasons for this such as the price of one or more products, increased shipping cost, crossing the customer’s budget even if it’s reasonable, customers might be waiting for a discount, etc.

Create a bridge to the touchpoints

Pricing might seem like a canal where reviews and ratings can work like a bridge that helps the buyer reach the purchase point. Like this, buyers need to get motivated in every stage to reach the ultimate goals.

Build a commendable customer support system

A customer support system is not just a panel to solve users’ problems promptly but also a hub that silently stores customer pain points and interests.

When you make sure your customer support is closer to the customers and has gained reliance, it adds bricks to the road of the customer journey.

• Implement quick responses
• Always offer a bit more help than required
• Get feedback from the users
• Followup on those user feedbacks

Gather value-centric data to implement analysis

Engaging lead generation forms helps you immensely gather user-specific data. When you categorically separate these data, you can implement post offers to the group of buyers and save marketing costs effectively with proper results.

Besides helping you retain customers, the lead generation form establishes strong communication with website visitors who have not yet been converted into buyers.

Eliminate useless efforts

The eCommerce customer journey is a big cycle where strategic mistakes might take place. Updated customer journey mapping is a way to find out those mistakes and eliminate them efficiently.

If you detect any problem inside the customer journey, you can at least eliminate the wrong strategies even if you can’t find a perfect solution instantly.

Find out pin-point strategies

You don’t need to run a 40-page strategy when you can compress it into a half-page. If you can summarize the points, you can apply a slight change inside the customer touchpoints like a surgeon conducts local anesthesia. 

• Eliminate failing strategies
• Find out what gaps the market possessing
• Stop focusing on wanderers(not shoppers)
• Reduce shopping cart abandonment rates

Research the (un)common buyer persona

Uncommon buyer personas reside in the common ones, study them. Study the feedback, check the oddest answers to the survey questions, and customers’ responses to the call to action.

Identify the missing charms

It’s not every time your projection will work efficiently. If you can’t notice it, you can’t stop it.

So, gone are the days to carry blind predictions, you better identify the missing charms specifically. 

See the charm on the homepage of Walmart in this new year, which might have been missed by eBay, but they didn’t. Maybe it’s not only a good competitor research, both eBay and Walmart know their customers: what they need and when they need it.

Keep asking the user and create customer engagement

Customers are like guests. They will not always tell you when and what they are hungry for.

The duty goes to you to control their appetite for your products by yourself. Never get tired of asking the users meaningful questions with an e-commerce customer survey.

Wrap up

One big gift eCommerce customer journey mapping gives you is the scope of personalized attention. You can group the customers based on their actions. It helps you meet the customers’ expectations.

eCommerce customer journeys are quite diversified because the users have different needs, perceptions, and behaviors. If you can trace the customer journey stages successfully, you can invest your efforts distributively. You will always be ready for every possible action your customers can take. By this practice, the mistakes and mission points will be detected automatically.

Wishing your customers a happy eCommerce journey with your brand.