Customer Journey Mapping For Ecommerce Business

Customer journey mapping is one of the most valuable business strategies in e-commerce. It helps you to clarify any issues that your customers may experience. You also get to learn a lot about your brand from the customer’s point of view.

Learning about your customer’s journey enables you to plan ahead and to reach their expectations. This results in the availability of high-quality products.

Definition Of Customer Journey

The customer journey refers to the total amount of experience and interaction that a customer has with your brand. This journey varies from one customer to the other depending on the interactions or experiences by each.

The customer journey has three phases:

• Passive/Inactive Phase

The main goal of this phase is to change the customer’s attitude towards certain products. Communication and understanding should be vital at this stage as it dictates if the customer will move to the second phase.

• Decision Phase

Once the customer learns about the products and is convinced, they now decide to purchase from your brand. Unless you motivate the customer, they cannot choose your brand. Customers will make the decision by gauging whether their needs will be met through the information you choose to convey and evaluating their options where they form an assessment.

• Purchase & Consumption Phase

After coming into a conclusion of what they want, the customer now opts to purchase the products. This can either be physical purchase or online buying. During this stage, a lot of interactions are met. 

The goal of mapping your customers’ journey is to keep track of their experiences and progress. Mapping will further help you to get your customer’s perspectives about your brand as well as optimize how your services are delivered.

Understanding The Importance Of Customer Journey Mapping

It enables you to make better experiences. From the various steps of creating a customer’s journey map, you can quickly isolate what doesn’t work for your customers. When these shortcomings are addressed, it becomes easier for customers and prospects to interact with your brand.

Journey mapping for your customers helps them to achieve their goals quickly. Once you learn that your customer’s goals, it becomes your obligation to see them achieving these goals, learning their journey translates to the enhancement of effective touchpoints, making it easy for goal achievements.

Customer journey mapping is also essential for the growth of your brand. Studies show that customer journey mapping increases the upsell revenue of a brand by up to 56%. 

Mapping also shows how you interact with your customers. This way, you can highlight your customers’ needs while at their different stages. It’s through the interactions you learn about any missing touchpoints that you should fix. Research shows that 85% of people who experience an outstanding customer experience are likely to become regular customers.

Pain points that you might have missed are clarified during the customer’s journey mapping. This means that you will keep learning about these pain points as they arise.

You can easily identify the things that you have done in the right way. A customer’s journey map does not only show the missing ends but also helps you identify your brand’s high levels.

Creating A Customer Journey Map

1. Know Your Customers

This means that you must learn the type of customer you are dealing with. You must be willing to understand what they like and dislike.

Put yourself into your customer’s shoes, and you will quickly learn why they do their things how they do. You will realize that your customers will behave differently at specific stages as you interact with them.

2. Know Your Customers’ Goals

Here you have to get deeper to understand the goals that your customer has in mind. Each customer has something they want to achieve at the end of their customer journey, and that is what you want to dig deep into this stage.

The customers’ goals may change as their journey unfolds, so you should be ready for these changes. There are certain things you can look at, such as; identifying the questions asked by the customer, surveying your customer, and you can also gather information through the customer analytic tools.

3. Mapping Out Your Customers’ Touchpoints

Any encounter that you have with your customers and leads to information exchange is called a touchpoint. You aim to keep all potential touchpoints with your customer into account for improvements.

You can also figure out any possibilities that may lead to some of these touchpoints becoming overwhelming so that you can fix them. Touchpoints are easy to identify, for example, word of mouth, events, surveys, emails, blogs, etc.

4. Identifying Your Customers’ Pain Points

At this stage, you must gather your data to identify any pain points that may be enlisted in your customers’ journey. It’s also essential to pen down areas that you are doing well, not leaving out the areas you need to improve.

This can be achieved by interviewing your customers for honest opinions. With that done, you can mark the pain points you need to eliminate on your customer journey map.

5. Prioritize And Fix Pain Points

You have already identified the pain points from your customers’ journey. Look at the pain points that, when fixed, will bring long-term engagement before settling. Prioritize the issues so that you don’t just fix them for the sake of it. The goal here is to continue drawing your customers and engaging them fully without further hitches.

6. Update And Improve

Customers keep growing and changing over time. Your customer’s journey maps should do the same so that once its completed and issues fixed, there is no turning back. In fact, after every six months, you should test, update, and improve your customer’s journey if possible. This way, you can conveniently keep track of your customers’ journey and interactions.

Build A Lasting Relationship With Your Customers

Building a lasting relationship with your customers’ can be made easy by customer journey mapping. Here you already know your customers’ expectations, goals, and, most importantly, experiences with your brand.

A customer will become more comfortable if there is a surety that their pain points will be addressed adequately. Keep yourself in your customers’ shoes to identify what exactly they want. Ensure that your customer is happy with your services. That way, their chances to recommend someone to you are very high. Keep contact even after they purchase your products by answering any queries they might have. Eventually, you realize that the relationship has already been built.