E-commerce: How can customer journey mapping improve your business experience? | SEGS
The second half of the year is very important for e-commerce. Marked by the most anticipated dates for retail sales, such as Shoppers Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, the period increases website traffic, attracts new users to platforms and drives sales. However, while the season brings brands visibility, it can create problems with the same intensity. It all depends on the experience the user will have with the company.
But how do you prevent a user from having a bad experience on your website, app or product? The answer is quite simple: put yourself in his shoes. For this, it is necessary to map the user journey, that is, make a visual sketch of the thought processes, stages and experiences that the consumer goes through with your business. This plan will serve as the foundation for creating the perfect brand strategy, customer retention and optimizing engagement.
Victor Paschoal, LATAM Marketing Manager at CleverTap, the world’s leading customer retention and engagement platform, outlined seven steps companies should follow to build a strategic customer journey map. Check:
Decide your goals
Successful brands are not based solely on business goals or customer needs. It is necessary to find the meeting point between the two and use it as a reference in your company. With a defined goal, it is possible to start the mapping process.
create personas
The second step is to humanize users by creating personas. After all, the customers who use your product or service are real people with needs and problems. User personas are semi-fictional characters that represent your target customers. You create them using data from consumer behavior and researching the needs and goals of those who interact with your brand.
List your touch points
Now is the time to look at the important places on your website or app where your customers interact with your brand. For example, an e-commerce website can list customer touch points from accessing a product page to checkout. See an example:
Website: Landing page (place to which the user is taken after clicking on the ad).
Website: product page (the place with all the information about the product).
Website: Shopping cart (a tool that calculates the final purchase price).
Website: Checkout (the place where the customer enters his data and makes the payment).
E-mail: Purchase confirmation (order confirmation message).
E-mail: Delivery notification (message notifying you of delivery).
We’ve simplified this, but you may have other steps along the way – an abandoned shopping cart email or a delivery notification, for example.
List user actions
While touchpoints are significant markers your customers reach along their journey, actions are the steps that take them from one touchpoint to the next.
Here’s an example. If your customer lands on your landing page, what actions will they need to take to get to your product page? These actions can be something like clicking on a specific product category or searching for an item by name.
Identify the highs and lows of the customer journey
From these steps, it will be possible to look for weaknesses in your platform. Does the page take a long time to load? Is it hard to find something in your app’s interface? Where might your customer encounter an obstacle that results in a negative experience?
After writing down the highs and lows, you can examine the possibilities within them. Maybe customers your brand attracted on social media were frustrated when they landed on your mobile site because it was so slow to load. Remove the barrier and you’ll improve the user experience.
Track user emotions
At each point of interaction, record the emotional state your user is in. Use analytics tools to understand your customers’ behavior and make an educated guess about their emotional reaction.
Perhaps a behavioral analysis tool has shown that your customers tend to abandon when they encounter a pop-up. It doesn’t take much thinking to come to the conclusion that your client felt uncomfortable. Or maybe you’ve found that a high percentage of your users have accepted your free download – that’s a happy time.
Finally, follow the buyer journey
Create a visual representation of the collected data by completing these steps. You can simply start with a customer journey model if you want, or develop a roadmap through a more robust process.
Some marketing analytics software like CMSs and engagement and retention packages like CleverTap already include tools to map the customer journey. These tools allow you to use data to easily create campaigns on the visual canvas.
About CleverTap
CleverTap is a modern, integrated Retention Cloud that enables digital consumer brands to increase customer retention and lifetime value. For brands that understand and value customer retention, CleverTap powers context and individualization with a deep, unified data layer, insights and automation powered by AI/ML. With users worldwide, it represents more than 10,000 apps including Vodafone Idea, SonyLIV, Daimler, Gojek, Carousell and the Premier League, who trust CleverTap to achieve their retention and engagement goals, increasing their long-term revenue. CleverTap is backed by leading venture capital firms including Sequoia India, Tiger Global Management and Accel, headquartered in Mountain View, California with offices in Mumbai, Singapore and Dubai. For more information, visit the CleverTap website or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
