Introduction – Understanding E-Commerce Customer Journey
The E-Commerce Customer Journey begins with the act of empathizing with the customer experience. By standing in the shoes of customers, we understand the emotional connections, and discomfort they face while buying our product.
Businessmen, Thus by analyzing the customer experience by themselves tend to construct a room for improvement and standardization. This in turn leads to quality services to the trusting customers.
But in the growing Competitive Market, Is it possible to sustain the loyalty among various E-commerce shoppers? Yes, we can accomplish this by mapping a perfect E-commerce Customer Journey. Let’s understand it with an example:
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SAM’S E-Commerce Customer Journey
Sam wants to buy a new phone. Here is where his Ecommerce customer journey begins. His old phone might be broken or he just likes a better version.
Customers who are satisfied with their current brands will stay loyal to the same. But to satisfy him, we have to first experiment with the analysis of competitors in and around our Business.
What Novelty do I provide? Who are all my potential customers and target Competitors? What Value do I assure to my users or How comfortable are they while using it? Digging out answers for these questions matters the most while mapping the perfect customer journey.
Potential customers will oscillate from pillar to post before deciding to buy a product. Followed by their brand comparison, review analysis, Testimonial checking, etc have to hold them sustained throughout the journey.
Now after undergoing all these analyses, A consumer checks out to pay and waits for the delivery. But then the Customer journey doesn’t only stop at the delivery. The main picture jumps in now, where the E-commerce businessmen should follow them periodically.
They must also encourage them to repeatedly pursue their brand and indulging the users to stay loyal to the services.
This would truly be the best E-Commerce customer journey.
Leading the way- A detailed Customer Journey Map
With the basic understanding sorted, let’s explore the pathway towards constructing a perfect Ecommerce Customer journey map
Explicating Customer Acts
Online business merchants need to collect data from the customers which will form the fundamental unit of the map. Information like who is buying the product, their location, age, gender, occupation, interests, economic standards have to be defined properly. Followed by which we need to figure out the benefits they will gain from our product.
Most of the traders must build numerous customer personas with different segments incorporated. The retailer has to make sure not to avoid the difference in customer segmentation.
Our customer personas must be mainly accountable to the emotions, pain points, and desires of the potential customers. We need to seek certain answers from our customers:
- What made them visit our website?
- Why did they choose us instead of other competitors in the market?
- Did they have a good or drowning experience while exploring our service?
- In what aspects, do we need to improve?
These building blocks of feedback and reviews will form the core of our customer journey mapping.
Let’s now look into a simple method to use E-Commerce Customer Journey.
E-Commerce Customer Journey Quad Mapping
Now let’s build the quad criteria of customer journey mapping: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Loyalty. Exploring these stages might help us to solve the problem during the very first time it’s experienced by the customer.
Quad 1- Awareness
Let’s Imagine, Tina is suffering from severe foot pain. If she is going to ask Google, the reason behind her frequent foot pain. What will it say?
Apart from the medical reasons, It also stated “ Oh no! you have a Bad Heel Slipper”. Her pain is not a bigger issue but it’s the symptom of the futuristic health adversities. So she needs to solve it as soon as possible.
After identifying her problem, she is now aware of her situation. Soon, she started to explore a better solution to buy a better product (Maybe flat & soft footwear).
This is called an awareness stage where the customers understand their problem precisely and look out for the right solution at the earliest.
Some of the sharp-witted E-commerce businesses like Birchbox make use of such search engine results and content marketing to hold the customers like tina.
Quad 2- Consideration
Now Tina is all set to buy a new flat slipper. She is clear with her goal and it’s time for her to explore all the possible solutions online. The consideration stage can also be coined as the evaluation stage.
This is where the prospective buyers are keen on understanding all the methods to solve this problem.
Quad 3- Decision
In the Decision Stage, the prospect distinguishes between the Novelty among various service providers and opts for the best one.
Decision Making involves Testimonial Checking and feedback delivery. Here, the customers explore whether their fellow shoppers liked the product or not,
But still, not every Customer crosses the Decision stage and checkout. This is because most customers want to experience a trial and error game before fixing up a product for themselves.
Knowing this Psychology, Companies like Lemonstand proffers a 14-Day free trial to their customers to improve their shopping affairs.
Quad 4 – Loyalty
If the customer crosses all the above-mentioned Quads, he/she enters the Loyalty Stage. Here, the brand owners will continuously fascinate the shoppers by re-emphasizing their value proposition and business touchpoints. This will eventually provoke the prospects to stay devoted to the brand, service, and the company.
Next comes the touchpoint identification. This will provide information on where exactly do customers perform the desired action.
Touchpoint Identification
Some of the important touchpoints include referrals, Defining channels like awareness campaigns, Online ads, Offline Media advertising, Branding, etc.
Effectively recognizing the Drop -off points where the customer breaks the chain of their journey must be resolved immediately. This helps to maintain user sustenance and loyalty.
Identifying the Areas of Improvements
Identifying the area of improvement from the user and amplifying it by practicing a better tool plays a crucial role in the E-commerce customer journey. This helps in deciding your customer-centered metrics for every stage in the mapping journey.
Lastly, implementing new ideas, testing them, and recording the user experience and feedback will keep you and your business evolving.
Check out the list of best E-Commerce tools or Top Web Content Management tools for your business. Using them can be a real good boon.
Conclusion – Let’s Perfectly Map it
And that’s how you empathize with your valuable customer! E-Commerce Customer journey mapping is an endless process that needs to be updated frequently to uplift the services that you proffer.
It might seem overwhelming at the beginning. But then, when you start exploring your product or service in terms of customer gratification, you will get to know the beauty of its nuances.
Even though E-Commerce customer journey mapping is quite a long process, the results and outcomes will make you feel worth it. So let’s empathize and implement customer-friendly practices to hit our goals right inside the goalposts.