Ways to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map for Ecommerce 

 

Customers may have converted to your brand for a number of reasons. However, the number of reasons to leave your company for the competition is much higher. A poor customer journey is one of them.

Customer journey is the single most important part of user experience. You may have the best product or service on the market but, if you don’t have an amazing customer journey, chances of having customers are next to impossible.

In this blog, we talk about a few of the steps to create an effective customer journey map for eCommerce.

• Understand your customers
• Define the steps of your journey map
• Contemplate on customer touchpoints and actions
• Discover the flaws in your customer journey
• Make necessary corrections

The entire process of selling can be thought of in terms of a customer service journey. If you don’t lead them right, then you will not be able to sell them right and might actually lose your precious customers to competitors who anyway have their eyes on your customer base. 

Thus, the customer journey is the single most important factor in the user experience. It wouldn’t matter if you have the best product in the world. If customers are finding it difficult to reach it, then you will have a hard time selling your product and staying in business.

How to Create an eCommerce Customer Journey Map

It might seem complicated on the surface, but creating a customer journey map for eCommerce is a series of simple tasks. Here’s a list of steps to follow:

Understand Your Customers

To create a map for someone, you need to know who they are, where they are currently, and where they want to go. 

You first need to understand your customers if you are to lead them from point A to Z. Now, as part of your initial brand building, you might already have clarified who your target audience is. But, to create an effective eCommerce customer journey map for them, you need to dig deeper and understand how they view the world. This will help you to anticipate their thought process and their decisions which will help you to position your product/service at the right place at the right time.

So, draw up a customer persona. There are various tools available online that you can use to create buyer personas for free that your entire team can then use to ‘market, sell, and serve better’. If you do not want to use pre-made templates, you can carry out this exercise on your own.

Here’s what a template to create a persona can look like:

Come up with a fictional name for your buyers and assign age and some background details like the family they have, where they studied, what their aspirations are and how they go about fulfilling it. Also, include as much accuracy as possible around their beliefs around money, needs, etc. Think of what’s important to them (wealth, reputation, values, growth, etc.). Basically, you are writing the story of the human who is your customer. 

Define the Steps of Your Journey Map

Most eCommerce customer journey maps are composed of the AIDA steps. These stand for:

●Awareness/attention

●Interest

●Desire

●Action

They sum up the entire customer journey from the time that your business is ‘just another brand’ for the potential customers to the time they make a purchase and fulfill their potential.

Awareness/attention is when a customer first hears about your brand. This can be through a guest post, a social media advertisement, a Google ad, word-of-mouth through someone, organic search, etc.

Interest is the stage when you are seeking to spark your customer’s interest in your offerings. So, you might do this through your weekly podcast, your daily blog posts, a new e-book where you spill some extra secrets, etc. The important thing is to get the customers to say a small yes to you by sharing their email IDs for these offerings. This will allow you to nurture them effectively and lead them to the next stage of Desire.

Desire aims to take the customers from simply liking your product and offerings to wanting them. Once you have gotten your customers’ email ids, you can nurture them to reach this state of wanting and desire through increased emotional connection and showcasing your brand personality.

All these stages are to lead them to action i.e. to make the purchase, hire you, make the demo call, etc. Most businesses also add another stage of “retention” after this wherein they upsell or cross-sell their products to these existing customers who have walked through their customer journey maps.

Contemplate on Customer Touchpoints and Actions

According to a study by the Marketing Week, consumers these days use an average of almost six touch-points and nearly 50% of them regularly use more than four.

Customer touchpoints are simply the places where the customer is likely to encounter you on his/her journey. So, for each of the AIDA stages, have you positioned yourself for maximum impact?

For example, on the awareness stage, the customer could encounter you on a guest blogging platform. Do you have the appropriate CTA and text ready to make him/her interested in your brand?

For the interest stage, do you have enough free content that establishes you as a trustworthy source and also adds value to the prospect’s life? Is it interesting and valuable enough to make them want to give you their email address or other details?

For the desire stage, is your email campaign automated and segmented properly to nurture your new leads the right way? Is the email copy interesting and valuable?

Finally, for the action stage, have you made it easy for the customers to make the purchase? Have you addressed their concerns, led to the FAQs and stated clear terms about the refund/return policy? ProProfs help desk ticketing software can also come in handy for this as it can help your business analyze the customer pain points. 

For each stage, think about where the customers would meet you and do you have clear steps laid out for them to easily and effortlessly progress to the next stage.

Discover the Flaws in Your Customer Journey

This would require constant back and forth and paying special attention to customers’ feedback plus your metrics. 

Where do customers seem to be getting stuck? Are they stuck at liking your brand and not wanting it? 

Maybe you could host a series of webinars that offer exclusive, insider info about your industry. 

Are you not able to get customers started on their customer journeys? 

Maybe your guest posts and social media need to be worked on. 

As you seek to improve the customer journey map and hence, the overall customer service experience, make sure to keep a special eye out for the flaws that wouldn’t be apparent in one-go. 

Make Necessary Corrections

And finally, work on making necessary changes and corrections. Improve upon what you have built plus added new touchpoints in the map and see how they perform. The customer journey map for eCommerce is not something that is built and perfected in a day. It is constantly being created and refined.

Implementing the above customer service tips for creating an excellent eCommerce customer journey map will help to bring in more sales easily. Your customers won’t get lost either and will effortlessly find their way to you!