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Ecommerce Customer Journey What Is It and How To Improve It

Ecommerce Customer Journey: What Is It and How To Improve It?

As we know, the online market is very popular in this digital era. The sales from online markets are increasing day by day and there is no sign of decrement. So as a business owner, it is very necessary to focus on your eCommerce customer journey.

When a customer comes to your online business and leaves after adding products to the cart or without completing a purchase.

It means the customer is not getting a better experience while they are moving from one stage to the other stage like searching for a product, choosing a product, adding to the cart, and final purchase.

To improve this situation and get conversions you have to find the root which may be about pricing, product quality, description, and other things.

You can also visit your site as a customer and follow the same steps for doing a purchase.

If you find that you also don’t have a better experience while following the steps then you can easily find out what needs to change.

In this guide, we are sharing detailed information about eCommerce journey,

Why is it important?

What is eCommerce journey mapping?

Stages of eCommerce journey and how to improve eCommerce customer journey?

Let’s deep dive into it.

What is an Ecommerce Customer Journey?

When a customer visits an eCommerce store, searches for a product that they want, and follows the steps to complete the purchase, then the experience they will get from searching for a product to making a purchase is known as eCommerce customer journey.

In simple words, Ecommerce customer journey is the experience they will get while following stages from searching for a product to making a purchase.

For example, A man visits your eCommerce website and looks for a product, then he finds a product and adds it to the cart and completes the purchase.

This is due to the better performance of your website which loads pages faster without any issues, pricing is shown clearly, and good customer support.

On the other hand, if your website takes too much time to load with lots of issues and there are lots of hidden prices that are not shown clearly, then it creates a bad experience for users.

And as a result, your site will be bounced and you will miss opportunities to make a sale.

Why is Ecommerce Customer Journey important for Business?

Ecommerce customer journey is very important for every online business to decrease their bounce rate and increase their sales.

You can get more of the information that customers actually want from your business and you are not providing it.

So, there are lots of reasons you need to know completely why it is so important.

1. Understanding

It is very important to understand what customers are looking for or what they want from your online business.

Most business doesn’t work on this thing, as a result, they get their sales decreased. So, this understanding helps to provide a better experience or customer journey.

2. Planning

After understanding the customer, you can easily set up a plan for your business.

You can launch new products, and services, and do the expansion of your business that the customer actually wants.

3. Efficiency

You can also check your business if there have too many stages followed by the customer while searching for a product to the ending point where they make a purchase.

4. Setting Goals

To make any business successful, you have to set realistic goals.

With Ecommerce customer journey, you can easily know what goals are compulsory for you that should be needed to follow.

The data you collect should match with the realistic goal so that it helps to grow your business realistically.

What is Ecommerce customer journey mapping?

Ecommerce customer journey maps are used to know how a user interacts with your online business platform.

It shows the steps taken by the customer while visiting your business till making a purchase.

This data is shown in visual form, so it is easy to understand and gather why they leave your business. What disappoints them? If they don’t get something that they are looking for?

With Ecommerce customer journey you will know about:

  • From where you are getting lots of traffic and sales
  • What elements are disappointing users to do a purchase
  • Which thing provides a bad experience to users
  • And most important, why do they leave your business

All these factors are a must to know to provide a better experience to customers.

With Ecommerce customer journey mapping, you can do a like of survey about customers’ behaviors and can remove all the obstacles that are resisting your users to complete a purchase.

What are the stages of an Ecommerce customer journey?

In an online business, every customer follows a journey, so a customer journey is common for them.

But they don’t know that they are following the stages of a customer journey. They don’t have any idea what the Customer journey is even though they are experiencing it.

There are five stages of Ecommerce customer journey which means everything for every business and your customers.

1. Awareness or Discovery

At this stage, customers visit your website through a platform or a landing page.

With this, you can know what customers are looking for on your website. Your customers also know about your products at this stage.

This is the best opportunity for you, so do research and use the data from this stage to provide a better customer journey.

2. Consideration of Interest

In this stage, customers start to browse your website if they like the products you provide on your website.

You will know what products a customer wants and this is an opportunity for you to reduce the bounce rate and provide more products for the customers to browse them.

3. Acquisition or Intent

In online business, you can easily know how many customers added a product to their shopping cart but didn’t make a purchase.

The shopping cart page of your website helps to understand this data and if you are using a signup form you can collect the emails of customers.

This process will simply target those customers who leave the website without making a purchase.

4. Retention or Purchase

This is the main stage where customers do a purchase on your website. You can get some feedback about their experiences while selecting a product and making a purchase.

This helps to build trust and relationships between a business and a customer.

At this stage, you can also follow a post-purchase strategy to provide other better products according to the interests of the customer.

This strategy is the best way to retarget the customer who can do more conversions for you.

5. Advocacy or Engagement

In the final stage, after purchasing you can encourage your customers to follow you on social media platforms to get new offers and discounts and do email sign-ups, and subscribe to the newsletters.

You can also share some articles and blogs related to similar products.

These things really help to retarget customers. If you follow this step, customers will find that you are focusing on their wants and providing the required essentials for them.

So they will really want to repurchase from your website.

How to learn Ecommerce customer journey?

To improve the customer journey, you first need to find the obstacles that are decreasing the performance of your website and also providing a better experience to users so that they can make a purchase with full confidence.

You can turn your site into Google Analytics, but keep in mind it can get you all the necessary data to understand and improve them.

There are also other tools available that really help to get all the necessary data.

So, after selecting a tool you can follow these steps or processes to learn about Ecommerce customer journey.

1. Use an on-site survey

You can use a survey page on your website to know through which platform they are coming to your site.

This is a discovery stage for every customer. Google Analytics can show you the proper information about it regardless of paid or organic traffic.

With this survey, you will find which platform brings you the most traffic and sales.

So, you can easily work on it to provide a better experience to your customers through that platform.

2. Use heatmaps

If your website has not too many visitors, the reason may be that they are not getting interested while browsing your website.

The other reason may be that your website has lots of pages and posts, so it is very difficult to navigate a page.

To deal with this situation, you can apply the navigation menu to make browsing simple for the visitors otherwise, your bounce rate will increase.

You can use heatmaps before and after the page of the site to check if your navigation option is working fine or influencing customers to spend time on your website or not.

Heatmaps can also be used on the pages to reduce bounce rates and get more conversions.

3. Use On-page Surveys

You can use on-page surveys to identify pain points that need to be changed to give a better experience to customers.

With this survey, you can also check for elements that are related to interest and purchase stages.

This survey is like the feedback that we need from our customers to make the eCommerce customer journey better.

So, you can use this survey on the homepage of your website with a question like: ‘’Can you suggest what thing we need to be changed?

And when customers will answers this question, you will get lots of problems and requirements that need to be solved.

4. Use post-purchase surveys

After a customer leaves your website with or without making a purchase, your work doesn’t end here.

You have to encourage them to come back to your website to make another purchase or complete the purchase which they left.

This strategy also helps to increase your sales and build a relationship with the customer.

So, will you do it?

You can simply send an email to them to get feedback about their experience and the elements that need to be changed on your website.

For instance, you can use this on the thank you page after a customer completes a purchase.

How to Build Ecommerce Customer Journey Maps?

Customer journey mapping provides lots of benefits. But for a beginner, it is a very complex process.

We are explaining in simple words how to build eCommerce customer journey maps.

But keep in mind that your data can be simple or complex, it depends on the customer’s path and channel they take to reach your website and discover a product.

Let’s move to the main steps.

1. Do Research

You have to do research about how a customer thinks and what paths they take to find a product and complete the purchase.

With customers, if you are a business owner, you should also think like a customer and experience the journey from finding a product to purchasing it.

For example, you can select a product of your business and ask the customer to follow the complete process of finding and purchasing the same product.

With this, you will know how many channels you used to find a product and how many ways you reach your website.

Now compare your journey with the customer journey, you will get an overview of touchpoints and interactions.

2. Set Goals

After research, make some goals to identify which data is important for you to provide a better customer experience.

This step is very important because if you don’t set a goal, you won’t be able to understand the data properly and you might think all data is important or all data is unuseful.

3. Understanding

Understanding the touchpoints and interactions is the main point of knowing what it means to create an effective strategy.

You need to check if those touchpoints need some improvement to give a better experience to users.

4. Identify Pain Points

We all know that every customer wants a product that solves their problems and makes their life easy.

So, if your business’s products also solve the customer problem in an effective way then you need to know what drives them to visit your website and purchase products.

5. Identify Main Touchpoints

You need to find the touchpoints where the customers aren’t able to make a purchase or leave your website.

Improve these touchpoints to provide a better customer journey and guide them to make their experiences better.

How to Improve Your Customer Journey for Ecommerce?

After mapping the customer journey, you get lots of pain points and touchpoints that need to be improved.

So let’s move to the steps that help you to improve your customer journey.

1. Create Touchpoints

Touchpoints are a very necessary element to optimize the customer journey. So, create more touchpoints by which your customers can find your business or your product easily.

You can use ads on search engines, social media platforms, emails, and on every available platform.

Make sure the touchpoints fit all stages and should be worked properly.

2. Optimize your Website

Optimization is the key to success. Your website should be well optimized to perform better on all devices like desktop and mobile.

This should be done because every customer has their own choices through which device they do online purchasing.

But research says that more than 50% of the customers purchase from mobiles. So, it is very necessary to check if it is mobile optimized or not.

You can use the Google search console to check the mobile usability and Yoast SEO to check the mobile view of your website.

After checking mobile usability, make sure that your pages load fast and are responsive otherwise customers leave your website and you will miss opportunities.

3. Use Chatbots

We all know that every new business starts getting lots of calls from customers to help in solving their problems.

But, sometimes it can increase your stress while providing the same solution to the same questions that are asked by different customers.

So, to deal with this condition, you can use Chatbots as proactive customer support.

You can prepare Chatbots by adding the questions and solutions that are mostly asked by the customer.

So, when a customer visits your website and asks the solutions for a common query, then they will easily get it from the Chatbots.

4. Personalization

When you use the personal touch in your content, then people like it must. So, you need to use automation and analysis to give your website a personal touch.

You can customize your content with dynamic content marketing based on buying preferences, locations, and genders.

This thing really helps to grow your business because customers find it attractive.

5. Collect more Data

As we know how data helps us to make our business more efficient. So, you need to collect data as much as possible.

You can easily get data through customer following stages on a website, surveys, polls on social media platforms, or by sending emails.

Data helps you to understand the market, expand your business to reach every customer, and provide a better customer experience.

Conclusion

Now you know what eCommerce customer journey is?

This is very important for every business to know because if they don’t get an idea about what problems customers are getting through the stages they follow on the website.

They need to change their perspectives as a customer to know the touchpoints.

Ecommerce customer journey maps are used to know how a user interacts with your online business platform.

It shows the steps taken by the customer while visiting your business till making a purchase.

So, there are lots of ways by which you can easily improve your eCommerce journey to provide a better experience to the customers.

You need to collect data, create touchpoints and optimize your website properly.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What do you know by touchpoints in the eCommerce customer journey?

Touchpoints are a very necessary element to optimize the customer journey.

So, create more touchpoints by which your customers can find your business or your product easily.

What you can know from eCommerce customer journey map?

You can know from where your customers are coming on your website and how much time it takes to move from one stage to the next stage from searching for a product to purchasing a product.

Which tools are free for customer journey mapping?

The tools that are free for customer journey mapping are:

  • Totango
  • Zoho CRM
  • G2 Deals
  • MoEngage
  • Lucidspark

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