How can you gain insights about your customers to improve your website’s usability and understand buying trends?

The answer is simple: build a customer journey map.

In this blog, we’ll dive into a few things: what is a customer journey, a customer journey map, how to map the customer journey visually, templates of different customer journeys, a step by step guide for how to create them, and examples of customer journeys in action. Let’s get started

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is a combination of all the interactions customers have with your brand before reaching a specific goal.

Creating a compelling journey helps you stand out and shows customers that you care about their experience. An enjoyable customer journey promotes positive engagement, making for more satisfied customers that are more likely to return for repeat purchases.

By better understanding your customers, you’ll be able to provide them with the best possible user experience every time they visit your online store. The best way to do this is by creating visual customer journey maps that present all this information about customers at a glance.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s interaction with your business or website. It’s used to define which parts of this process might not be working as smoothly as they should be, thus improving the customer’s experience.

The customer journey map is a (mostly) visual tool that helps businesses understand what a customer goes through when buying a product or service from them. It maps out in clear, concise, visual terms, the journey each customer is likely to experience through buyer personas and user data.

The best customer journey map is a story, brought to life visually, of the customer’s experience. In essence, the best customer journey map is a story, brought to life visually, of the customer’s experience. It should be noted, however, that more complex information on the map may require text.

The map itself highlights “touchpoints, which are specific elements of the customer’s interaction with a business. Each of these touchpoints – for example, seeking a product, researching its content, buying the product, waiting for delivery, and returning it if unsatisfied – can be judged as negative, neutral, or positive from the customer’s perspective.

Customer journey maps require various research techniques that include hard data, customer feedback, and creative thinking. As such, no two maps are the same and each one will depend on many different factors that can’t be simplified or stereotyped as a matter of course.

The heart of customer journey maps: Buyer personas

Buyer personas are at the heart of a customer journey map tool and are broad representations, presented as fictional characters, based on real-life data and customer feedback. Typically, each project will create between three and seven buyer personas, each of which will require its own customer journey map.

The point of the customer journey map is to understand, as clearly as possible, what a customer will encounter when using your service. It will also help you improve the elements that are not functioning properly, are not easy to navigate, and show you how to make the entire experience more satisfying.

Each persona, and therefore the journey map itself, is not meant to be a perfect illustration of actual interactions. Rather, it’s a broad representation of the experience from the persona’s perspective.

Who Can Benefit From A Customer Journey Map?

There are many reasons why a customer journey map can be useful to a business. Customer satisfaction is more important than ever to a business, and it’s tied to loyalty to an extent that has not previously existed. Customers are more demanding, aware of their options, and willing to shop around.

By mapping each of the previously mentioned touchpoints, a well-designed customer journey map template can highlight any problems that clients might experience in the process of interacting with a business and help foster a relationship with an organization, product, service, or brand. This can occur across multiple channels and over a long period of time.

Once a customer journey map template has been designed, the entire enterprise can keep the customer at the forefront of the decision-making process. With a focus on the customer and their experience, or user experience (UX), any kinks, holes, or brick walls within the timeline’s touchpoints can be ironed out.

Bringing Together All Aspects Of The Business

Customer journey maps can help a business by bringing together departments with a focus on customer experience. To begin with, all departments can be engaged to discuss issues that customers may face when dealing with them. This is no small thing as many departments may not be used to dealing with customers, yet the decisions they take may have a profound effect on UX. By creating an understanding of how each touchpoint affects UX across the entire business, decisions can be made from an empathetic perspective.

Traditional marketing stops at the point of purchase, but customer experience does not necessarily end there. For example, perhaps the purchase was not to their satisfaction and they want to return the goods. Departments that might not typically be involved in touchpoints before purchase now have a central role to play. How easy is it for the customer to find the return information on a website? If they need information on delivery or collection times, how likely are they to get a response that will satisfy them? This all requires forethought and a policy that keeps customer experience central to design and organization.

How to map the customer journey visually

A customer journey map is a visual representation that helps you gain better insight into your customers’ experiences (from start to finish) from their point of view.

There are two vital elements to creating a customer journey map:

• Defining your customers’ goals
• Understanding how to map their nonlinear journey

By mapping out a customer’s digital journey, you are outlining every possible opportunity that you have to produce customer delight. You can then use these touchpoints to craft engagement strategies.

According to Aberdeen Group (via Internet Retailer), 89% of companies with multi-channel engagement strategies were able to retain their customers, compared to 33% of those who didn’t.

To visually map every point of interaction and follow your customer on their journey, you can use Excel sheets, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to help you better understand.

Customer journey maps also help brands with:

• Retargeting goals with an inbound viewpoint
• Targeting a new customer group
• Forming a customer-centric mindset

All of these lead to better customer experiences, which lead to more conversions and an increase in revenue.

Want more information on the digital customer journey? Check out our digital customer journey resource kit for a detailed e-book, an editable workbook, a use case booklet, and an infographic.

Examples of Customer Journey Map Templates and Which to Choose

There are four different types of customer journey maps to choose from. Each map type highlights different customer behaviors as they interact with your business at different points in time. Choosing the right template is essential based on your goals.

1. Current state template

The current state template is the most commonly used journey map that focuses on what customers currently do, their way of thinking, and how they feel during interactions.

It’s great for highlighting existing pain points and works best for implementing incremental changes to customer experiences.

2. Future state template

The future state template focuses on what customers will do, think, and feel during future encounters. It’s useful for conveying a picture of how customers will respond to new products, services, and experiences.

3. Day in the Life Template

This template is similar to the current state template because it visualizes present-day customer behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. However, this template assesses how customers behave both with your organization and with peers in your area.

This type of journey map works best for spurring new initiatives by examining unfulfilled needs in the market.

4. Service Blueprint Template

When creating a service blueprint template, you typically begin with an abridged version of a current or future state journey map. Then you add a network of people, methods, procedures, and technologies responsible for giving a simplified customer experience, either in the present or in the future.

Current state blueprint maps are beneficial for recognizing the source of current pain points, whereas future state blueprint maps help create an environment that will be necessary for providing a planned experience.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map (7 Steps)

Creating customer journey maps may feel repetitive, but the design and application you choose will vary from map to map. Remember: customer journeys are as unique as your individual customers.

Step 1: Create Buyer Personas

Before creating a journey map, it’s important to identify a clear objective so you know who you’re making the map for and why. Building personas is the most time-consuming part of the process. It requires detailed research, including qualitative and quantitative data, and is the foundation of the entire process. A persona is a highly relatable and rounded fictional character, generalized, but not stereotyped.

Buyer personas help define customer goals, providing a deeper understanding of their needs and topics of interest. More detail makes for more realistic personas, which means you’ll need to do a fair amount of market research to acquire this data.

Start by creating a rough outline of your buyer’s persona with demographics like age, gender, occupation, education, income, and geography. When you have that in place, you’ll need to get psychographic data on your customers. This kind of information may be harder to collect compared to demographic data, but it is worthwhile to understand customer preferences, needs and wants.

In short, demographics tell you who your customers are and psychographics provide insights into the why behind their behavior. Collecting concrete data on your customers helps you serve them better and deliver a more personalized user experience.

Collecting concrete data on your customers helps you serve them better and deliver a more personalized user experience.

Step 2: Select Your Target Customer

After making several customer personas, it’s time to do a “deep dive” into each to build a more accurate reflection of their experience.

Start by analyzing their first interaction with your brand and mapping out their movements from there.

What questions are they trying to answer? What is their biggest priority?

Step 3: List Customer Touchpoints

Any interaction or engagement between your brand and the customer is a touchpoint.

List all the touchpoints in the customer journey, considering everything from the website to social channels, paid advertisements, email marketing, third-party reviews, or mentions.

Which touchpoints have higher engagement? Which touchpoints need to be optimized?

All customer journey mapping examples are unique. Therefore, touchpoints on one map are unlikely to work for another. In fact, every business needs to update its buyer personas and customer journey maps as their business changes. Even quite subtle changes can have profound effects on the customer journey map template.

Step 4: Identify Customer Actions

Once you have identified all your customer touchpoints, identify common actions your customers make at each step. By dividing the journey into individual actions, it becomes easier for you to improve each micro-engagement and move them forward along the funnel.

Think of how many steps a customer needs to reach the end of their journey. Look for opportunities to reduce or streamline that number so customers can reach their goals sooner. One way to do this is by identifying obstacles or pain points in the process and creating solutions that remove them.

This is a great time to use the personas you created. Understanding the customer will help you troubleshoot problem areas.

Anticipating what your customer will do is another important part of mapping the customer journey. Accurate predictions lead to you providing better experiences, which ultimately leads to more conversions.

Step 5: Understand your available resources

Creating customer journey maps presents a picture of your entire business and highlights every resource being used to build the customer experience.

Use your plan to assess which touchpoints need more support, such as customer service. Determine whether these resources are enough to give the best customer experience possible. Additionally, you can correctly anticipate how existing or new resources will affect your sales and increase ROI.

Step 6: Analyzing the Customer Journey

An essential part of creating a customer journey map is analyzing the results.

Now you have your data, customer journey mapping template, touchpoints, and goals, it’s time to put it all together and define where the UX is meeting expectations and where things can be improved. It is important to note that mapping where things are going well is almost as important as defining what isn’t. Some elements of the journey can be spread to other areas.

As you assess the data, look for touchpoints that might drive customers to leave before making a purchase or areas where they may need more support. Analyzing your finished customer journey map should help you address places that aren’t meeting customers’ needs and find solutions for them.

Take the journey yourself and see if there’s something you missed or if there is still room for improvement. Doing so will provide a detailed view of the journey your customer will take.

Follow your map with each persona and examine their journeys through social media, email, and online browsing so you can get a better idea of how you can create a smoother, more value-filled experience.

One of the best ways of pinpointing where things are not going to plan is through customer feedback. This is typically done through surveys and customer support transcripts.

Step 7: Take Business Action

Having a visualization of what the journey looks like ensures that you continuously meet customer needs at every point while giving your business a clear direction for the changes they will respond to best.

Any variations you make from then on will promote a smoother journey since they will address customer pain points.

A great way to test your variations to find out what better serves your customers throughout their user journey is by leveraging A/B testing.

AB Tasty is a best-in-class A/B testing solution that helps you convert more customers by leveraging experimentation to create a richer digital experience – fast. This experience optimization platform embedded with AI and automation can help you achieve the perfect digital experience with ease.

Analyzing the data from your customer journey map will give you a better perspective on changes you should make to your site to reach your objective.

Once you implement your map, review and revise it regularly. This way, you will continue to streamline the journey. Use analytics and feedback from users to monitor obstacles.

Customer Journey Map Examples

Customer journey map templates are varied, some appear like works of art, while others are the work of a child, but as long as they are clear and concise, they can be effective.

This customer journey map for the charity ‘The Samaritans’ is a highly empathetic map, focused on the purpose of the charity itself. Note how the text is highly visual and therefore makes it easy to relate to the image of the map itself.

This is an example of a map that gives the impression of a journey, rather than a linear UX. This can help push home the point that customer experience is rarely easy to define as a journey from A to B.

The Truth about Customer Journeys

Customer journeys are ever-changing. Journey maps help businesses stay close to their customers and continuously address their needs and pain points. They provide a visual of different customers which helps to understand the nuances of their audience and stay customer-focused.

Customer journey maps can vary widely, but all maps share the same steps. With regular updates and the proactive removal of roadblocks, your brand can stand out, provide meaningful engagement, improve customer experiences, and see positive business growth.

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Luxury e-commerce brands face unique challenges but also unparalleled opportunity.

As technology advances and consumer expectations are high, the key to thriving in the luxury industry lies in mastering the art of experimentation, personalization and continuous experience optimization.

Unveil an arsenal of test ideas that luxury brands can employ to curate custom experiences, featuring examples from real AB Tasty clients in the luxury industry to serve as inspiration for you to start creating your own dazzling digital experiences.

Craft experiences that wow!

Get your copy of “7 Luxury Test Ideas To Make Your Digital Experiences Shimmer” now.

LUXURIOUS TEST IDEA

Help visitors find the products they need with subcategories like ba&sh

The team at ba&sh found that their product listing pages were often the first place visitors landed on the website. From there, visitors often browse but click away if they don’t find what they are looking for quickly. An A/B test proved that  displaying clear category filters helped ease the shopping experience, leading to a 2% increase in traffic to the product detail pages and a 3% increase in revenue.

Build luxe experiences that surpass your customers’ expectations

Get access to the latest trends in experimentation with “7 Luxury Test Ideas To Make Your Digital Experiences Shimmer.”

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Watch AB Tasty and Mitch Hussey, Product Manager at Bonobos on how to use cross-functional experimentation to improve your digital experience.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How to prioritize and roadmap experiments that will have the biggest impact on your customer experience.
• How to define roles and responsibilities for a cross-functional team so that everyone is aligned on goals and expectations.
• How to measure the impact of experiments on the customer experience, revenue, and product functionality.

You’ll also get a behind-the-scenes look at three real-world experiments that Bonobos has run, and learn how to apply these insights to your own business.

This webinar is for you if you’re interested in:

• Improving your digital experience
• Learning how to use experimentation to drive results
• Getting insights from a leading retailer

The post How Bonobos Works Cross-Functionally to Create Winning Customer Experiences appeared first on abtasty.

Evan Wells, Sr Solution Consultant at Contentsquare, is an expert at creating successful digital experiences. His secret? Combine digital insights with AB testing to increase web activity and drive growth.

The customer journey experience has never been more important to companies than in the challenging landscape of 2023. Get insights from Contentsquare for the key to CX success. The upward rise in traffic, conversion rate, and how to retain customers on your site.

We’ll share key insights from the report that may already be affecting your CX and how you can enrich your testing initiatives to create conversions.

The post Curbing the Consumption Crisis appeared first on abtasty.

Continuous optimization of website elements such as landing pages, site speed, and user experience, can increase businesses’ conversion rates and reduce bounce rates, leading to a higher ROI for their paid media efforts. Wpromote will explore the various ways to improve site experience for paid media and the importance of implementing these strategies for achieving optimal results.

The post Smart Site Optimization Boosts Paid Media Performance appeared first on abtasty.

But there’s a major problem: you don’t know when you should place an order and who you should order from. You’re browsing a couple of websites and you see a gorgeous flower bouquet. You scroll down a bit and promptly read:

“Mother’s Day: Order now for on-time delivery.”

That’s it – you need to order now for the bouquet to be delivered before Mother’s Day.

That pressure you just felt? It’s called urgency.

Urgency and scarcity are widely used across marketing campaigns to increase engagement and boost conversions, because it works.

Take Black Friday for example: according to Adobe Digital Insights, that day alone racked up almost $9B dollars in sales in 2021.

Basically, urgent situations push us to act fast and scarcity triggers purchase anxiety, forcing us to act promptly. Put into the right hands, these tools can help e-commerce and online businesses boost their conversions and increase sales.

Before we look into the best practices, let’s take a quick look at the psychology behind scarcity and urgency.

Understand the psychology behind urgency

Urgency is a psychological trigger that is deeply rooted inside our brain: it relates to the human loss aversion or the so-called “fear of missing out” (FOMO).

Scientifically speaking, urgency is a time-based concept that prompts us to act quickly.

Similar to the scarcity principle, FOMO is a kind of social anxiety defined by wanting to stay connected with everyone around you and continually keep up with what they are doing.

When faced with a limited-time offer (e.g. a discount), we automatically start to evaluate if we’re comfortable letting this opportunity get away. In other words, the fear of missing out grows.

Understand the psychology behind scarcity

Similar to urgency, scarcity is a psychological trigger that uses quantity to compel us to act quickly. Scarcity triggers a thought that pushes us to place a higher value on objects that are scarce or rare.

Scarcity also triggers our FOMO instinct: if something was running out of stock, we’d also consider the pros and cons of buying it before it’s too late.

Now that we covered the psychological basis behind urgency and scarcity, here are the best practices to apply them in real-life marketing cases.

Scarcity and urgency best practices for marketers

Scarcity and urgency are undoubtedly powerful techniques to increase conversions.

However, they should be used with caution because pushy methods can rapidly become risky for your brand loyalty.

Avoid fake urgency and scarcity

Creating urgency is good, but abusing it is bad.

Some stores go all out and put everything on sale all year long, creating the feeling that everything is a bargain.

In the image below, you can see that the page gives the impression that every item is on sale. When everything is on sale, your customers realize that nothing really is and you’ll lose credibility.

Scarcity tactics don’t perform well when perceived as manipulative.

As a rule of thumb, only display genuine offers and don’t abuse them. Occasional sales are enough and generally more powerful.

Use the right vocabulary

As we’re exposed to sales and promotional offers all the time, sometimes it’s hard to distinguish fake sales from real bargains.

To avoid sounding too pushy, try not to use too many flashing banners—your visitors should be able to sense a real bargain at first glance.

Create powerful CTAs

Similar to the carefully chosen vocabulary, your call-to-action should state a real benefit and emphasize the urgency/scarcity.

For example, it’s a common practice to indicate the remaining stock in order to trigger the scarcity instinct.

You can see in the image below that Walmart is using this tactic by displaying “only 3 left!” below the price.

Personalize your messages

Crafting personalized messages is a major trend we see in digital marketing.

Whether in B2C or B2B, 1:1 personalization yields major benefits and overall better conversions.

Because it’s so efficient, adding hints of scarcity and urgency to your personalized messages could dramatically increase your sales.

Here are a few tips that you could use to implement scarcity-based personalized messages:

• Additional personalized product suggestions
• Dynamic text insertion
• Email campaigns using marketing automation
• Contextual Targeting

Want to get started on personalizing your content? AB Tasty is the complete platform for personalization and experimentation equipped with the tools you need to create a richer digital experience for your customers — fast. With embedded AI and automation, this platform can help you achieve omnichannel personalization and revolutionize your brand and product experiences.

5 Real-life examples of scarcity and urgency tactics used to increase conversions

Now that we’ve covered the best practices in scarcity marketing and urgency marketing tactics, let’s see some real-life examples.

Booking.com

Booking.com does an outstanding job of triggering a sense of urgency among its visitors. In the image below, you can see that they indicate how many times a given hotel was booked in a 12 or 24-hour period.

On top of that, they use messaging to enhance this sense of urgency such as: “Don’t Miss This” or “In High Demand!”

Using scarcity methods, Booking.com can boost internal competition in order to provide a superior service to its customers.

OnePlus

OnePlus is a smartphone company that became popular in a matter of months by playing solely on the scarcity tactic. They created a smartphone that you could only buy if you were invited.

It was impossible to buy this smartphone from any store and you could only order it directly from their website.

By creating a sense of exclusivity, OnePlus triggered a massive fear-of-missing-out effect that spread within the tech-savvy community.

Their daring marketing campaign was mostly based on the scarcity principle and led to a massive 1M unit sales and 25 million visits to their website.

Sushi Shop

In the food delivery industry, avoiding late deliveries is a tremendous challenge, considering that the average worker only dedicates half an hour for lunch breaks.

Marketers at SushiShop (a French leader in sushi delivery) wanted to test an urgency marketing tactic to see if it could yield any positive results.

Having this in mind, AB Tasty helped the brand introduce a stress marketing tactic based on the urgency principle.

In order to do so, we implemented a sticky banner at lunchtime on their mobile app to urge customers to pre-order. The idea was that they could pre-order to guarantee a satisfying delivery time and avoid late deliveries.

The results were very positive. They saw a 3% increase in cart order confirmations.

Amazon

As the largest e-commerce company in the world, Amazon is an obvious choice when it comes to scarcity and urgency examples.

On top of their nearly perfect product pages and listing pages, Amazon also has a “Today’s Deals” section where limited offers are displayed.

Their product listing cleverly displays your savings in order to highlight the price difference.

Furthermore, some products come in a limited quantity: Amazon uses this scarcity method to display the remaining stock.

In this case, 33% have already been claimed.

Using this strategy, Amazon manages to create a real sense of scarcity and urgency while not being too pushy in the process.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a famous communication and project management software known for making teams’ lives easier.

Besides its fancy visual identity, this company uses clever urgency tactics to make you feel like you’re missing out on something if you don’t use Basecamp.

By quoting real numbers from clients’ statistics, Basecamp clearly illustrates the benefits of using their product.

They even mention how many businesses have signed up in the last week.

On its “Real Results” page, Basecamp displays a huge number of customer reviews. Seeing all of these reviews could make you feel like the whole planet is using it, and that’s exactly what they want: The end goal is to trigger your FOMO.

Benefits of scarcity and urgency marketing tactics

In the hypercompetitive marketplace today, brands need to focus on winning customer attention in order to increase conversions.

Scarcity and urgency marketing are two very important approaches that can help increase the conversions that you’re after, gather new leads and close more deals. Just remember to apply urgency and scarcity responsibly – you don’t want your visitors to lose trust in your company.

These tactics can help you avoid the overuse of pushy advertisements on your website but still add light pressure on visitors to complete their purchases.

Encourage your visitors by using some of the urgency or scarcity tactics highlighted in the article above to see your conversion rate skyrocket.

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Forget about Blue Monday, this webinar is designed for you to remember the reason why you got into CX in the first place. Let’s focus on the fundamentals of CX and what makes a digital experience memorable and meaningful.

In partnership with Contentsquare we will be discussing:

• How to identify friction and bad user experiences on your site
• Create real empathy with your audience by understanding their needs and frustrations
• How to move quicker and faster in order to improve the customer experience on your site
• Testing, optimization, personalization, customer discovery journey  – all the ways you can delight your customers!
• Real-life practical examples from our customers

Find out how to optimize your site, quickly and efficiently, based on data in order to make memorable user experiences that will drive customer lifetime value and brand loyalty.

Save your seat below!

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However, investment in product development and targeted marketing is even more important during times of economic uncertainty. In this fireside chat, our panel will discuss the following topics within the context of today’s economy.

• Understanding Your Customers’ Entire Journey.
  Get a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior by analyzing unified data from across the customer lifecycle, including website, mobile, email, and more.
• Powering Personalized Customer Experiences.
  Deliver unified, targeted customer experiences across every channel to drive more efficient acquisition and effective retention.
• Making Better Product Decisions.
  Identify areas of drop-off and conversion so you can prioritize marketing efforts and product features that drive user engagement and retention.
• Promoting a Data-Informed Organization.
  Empower your entire team by democratizing access to data with easy-to-use, self-serve analytics on top of unified customer datasets.

The post Future-Proof Your Business with Innovation appeared first on abtasty.

Curating a unique experience is vital to ensure your customer’s needs are met during the entire user journey.

For this, you’ll need to become familiar with the digital customer journey specifics, the five phases customers pass through, and how to optimize the digital customer journey to deliver the best user experience.

Let’s start by defining the purchasing journey.

Related: Check out our customer journey infographic to optimize every step of your digital customer journey

What is the digital customer journey?

The digital customer journey consists of the steps a consumer takes on the way to a desired action, such as a purchase.

It involves all the touchpoints that the customer might encounter along the way from the moment they have an interest in the purchase, to initial contact with a product or brand and the remaining steps that lead up to the purchase.

When the sale is complete, the journey does not stop there. The journey continues after the sale by implementing customer loyalty strategies to encourage repeat purchases.

These “touchpoints” or points of contact with a brand or product are important because most customers will be exposed to a brand or product multiple times before making a purchase decision. Touchpoints include both physical and digital advertisements, online forums and word-of-mouth recommendations, which means that each customer’s journey has a unique duration and path.

To get the most out of your customer’s journey, it’s important to consider the unique situation of each customer to adapt to their needs.

Adapting to the needs of each customer

As you’re planning your digital customer journey, you need to account for the different needs and expectations of each customer.

Customer needs and expectations can vary widely based on their intentions and where they are in the customer journey. In the same way, their behavior will differ during each phase in terms of how they search and what information they’re looking for.

It is important to be able to adapt to the needs of each customer when they enter your online store, regardless of where they are in the customer journey.

The purpose of the digital customer journey

The digital customer journey is a tool for guiding your online customers to make a desired action. By having a thorough understanding of your customer’s needs, desires and typical behavior, you can offer them a smooth shopping experience, specifically catered to them.

Despite the array of customer journey models available, which represent various approaches and implement numerous phases, they all start with a common factor: customer awareness.

In order to sell a product, a customer must first be aware of its existence and be interested enough to seek further information. Most purchases are not made spontaneously, but rather after consideration and research.

The customer journey model should take this into account and guide the customer toward a conversion, which might be in the form of a purchase, a newsletter subscription, or a digital download.

Digital customer journey phases

Each phase of the digital customer journey plays an important role in the conversion of a customer.

The number of phases within a customer journey varies depending on the model you follow. In the example below, we will be focusing on one key model: the customer-centric model.

Most models, including the customer-centric model, consist of a minimum of five phases. However, these phases can also be divided into smaller actions depending on how detailed you want to be.

When thinking of different phases of the customer journey, visualization is an important step to take prior to its implementation. Building a template for a visual representation will help you truly understand and see where your customers go, how they get there, and when they pause their journey.

A customer-centric model

In order to have a customer-centric approach, you must first understand customer needs at each phase of the shopping experience and tailor that need to each customer.

This customer journey model consists of five phases and, while it is based on brick-and-mortar retail processes, the customer needs are transferable to the online space.

The five phases: research, selection, buying intent, loyalty, and confidence correspond with customer needs: orientation, recommendation, inspiration, entertainment and connection.

These requirements must be addressed in addition to their digital needs when building out the customer journey.

Phase 1: Research

To draw in visitors to the first stage, you have to have a unique value proposition to differentiate your brand from the rest. The role in this phase is to persuade the visitor to begin their journey with you and nurture them with educational information to feed their interest and answer their questions.

During this phase of the customer journey, the customer is already aware and interested in a particular product. Typically, they’re arriving at the online store with the intention of finding a product that matches their desires.

As an e-commerce brand, your role is to reassure the customer of the suitability of your product, your trustworthiness and your site security.

At this point in their journey, the customer requires orientation within the online store.

By implementing intelligent search, logical categories, facet navigation and personalized results, you can facilitate the research process for your customers and help them to find a corresponding product faster.

The easier it is for your customers to navigate your online store, the lower your bounce rate will be and the greater the chance of your customers converting.

Having an intelligent search algorithm built into your website is very important to appeal to customer needs. AI search algorithms should be able to properly interpret what users are searching for at all times, even when a visitor makes a typo. Searching frustration can be easily avoided on e-commerce websites with the help of an intelligent, optimization platform designed specifically with this in mind.

AB Tasty is the best-in-class experience optimization platform to help you convert more customers by leveraging intelligent search and recommendations to create a richer digital experience – fast. From experimentation to personalization, this solution can help you achieve the perfect digital experience with ease.

Phase 2: Selection

As the customer progresses to the next phase of their journey, they require more in-depth product information, reviews, comparisons and recommendations to be able to make their decision.

Their attention will be drawn to the product detail page, where all product information should be clearly displayed alongside elements that reinforce your trustworthiness and security. At this point, an online assistant can give vital advice to your customers regarding their product selection, to make sure their needs are met.

By accompanying your customers during the selection phase, you can reduce your rate of product returns and increase customer satisfaction.

Phase 3: Buying intent

With the information, advice and comparisons gathered during phase three, the customer is now ready to make a purchase decision. This is the perfect time to inspire them with personalized product recommendations, which take into consideration prior user behavior and preferences.

There are systems available that make recommendations based on a customer’s chosen article, to offer added value to the customer and give you an opportunity to cross-sell products. This method can be implemented at different touchpoints, to increase overall shopping cart spending and provide an optimal experience to the customer.

When the customer proceeds with their order, it’s important that the process is as smooth as possible, to prevent them from abandoning their cart during the final stages.

Phase 4: Loyalty

Now that a purchase has been made, the customer moves on to the customer loyalty phase of the journey. An important part of an e-commerce business is ensuring customer retention, which can be achieved by providing entertainment.

One way to fulfill their need for entertainment and their desire for seamless, customized browsing is to offer a personalized, interactive shopping experience. This will help to build an emotional bond with your customer and encourage their loyalty to the brand to decrease the potential of churn.

By filtering the articles on display based on the preferences of each customer, they are only exposed to relevant products, saving them time and making the experience more enjoyable, resulting in an increase of repeat purchases.

Phase 5: Connection

Once you have gained customer loyalty, it’s time to solidify the trust between your brand and your customer, through communication.

To build an maintain a connection with your customers, you can offer them news-worthy content, special deals and product recommendations based on their purchase history. These customers already know and trust your brand. Connecting with them will likely increase the traffic to your online store and repeated business.

To build and maintain a connection with your customers, you can offer them personalized email newsletters offering special deals and product recommendations based on their purchase history, which will likely increase the traffic to your online store and repeat business.

The ultimate goals at this stage are to build loyalty, increase customer retention rates, and decrease churn.

Mapping your customer journey

Customer journey mapping enables you to recognize and optimize the various touchpoints which occur during the customer journey.

By leveraging your knowledge about your customer you can ensure a positive experience at every touchpoint they have with the brand, in order to build trust, connection and a willingness to buy.

Using personalization to enhance your customer journey

With the vast array of products and brands to choose from, customer loyalty has become more important than ever. By focusing on personalizing the digital customer journey, you can reduce the chances of your customer abandoning their purchase or opting for another brand.

An individualized customer journey is beneficial for the following reasons:

• Option overload: As online brands fight for the attention of consumers, it’s important to set your brand apart from the rest, with a customer journey that is tailored to their needs.
• Analysis paralysis: With a plethora of information now readily available to customers who are researching and comparing potential purchases, your digital customer journey can help to deliver the information they need with ease and offer them the best shopping experience, thereby tipping the scale in your favor.
• Lack of loyalty: The ease with which a customer can change service providers has increased the pressure and importance of meeting their needs during the entirety of the digital customer journey. Every interaction matters.

Offering a personalized experience elevates the customer journey and helps to ensure customer satisfaction. By leveraging the power of personalization, you can adapt the individual phases of the customer journey to each customer’s needs for an optimal e-commerce experience.

Personalization is the key to customer satisfaction

There is no way to deny the intense competition in the e-commerce space. Attracting and retaining customers is more difficult now than it has ever been. To advance ahead of the competition, you must understand customer needs and personalize each user journey with the help of a customer journey model.

By personalizing each experience your customers have with your brand, you can be sure to give your customers an optimal shopping experience, guarantee customer satisfaction and encourage customer loyalty.

The post Understanding the Digital Customer Journey appeared first on abtasty.

But how do you choose the right experiment and gain greater insights?   

In this webinar, we will discuss:

• How to enable teams to test more boldly, reducing guesswork
• The importance of understanding the “why” behind customer behavior and how this is key to prioritizing actions, driving gains in conversion, increasing revenue and improving customer satisfaction
• Driving business impact faster and more accurately by interpreting insights and visuals in real-time

The post Reducing the Guesswork Behind Journey Experimentation appeared first on abtasty.