How to Create Your E-commerce Customer Journey Map

E-commerce brands are more pressured than ever from creating a new customer journey map. You may be asking why? It is all because of the customer experience and interaction with your products.

Many e-commerce sites are endlessly finding new methods on how to create an e-commerce customer journey map. This is because once a competitor has created one better than yours, there will be challenges you will have to face.

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Don’t worry! Because today we are going to show you a few tips on how to create the right customer journey map!

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What Is an E-commerce Customer Journey Map?

The e-commerce customer journey map is composed of a series of stages a customer interacts with your products.

These all include awareness, consideration, decision, to retention. These interactions can happen through your social media channels, Google Ads, reviews, and organic website traffic.

The whole goal of the customer journey map is to convert a new customer to a long life loyal customer. This is why we focus on the journey map a lot.

The word itself is telling us that it defines all the experiences a customer has had and is going to have with your product. 

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The Customer’s Journey 

The e-commerce customer journey has four stages: 

1. Awareness 

The first encounter a customer has with your brand/product. The awareness stage usually comes from social media, a website visit, an ad click, etc.

Awareness all arises when a customer has a problem that he/she wants to solve. The customer may do research to solve this problem and finds your website (if it ranks well enough), or sees an ad you placed on social media.

The best awareness you can get off of customers is when you are well-known, recommended, have good site optimization, good social media presence, etc.

2. Consideration

The consideration stage is the one when customers start thinking about whether to buy or not.Customers at this point are not only considered the price but for their budget also.

They will compare products from your site and others to see what fits them best. This is where all your customers will be looking at your package services, offers, product reviews, etc.

3. Decision

This is the final stage before the purchase. Customers are narrowing down their ideas and seeing what can fit them best. It is where they see if your product is unique compared to the rest or not.

This stage will show whether you created a good e-commerce customer journey map or not.

4. Retention

The last stage of the customer journey. This is the stage the customer buys some product off of you. Customer retention all depends on the quality of the product or service you gave the customer during their purchase. This is the phase whether the customer decides if they want to be your regular customer or not.

One mistake during the first purchase is usually what costs you business.It can be a late delivery or returning the product back to you. It is rare that any customer will buy again if they have a bad first impression.

Create a Customer Persona

You have to know the customer before the customer comes to you. The best thing to do is to create a customer persona. 

Customer personas can take a long to create but are worth it since they give you an overview of what customers you are targeting. Customer personas are good in identifying the following:

• How did the customer find you?
• What made your product attractive?
• What made them choose your product?
• Why your website?
• What can be better?
• What was their experience?

Understanding the psychology of the human being means you understand how to increase sales.

Analyze Behaviour Flow Report

You can do a quick behavior flow report with Google Analytics.

The behavior flow of first-time visitors, loyal customers, returning visitors, etc, is very important to know.

Even those who stay long periods of time on your website and end up not buying. All of these hints let you know what you can improve in your services.

Analyze the Conversion page

Check out which page on your site is the most visited. This way you can know which page is bringing you the best conversions.

Maybe you are getting your biggest conversion from Facebook Ads, organic SEO growth, Google Ads, or something else.

It is very helpful when you know this because it helps you concentrate on what gives you the most results.

Most online e-commerce sites have found out the social media plays a huge role in increasing brand awareness. Since it helps you get more exposure and website conversions.

Analyze Customer Wants/Needs

If you don’t care about your customers, your customers won’t care about you. It is very important you always analyze their purchase behaviors and show them that they are important to you.

This leads to long-term retention and long-term loyalty from the customer side.

“You need to give first to get”

What Is The Ideal E-commerce Customer Journey Map?

To have a great customer journey map, you want to follow these steps in creating one:

• Set goals for each buying stage – From the first visit to your website, make sure you know your customer as well as they do. Think as if you were in their shoes and try to come up with strategies that lead them to a long-life/term customer.
• Identify Loyalty – Identify what stage led to customer retention/loyalty. These steps will help you create the ideal customer journey map.
• Identify the Competition maps – you want to analyze the viewpoints of your competitors as well. What you have to always know is that nothing can work forever. Even if your customer journey map is working, watch out and research what your competition is doing!.
• Gather feedback – ask your first-time visitors, your customers how they feel about your products, your website. Do a questionnaire, a survey, or something. You never lose anything knowing more! 
• Improve – As we said before, don’t ever stick to the same map. Through feedback and consistent improvement, your map can always be ahead of the rest.

Why Do I Need an E-commerce Customer Journey Map?

If you don’t know how your customers are interacting with your business, then who else will know? That is the answer to why you need one.

We already told you about the customer persona you should create. Creating an e-commerce customer journey map helps you understand the lifecycle of the customer in the four different stages of the customer journey.

The customer journey map clarifies what is missing in your business, and shows you how customers feel about your business.

As we mentioned the 4 different stages of the customer journey, the map lets you know what is missing in each of the points. This allows room for improvement and clarifies your priorities and weaknesses.

Conclusion

These were our tips on creating the ideal customer journey map. It is always easier to do so when you have the right guidance.

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