Customer Purchase Journey and Mapping in Digital Analytics

In online marketing, customer purchase journey and mapping is an essential part of this online journey. The purchase funnel comprises of different stages. Like, Acquisition, Behavior, and conversion.

• Acquisition is what building awareness about your product or service and making the prospect interested in your product or service
• Behavior, as to how he engages with your website content with regard to your product or service.
• Conversion takes place when a user becomes a customer and carry out transactions with your business.

To sell the products or services, we do carry out marketing. It may be online or offline. The difference is that in the offline world, it’s difficult to track the activities during the purchase cycle. While online we can always measure the activities at every stage of the buying funnel. We can track;

After reading this blog you’ll be able to understand, what customer journey mapping is? the benefits of customer journey mapping and how to create a customer journey map?

I’ll explain with some of customer journey mapping examples which will serve as customer journey map templet.

Customer Journey Example

You have a store selling children’s wear online and your goal is to sell maximum child jackets. To sell maximum, you conducted the campaign to boost the sales and now you want to measure and analyze which campaign performed the best and which channel was better. You can measure all this by using digital analytics and find;

• Which part of the world, people purchased more jackets. So that, you could run more campaigns for those areas.
• How many users proceeded through the shopping process. If you find the more abandoned rate at some stage of the funnel, you can make changes to resolve the problem.

Any online business can benefit from digital analytics. Like;

• If you have an e-commerce business, you can understand the customer’s online purchase behavior and find what is selling and what’s not. And decide the changes to improve the less performing touchpoint.
• If you are publishing content to attract traffic and use it for advertising, you can align your content and advertising in a better way for better results.
• You may collect user information to connect with potential leads and so on.

Google Analytics has the capabilities to collect behavioral data from mobile applications, online point-of-sales systems, video games consoles, CRMs or any other internet connected systems. This all data that you collect from different sources is compiled into Analytics reports to analyze and understand your customers and their purchase journey to improve your business.

Mapping Customer Journey

If you want a holistic understanding of your customers, so that, you can better meet their needs, and measure the impact of being truly assistive to them, then mapping the customer journey is necessary. Your maps should identify all the moments or touchpoints. To determine, when and where your customer would interact with your brand, keep in mind the following points to gain maximum output when mapping the customer journey.

Visualize your customer journey map

Create a visual map of the entire customer journey and simply write down each touchpoint. For example, you want to eat food, your journey map might be:

• You’re studying in your room and decided to order food.
• Started searching online for food delivery options.
• You find a restaurant
• Looked for menu
• You place an order
• Wait for the food to be delivered
• You pay the delivery person
• Eat the food

By mapping the entire customer journey, now, you can collaborate with your team to brainstorm the new ideas and make the changes or additions easily.

Create Hypotheses, Implement and test

Basing on visualization of the customer journey, create hypotheses, as how to improve the customer journey, then implement and test them. If there is something wrong, go back to your journey map, reassess, make necessary changes, and improve. This is not a onetime event, journey mapping process is a continuous process. As with the change in technology or change in customer priorities and taste, your brand has to evolve with it. For all businesses, once a year journey mapping is recommended, to work out what is working and what’s not.

Find the sweet spot where your customers’ goals and your own align

Your goals and customer goals are different. So, you need to consider as how your marketing and communication strategies can help your customer reach their goals while also getting you closer to yours. Remember, helping the customer to achieve his goal will help you to reach your goal and the sweet spot.

Identify all the moments in your customer’s journey

Make a list of all the moments and group them when they happened in the customer journey. These moments could be pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

Now, track what actions and interactions took place between your brand and your customers, just before and after each stage.

For example, when the customer places an item in his shopping cart then you can suggest further the related products with the ad message.

Meet your customers at every point in their purchase journey

Understand the intent of customers, and deliver what a customer needs in the exact moment they need it. For that search is the essential tool as today customer search before any purchase. And by that you know which customer is searching what. At this moment present the relevant ad message to land them on your desired landing page. Remember, you can’t present the same ad message to all the customers.

Experience the customer journey yourself

By experiencing yourself the customer journey will uncover valuable insights to improve your business. Ask yourself these three questions about the main communication touchpoints when experiencing yourself,

• Did the touchpoints for the product or service work well?
• Did they help you complete your journey?
• What was missing?

Recognize pain points and moments of delight

Finding the negative experiences of your customer is very important. One that you will be able to find who from your team is responsible for this touchpoint and you could improve the situation.

Say your ads and the landing page are not align. As a result customer will bounce when they will not find the product the way it was advertised.

Get insights to remove friction

Today we need to look at the customer shopping experience as a whole and offer the most seamless and frictionless experience – from initial search to the final purchase. To make the journey frictionless, shorten the number of steps, make the navigation simple, or make the purchase process easy.

Measure business impact, not channel metrics

KPIs are the most important measure you could take. You need to track search and other demand generation actions such as product page visits, phone calls, quote requests, and then you can assign the value to each action. By this, you will be able to work out the impact of your marketing on business goals.

To conclude, I’ve explained in detail how to analyze the customer journey. if you’re generating large traffic on your website but not translating into sales, you need to find out the problem. At which stage of the buying funnel you are losing the customer. Find which channel is contributing to achieving goals. Your focus should be to make the customer‘s journey easy and smooth to reach the purchase destination efficiently. For any e-commerce business, not understanding the customer journey is disastrous.