Online commerce has become more sophisticated than ever before, and keeping loyal customers is one of the biggest challenges an online store owner will face. To put it simply, customers have a lot more options than they used to — and if they don’t find what they want at your store, they can easily go somewhere else.
If you want to have more regular, loyal customers, get them to try out your new app or service, or just get them to read your newsletter again, it won’t just happen by itself — they’ll need your gentle guidance to do so, and that means taking them on a customer journey.
What is a customer journey?
It’s the process of guiding and encouraging someone from being a total stranger to your company to loyal customer.
The process typically looks like this:
Awareness, where someone discovers your company for the first time, whether it’s through ads, social media, word of mouth, or whatever. The important thing is, they want to know more and will likely visit your website to find out.
Acquisition, where the visitor becomes a customer by purchasing your product or service and signed up for email updates so they can be notified of any new merchandise, sales, or offers.
Onboarding happens when you start sending emails to make the customer feel welcomed, tell them a bit about what to expect from these updates, and maybe show them some other items they might like. (This will become important in data-driven journeys, which we’ll get to in a moment.)
Engagement, where you get customers to keep your business in mind, whether they buy from you regularly, read your blog, watch your videos, or interact with your business on social media.
Advocacy, where the customer becomes an evangelist for your product or service, spreading the word about how great you are. This is a great way to get new customers.
There is a great tutorial we recorded at Freshworks Summer School from Kirsty Traill VP of Customer Experience at Hootsuite where she goes over each one of these stages in the customer journey, here it is:
Why data-driven customer journey is important
You may have noticed an important theme running through the steps above — they involve making sure the customer feels welcome, valued, and engaged. One of the best ways to make that happen is through personalized content — show them products, offers, and sales you know they’ll be interested in.
The best way to personalize is by collecting data on their preferences, buying habits, and online behavior. This takes the guesswork out of trying to appeal to a segment of the customer base, instead relying on hard data to inform your marketing, sales, and even customer service decisions.
D2C brands can collect this information in a number of ways. For example, software tools can collect information from website videos using heat mapping, live recordings of website visits, and survey tools. (More on these tools in the steps below.)
A data-driven approach means gleaning actionable insight from collected data and using it to optimize content publication, nurturing of leads, promotional materials, and customer communication of every kind. It can also help you overcome some of the more pernicious obstacles to acquiring and retaining a customer.
Challenges of an online storefront
Before we get into the steps you should take to build a successful data-driven customer journey, let’s take a look at some of the more common pitfalls of trying to land a customer in the first place — in other words, why potential customers might leave your website before ever making a purchase.
Statistics have shown that almost 51% of potential customers bounce or leave a website before completing the purchase of an item they’ve put in their cart. That means the majority of visitors to your website never get to the point of buying. Why is that?
One of the major reasons, ironically enough, is fraud prevention. Online fraud is a major problem for sellers, and while fraud prevention tools which can detect signs of identity theft and possibly reduce fraud, they operate on strict rulesets that can lead to false positives, i.e., legitimate purchases being declined. When that happens, a customer is more than likely going to bail and never come back. It’s highly improbable that they’ll contact you, try to work around the problem, or ever come back to complete the purchase.
This is only one of the reasons visitors might leave your website before purchasing anything. Other reasons might include:
- Poor or uninformative landing page design.
- Substandard promotions or special offers.
- Asking the customer to provide too many details upfront.
- Confusing or unsightly navigation/purchasing process.
If you’re an owner of an online business, you already know keeping your bounce rate low is essential to the process of acquiring a customer. The tricky part is knowing when to use tools like chatbot messages, popups, or other software tools to try to keep them around long enough to make a purchase.
But there are automated solutions to make this process easier and more precise. For example, the Freshmarketer for Shopify store owners will allow you to set up a gentle reminder for your shoppers that they have an item in their cart through an SMS or WhatsApp message, helpfully pointing out the discount they can get if they complete their purchase.
Take a look at how this is configured in the app and looks like to the customer:
7 steps to a data-driven customer journey
Now that we’ve established some of the pitfalls of running an online storefront, let’s take a look at how to create a customer experience that will not only get them to complete that purchase, but to keep coming back for more.
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Gather key data
One of the adages of big data is that raw data isn’t useful by itself. That data has to be organized, analyzed, and shaped into something presentable to executives and shareholders. This is no small feat, and is one of the reasons marketing analysts are in such high demand.
But if you don’t have the budget for a marketing analyst, there are software tools that can gather data and provide valuable insights. Freshmarketer helps businesses form a 360° view of contacts, gathering valuable data even before they become a customer. It can track website visits, form completion, sales interactions, and eventually purchases, giving business owners a thorough profile of their customers and their needs. This data allows store owners to automate their campaigns to increase conversions with multichannel engagement through email, SMS, WhatsApp, and chat.
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Create smart segments and target your customers better
This step goes hand-in-hand with automation — creating a personalized experience for each and every customer. Creating smart segments based on the data you collect with Freshmarketer allows store owners to personalize each and every message they send to their customers.
You can segment your customers by their location/geography, how your contact interacts with your website, different behavior triggers to target the right set of customers at the right time and improve conversion opportunities from your campaigns.
Here is how it looks like inside the Freshmarketer app:
By crafting messages and notes that seem to be made just for them at the right time, you can make the customer feel welcome and valued, increasing the chances of getting a successful conversion or turning a customer into a spokesperson for your brand.
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Optimize website experience to increase conversions
As a storeowner your job is to attract quality leads, improve conversions, and accelerate growth. When a customer engages with your online storefront you need to make sure they have the best possible experience so that you can convert them.
Here are the major steps to follow to increase your conversions:
- Analyze your visitors behavior – Use heatmaps, funnel analysis, and replays of user sessions to see what they’re doing on your website, and spot and fix user experience issues and errors.
- Customize experiences to your audiences – run A/B tests and split tests to figure out what resonates with your customers the most in terms of design and copy on the site.
- Keep customers engaged – the key here is to prevent customer from abandoning your site by triggering the right messages at the right time. Here is an example of the same message from earlier in the article as an SMS asking the customer to complete the transaction:
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Act on your analytics.
One of the major benefits of a data-driven approach is not only being able to craft your campaigns around hard data, but also to get hard data about your results. Freshmarketer analytics reports allow you to build your own dashboards to measure customer engagement, SMS and emails’ performance as well as conversions. Filters allow you to view data across emails, journeys, and contacts behavior, here is how this looks like in the app:
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Improve & foster collaboration
These days most of the workforce is remote, which means collaboration among your team members is something that is at the forefront of your everyday business. You need to collaborate across functions, teams and time zones.
Freshmarketer allows you to create separate reports and share and export them with different functions and teams as well as team members at your company.
Whether you use our app or another to share reports with your team, remember that personalized reports as they pertain to different functions on your team will help each team member receiving the report collaborate with you more efficiently. For example – if you’re creating a report for someone in a sales role – omit the UX interactions and marketing campaign details and focus on sales funnel analysis.
This is basic common sense when it comes to sharing data and reports, yet most of the time we forget to do this.
Another quick tip is that since you are collaborating across different departments, from sales to customer service you need to have one place where any department can look up all your customer data.
This can be an integrated software tool, whether it’s CRM software or other ETL tools that can organize your data in a way that’s easily accessible to everyone in your business.
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Map customer interactions across multiple touchpoints.
We talked about this before but we just want to remind you that in order to get a clear picture of your customers’ behavior, you’ll need to create a customer journey map to visually represent the experiences and interactions those customers have. In particular, it pays to discover all the touchpoints your customers use to interact with you, whether it’s your website, social media channels, ads, or marketing materials.
Because so much in sales relies upon getting customers the right information at the right time, a journey map will show you exactly when and where to present that information.
Once you have this journey map you can use an app such as Freshmarketer to engage with customers over SMS or email or across other channels with the right messaging at the right time.
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Automate
You have probably gathered that automation is one of the most powerful ways you can increase conversions for your online storefront. It’s important to make sure you test and know exactly what to say and when by running test campaigns on a small set of your audience.
Do not start scaling an automation campaign to your entire audience until you have data showing you that it’s working on a small subset of your customers.
This is where running informed and driven by hard data campaigns comes into play. Automated email campaigns, SMS or WhatsApp follow-ups, and other tools can be set to automatically guide potential and existing customers through the customer journey process, with minimal need for human staff to monitor or get involved.
Just remember to use data and customer journey maps to build these automations.
Now it’s Your Turn!
It’s a proven fact that it’s cheaper and easier to retain existing customers than it is to gain new ones — and that’s why it’s important to make the customer journey a never-ending one. Keeping personalization fresh, relevant, and consistent is key to making sure your existing customers don’t become the ones leaving items in their cart without completing a purchase. After all, one of the major reasons to create a data-driven customer journey in the first place is to turn a passerby into a loyal customer who will spread word of mouth about your business — and that means continuing to make them feel valued, appreciated, and welcome well into the future.
Now it’s your turn, give it a try and let us know how it works out in the comments below or email us!
