How to get meaningful insights into the ecommerce customer journey
A shopping experience does not become seamless on its own. To create the best customer experience, you need to understand the journey a customer goes through, from becoming aware to buying a product. And beyond.
The customer journey becomes more complex as the number of media channels increases. Every single customer walks their own journey. Some become customers through your social channels; others need months of consideration before visiting your website and eventually buying your product. And some never do.
Understanding the ecommerce customer journey gives valuable insights into your customers’ behavioural traits and preferences. But it also sheds light on how your customers perceive their interaction with your business. Valuable information that could either give you a head start or let you play catch-up.
We prefer the head start. That is why we’ll provide tips on getting valuable insights from your ecommerce customer journey. So that you can act and leap ahead.
Mapping out the ecommerce customer journey: Why it’s important
The customer journey is a visualisation of all the interactions that your customers have with your company. By segmenting these touchpoints into specific stages, you create an overview of which stage the customer is in the buyer journey. But it also helps you identify bottlenecks: touchpoints that, due to unsatisfactory interactions, lead customers to leave the journey.
Identifying and optimising these bottlenecks is crucial to ensuring your customer journey is as smooth as possible. But there are other ways to provide the best possible customer experience.
The importance of personalisation
One of the biggest bottlenecks in customer journeys is generic, impersonal content and offerings. The conversion rate of showing a panty liner ad to a male customer can be at most zero. So why show this content in the first place? The answer is simple: due to a lack of insights.
This is where personalisation comes in. The art of showing content that is highly relevant to each individual customer, therefore greatly increasing the chance of them buying your products, while also significantly improving their customer experience with your business.
Using customer journey insights to optimise the customer experience
Personalisation and a smooth customer journey go hand in hand in optimising the customer experience. But to offer highly personalised content and a smooth customer experience, there are several steps you should take first:
1. Gather customer data
Without data, no insights. You must collect and store data from multiple channels to create a comprehensive overview of the customer and their journey. A customer data platform (CDP) like Spotler can help unify and organise this data into a single, insightful platform.
2. Gaining insights from the data
Time to analyse the collected data. This can be done through various tools and techniques such as segmentation, clustering, and predictive modelling. This may sound complex, but it doesn’t have to be.
A CDP does the work for you. By using smart algorithms, it automatically segments your customers and even creates individual customer profiles. This provides you with valuable insights into each individual customer’s behaviour, traits, preferences, and demographics. Which you can use to deliver a personalised customer journey.
By visualising all touchpoints across the customer journey, you get a complete overview of interactions with your company. This allows you to evaluate each one of them.
3. Identify bottlenecks
With the touchpoints visualised on the map, you can now identify the pain points: the interactions that lead your customers to leave your buying experience. Where is the interaction not meeting your customer’s expectations? Where do they bounce? And is there a way to optimise this touchpoint?
By following these three steps, you now have a complete overview of the customer journey and have extracted the most important insights. Time to use these insights to your advantage!
You do so by transforming customer data into the most personalised experience possible. And by optimising all the bottlenecks that you have identified. How? With the help of a CDP.
The Spotler CDP as a way towards customer journey optimisation
Gaining insights into your customer journey can be complex. But transforming these insights into customer experience-improving actions is even harder. It demands time-consuming analysis of each customer’s interactions with your company to personalise them.
Our Customer Data Platform does this automatically. It collects your data, does the analysis, and enables you to easily set up personalised advertising campaigns, e-mails, and dynamic content blocks on your website.
And it offers a wide range of insights to help you optimise the customer journey. It lets you easily create a relevant customer journey and track customer behaviour across channels. This helps you to detect bottlenecks so that you can take action to smooth the journey.
In summary, Spotler lets you gain 360-degree customer insights and personalise the customer journey and touchpoints. Which, over time, leads to higher conversion rates, revenues, and increased customer loyalty in combination with lower media costs.
What can a CDP do for you?
Explore the possibilities of using a CDP for your business. Book a quick demo at a time that suits you.
