A practical guide to customer journey analytics
By mastering customer journey analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of your customers’ actual needs and behaviours. This will help you identify hidden patterns and trends in how your customers interact with your brand. You can then use this information to create the ultimate customer experience. In this guide, we’ll discuss what customer journey analytics is and how you can use it to effectively improve the customer experience. Let’s get started!
What is customer journey analytics?
Customer journey analytics is the process of evaluating and understanding all customer interactions with your company or brand. The goal of customer journey analytics is simple: to improve the customer experience, marketing, and sales activities, and increase profitable revenue.
The analysis often begins with creating a customer journey map, which visualises each touchpoint a customer has with your company in a graph or flowchart. However, customer journey analytics goes beyond simply mapping the customer journey. Every interaction that influences a customer’s decision about your brand is put under a microscope to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
Customer journey analytics can include a wide range of metrics, such as:
- Customer satisfaction scores (NPS)
- Funnel conversion rates
- Time on page
- Percentage of returning visitors
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- And much more
Why is customer journey analytics important?
As discussed, the goal of customer journey analytics is to improve the customer experience and profitable revenue. Analysing a customer journey provides your business with significant benefits to improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. It shows which marketing activities and channels are most effective, which products or services are most popular, and where customers experience bottlenecks during the buying process. But there are more benefits:
More focus on customer-centricity
By deeply analysing your customers’ behaviour, you can put the customer at the centre of your organisation. This will give you a better understanding of your customers’ actual needs and behaviours, allowing you to create personalised customer journeys and campaigns that align seamlessly with them.
Identify problems in real-time
Real-time customer journey analytics enables you to quickly identify and address problems as they arise. For example, if one of your email campaigns contains an invalid hyperlink, your analyses will quickly show that something is wrong and needs to be changed.
Eliminate data silos
Customer journey analytics eliminates data silos and creates unity within your organisation. Although analysing customer journeys across different channels requires large amounts of data, it also streamlines processes across departments. By having an organisation-wide understanding of the customer experience, employees will better understand how the customer journey looks and can be optimised. This leads to a more consistent, high-quality experience for customers, as employees can anticipate what happens before and after interactions.
Customer journey analytics in 5 steps
Measuring, analysing, and optimising the customer journey can be broken down into the following steps:
1. Centralise your data and define the customer journey
The first step in customer journey analytics is to centralise data from different sources and marketing channels. If you use a CDP, this often happens automatically. Without a CDO, the process will be more complex and time-consuming, but it is still worth doing.
Then you can start mapping out the different phases of the customer journey. Begin by identifying the most important touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, such as social media, email, service calls, and website touchpoints.
2. Analyse your customer data
After collecting and centralising customer data, it is important to gain insights into customers’ actual behaviour and needs. This can be done using a variety of techniques, such as segmentation, user profiling, and predictive modelling. By linking specific touchpoint interactions to customer behaviour, external data, social media data, survey results, and more, you will gain insights into how customers interact with your business.
However, a CDP goes one step further by generating a 360-degree customer profile for each individual customer, giving you a more complete picture of your target audience’s preferences and behaviour.
3. Identify pain points
The goal of customer journey analytics is to optimise the customer experience, so identifying any bottlenecks in both the buyer and customer journey is essential. Where does the customer journey not meet expectations? Where do they leave the buying process? Is there a way to improve this specific touchpoint?
4. Optimise the customer journey
Once all interactions and pain points have been fully mapped out, the next step is to optimise the customer journey. It is best to start by optimising one interaction point at a time and measuring the effect of each change. This could include making changes to your website, marketing campaigns, or customer service. Once the optimisations have a positive effect, you can move on to the next area for improvement until the entire customer journey is optimised.
5. Continuously monitor and evaluate
Optimising the customer journey is a continuous process. Consumer behaviour and technology are constantly changing. Therefore, it is important to continue monitoring the effectiveness of your customer journey. If customer journey analytics shows that the bounce rate or other metrics are declining over time, it is important to repeat this process. And periodically repeat it.
A simple way to improve the customer experience with customer journey analytics
Due to the enormous growth of data and marketing channels, many marketing teams struggle to effectively implement data management and data analysis. Not surprisingly, these processes are often complex and extremely time-consuming.
The benefits of customer journey analytics are clear, however. It provides more specific and in-depth insights into how you can create the ultimate customer experience. Which results in lower bounce rates and media costs in combination with higher conversion rates, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
Do you want to fully leverage the potential of customer journey analytics without the labour-intensive collection and analysis of data? Our Customer Data Platform automatically collects, centralises, and segments all your customer data. So that you can focus on the strategic and creative aspects of customer journey analytics: creating the ultimate customer experience.
Spotler Activate enables every marketer to easily centralize first-party data and create hyper-personalised customer journeys without the need for IT or programming knowledge.
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