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Having a solid understanding of your customer journey is vital to your business success. Not only does your customer journey impact your ability to attract new customers, but it helps to foster customer loyalty and boost retention.
Your customer journey is a roadmap of each experience your customers will go through when they interact with your brand. This doesn’t just focus on a single part of the experience, such as the buying stage, but looks at the complete experience from beginning to end.
If you don’t understand your customer journey, how can you expect to optimise it? Making improvements to the way customers interact with you can increase revenue, boost customer satisfaction and encourage repeat business. We are looking at the best techniques and tools to understand your customer journey.
Use consumer behaviour modelling
One of the most effective ways to get a good understanding of your customer journey is to use consumer behaviour modelling. By turning your attention to consumer behaviour, you can see exactly how your customers make their purchasing decisions.
Consumer behaviour modelling can help your business to understand who your customers are, what they like, what they don’t like, what motivates them and how they shop.
There are many different methods available to help collect and collate this data, some of which we will discuss in this article. Once you are using these data collection methods, you can use various consumer behaviour models to gain insights into your customer journey.
Carefully evaluate customer analytics
Every action a customer makes can provide valuable insights into their behaviour. Tools such as Google Analytics will give you insights into how your consumers are interacting with your business online. There are endless ways that Google Analytics can help your website, and utilising this data will help you understand your customer journey.
From bounce rates to the time spent on each page, all of this behavioural data can lead you to conclusions about your visitors, such as if consumers are having difficulty navigating your checkout pages, or which pieces of content are driving more traffic to your site organically.
Create detailed buyer personas
When we talk about creating buyer personas, many marketers automatically look at generic demographics such as location, age and profession. When you want to get an understanding of your customer journey, you need to create personas which are detailed. This will help you to create marketing messages and campaigns which truly resonate with your audience.
There are various ways to create detailed buying personas. Utilising your Google Analytics, you can look at your acquisitions to understand where your consumers are finding you, whether it be social media, paid campaigns or industry blogs. Not only that, but looking at keyword data can help you to discover the terms that your personas are using to describe your business and products.
Look at your customer reviews
Online reputation plays a crucial role in the customer journey. Not only will many consumers use customer reviews to help them make their buying decisions, but the information given in reviews can be very powerful in understanding the customer journey.
Reviews and feedback affect every stage of the customer journey. Many customers will begin their journey with research and will look in detail at product and business reviews before making any buying decisions. In fact, research shows that 95% of customers will read reviews before purchasing.
At the other end of the journey, customers who have made a purchase might leave a review, providing vital insights into who they are and their unique buying journey. Analysing reviews that have been left for your business or product in detail can help you to understand who your customers are, how they found you and how they feel about your brand.
Looking at sentiments and other insights to your online reputation can reveal a lot of useful information about your customer journey.
Ask your customers their opinions
One of the most effective ways of understanding your customer journey is to go directly to your audience and ask them. Use surveys, focus groups, and interviews to find out detailed information about who your customers are, how they found your business, and why they have chosen your products.
Surveys are very effective for providing real-time data from a large group of people, whereas focus groups and interviews are better for in-depth insights from a small audience.
Businesses today have no reason for not fully understanding their customer journey, with so many tools and techniques out there to help gain valuable insights.
Consumer behaviour modelling, advanced analytics and customer feedback are all effective ways of finding out more about your customer and their journey with you. Once you understand your customer journey, you will be better placed to create an engaging experience for your consumers.