How to get meaningful insights into the ecommerce customer journey
A shopping experience does not become seamless by itself. 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 in visiting your website before eventually buying your product. And some never do.
Understanding the ecommerce customer journey gives valuable insights into your customer’s 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 visualization 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 to identify bottlenecks: Touchpoints that, due to unsatisfactory interactions, lead to customers leaving the journey.
Identifying these bottlenecks and optimizing them is of great importance to making sure that your customer journey is as smooth as it can be. But there are other ways towards providing the best customer experience possible.
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 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 optimize the customer experience
Personalisation and a smooth customer journey go hand in hand in the process of optimizing 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 all your data from multiple channels to create a complete overview of the customer and its journey. A customer data platform (CDP) like Spotler Activate can help unify and organize this data on one 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 behaviour traits, preferences, and demographics of each individual customer. Which you can use to deliver a personalized customer journey.
By visualizing all touchpoints across the different stages of the customer journey, you get a complete overview of all the interactions with your company. This allows you to evaluate each one of them.
3. Identify bottlenecks
With the touchpoints visualized across the map, you can now identify the pain points: The interactions that lead your customers to leave their buying experience. Where is the interaction not meeting your customer’s expectations? Where do they bounce? And is there a way to optimize this touchpoint?
By following these three steps, you now have a complete overview of the customer journey and have extracted the most important insights from it. Time to use these insights to your advantage!
You do so by transforming customer data into the most personalized experience possible. And by optimizing all the bottlenecks that you have identified. How? With the help of a CDP.
The Spotler Activate 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 for time-consuming analysis of every individual customer’s interactions with your company, to then personalize these interactions.
Spotler Activate does this automatically. It collects your data, does the analysis, and enables you to easily set up personalized advertising campaigns, e-mails, and dynamic content blocks on your website.
And it offers a wide range of insights to help you optimize 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 smoothen the journey.
In summary, Spotler Activate lets you gain 360-degree customer insights and personalize the customer journey and touchpoints. Which, over time, leads to higher conversion rates, revenues, and increased customer loyalty in combination with lower media costs.
Book a free demo directly
Interested to find out what insights from a CDP can add to your company? Book a demo and get inspired.
