On the surface, a customer’s journey on your brand’s website may seem simple. They visit your website, find a product they like, and then make a purchase.
But a closer look at the process will reveal that the journey with your site has multiple stages and touchpoints, all of which can impact your customer’s website experience and either move them along the sales funnel or halt them in their tracks. Thus, a poor website journey translates to a poor customer experience, which negatively affects website conversion.
A recent marketing report found that 80% of customers say that the experience they get from a brand is as important as its products or services. In addition, 66% of customers expect companies to have a full grasp of their unique expectations and needs.
Nothing destroys a business more quickly than silent dissatisfaction. When your customers are dissatisfied with their journey but you have no idea what hampers their experience, then achieving your business goals becomes difficult, if not impossible.
How, then, can companies successfully navigate and facilitate their customers’ journeys, meet their expectations, align customer journey friction with business metrics, and still ensure that their website experiences are smooth, frictionless, and empowering?
One excellent way to truly understand and optimize the customer experience and increase website conversions is through visualizing customer journeys. Or what we call customer journey maps and path analytics.
What are Customer Journey Maps?
With today’s customers using a plethora of communication channels such as mobile apps, smartphones, websites, and emails to interact with brands at various stages of their journeys, delivering delightful, seamless, and consistent experiences at each instance has become more complex.
Customers today are extremely demanding and have high expectations from brands. They won’t think twice about abandoning your site and switching to your competition after an unpleasant experience. This is where customer journey maps come into the picture.
Customer journey maps are compact visualizations of your customers’ end-to-end experience. These visualizations can range from infographics, illustrations, diagrams, and more.
A customer journey map gives your business a clear picture of all the touchpoints your customers encounter with your brand, both online and offline. These data visualizations put you and your team directly in the shoes of your customers. These maps enable you to view your brand, products, services, and processes from the lens of your customers, helping you experience their journey, bottlenecks, and frustration through your brand's funnel.
In short, customer journey maps let you see and feel your customers' experiences with your brand as they progress across your channels - email, live chat, social media, websites, and more. It also points out the parts where your customers drop off and why.
How Customer Journey Maps Increase Website Conversions
Effective tools (like Blue Triangle Enhanced Marketing Insights) enable you to leverage real-time analytics to derive high-quality, actionable insights to keep your finger on the pulse of your customer journey and supercharge your website and campaigns.
By visualizing your customers' journey and end-user friction, you're able to:
- Understand your customers better. Actively monitor essential business and engagement metrics by campaign, referral source, geography, visitor type (new vs return), and more to amplify specific customer experiences.
- Fully optimize the customer onboarding process. Simplify your customers' introduction to your brand, product, or service.
- Identify your customers' pain points. Follow the converting and non-converting paths your customers take on your website to discover journey friction and bottlenecks. By listening to the voice of your customer, you can identify where and why they exit your site and make optimizations to improve the experience.
- Pitting your customers’ expectations versus the experience they actually receive. Know how your brand succeeded or failed to meet customer expectations and discover what can be done to deliver better experiences. Immediately identify and prioritize initiatives to improve pathways undermining the performance of your campaigns and business KPIs.
- Improve your customer retention rate. Look at post-purchase experiences and determine what made your customer buy your product or abandon your website. Instantly identify your highest converting path for any page or campaign. This knowledge will allow you to further enhance your strengths and work on your weaknesses.
- Maximize marketing efforts. A better understanding of your customers helps you create a data-driven flow for your buyer's journey. Identify performance issues impacting your revenue so you can quickly fine-tune your campaigns and customer journey. This knowledge also helps you build accurate marketing personas based on data-based insights to amplify future interactions, deliver tailored experiences, and boost website conversions.
- Diagnose and fix technical issues fast. Real-time monitoring of your customers' journey can help detect issues on your site, such as inferior performance and speed metrics impacting Core Web Vitals (CWV), alerting you instantly when a problem is obstructing your customer experience.
Improving the customer journey enhances the customer’s overall website experience. This is crucial as better CX translates to better website conversions. According to PwC, 73% of customers say experience is a crucial determining factor in their purchasing decisions.
Not only that, studies have shown that businesses that invest in delivering high-quality, seamless, and delightful CX enjoy 1.7x revenue growth and 1.9x higher customer retention rates.
Optimize The Customer Journey Now
It’s only through totally knowing and understanding what drives your customers that you can fully empathize with them. Armed with this knowledge, along with valuable insights, you can transform their website experience and take them on a delightful, frictionless, and meaningful journey. With Blue Triangle, turn the voice of your customers into a competitive advantage!
The internet has no memory. Customers adapt to changes on your site the moment you make them. Blue Triangle gives your business the unique benefit of real-time analytics, enabling you to closely track the pulse of your customer journey and respond to issues long before they become huge barriers to your customers’ experience.
Your website is a representation of your brand. It’s high time you optimize the customer journey whenever they visit your site and give your buyers truly personalized experiences they expect and deserve.
Some of the most successful organizations are the ones that are truly customer-focused and operate by leveraging their customers' perspectives, analyzing customer journey data, and executing data-driven CX initiatives.
With Blue Triangle, we can empower you and your team to prioritize prescriptive optimizations, quantify the projected revenue uplift on your business, and provide the essential missing link needed to create an ROI.
Learn how to get a complete picture of your customer experience and drive more conversions with Blue Triangle Enhanced Marketing Insights.
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