E-Commerce Businesses on the Rise!
The ancient proverb goes like this: It’s not where you end up, but how you get there. E-commerce may be driven by the end goal (to turn leads into sales), but you must learn how your customers purchase your goods or services.
The epidemic has accelerated the growth of e-commerce, which had already been increasing at an enormous speed. By 2023, the global retail market is predicted to be worth $6.5 trillion.
As a result, a substantial amount of money will be made. Another step to creating a smooth customer journey on your e-commerce website is to setup an ecommerce store that seamlessly integrates with Gelato’s print-on-demand services that offer your customers a seamless experience from browsing your products to placing orders.
E-Commerce Customer Journey: What It Is
The customer journey in e-commerce refers to the series of steps that a consumer will take when making a purchase decision and while navigating an online retailer’s website.
The customer’s journey starts when they are introduced to the product, service, or brand for the first time and continues through the purchasing decision-making process.
The customer experience may considerably influence your company’s overall performance if it is streamlined and adequately tuned. For instance, Branded Tracking Pages can increase conversions and online sales may be accomplished with the proper ecommerce customer experience.
There exist five stages within the e-commerce customer journey:
- Awareness
This is the first step at the beginning of an e-commerce customer journey. When a problem arises, the consumer turns to the internet to find more information.
At this point, the buyer may be discovering brands on their own. In addition to advertisements and social media posts, and organic search may also be a source of information.
Customers should be able to see a brand’s website to pique their curiosity and encourage them to learn more.
- Consideration
A brand has piqued the curiosity of consumers at this point. If they’re searching for a certain product, they may also be looking at related things on other websites.
If prospective clients are looking for information outside the typical customer path, they may turn to sources like Facebook pages and online reviews. A remarketing advertisement may help e-merchants win over clients at this time.
- Acquisition
At this point, the consumer is beginning to focus on a few specific products. Once prospective consumers are convinced that your goods are exactly what they’re looking for, they’ll be more likely to buy from you.
Other areas of your organization may be used to assist the consumer in making a purchase. It might offer discounts, a guarantee on the goods, 24-hour customer assistance, or a streamlined checkout procedure.
- Retention
One sale is nice, but it’s much better when you can keep a client happy, so they keep buying from you. Returning is key when it comes to long-term success in the company. When a consumer sticks around, it’s because they’ve had a wonderful experience.
Another problem is ensuring every client has a positive experience, but doing so is critical if you want them to spread the word about your business to their friends and colleagues.
- Advocacy
This is the point in a user’s satisfaction levels when you’ve made the transaction, experienced recurring engagement, and now the consumer is speaking out for you.
Loyalty is the ability of your customers to engage with you across all your contact points and even to assist your company’s growth.
The Importance of Customer Journey for Your Business
Irrespective of how competitive your price may be, customer retention is much more dependent on the consumer’s perception than on the items offered.
As a direct result of this, owners of internet businesses have begun to place more emphasis on creating a positive consumer experience, maintaining relationships with current clients, and luring new clients. Maintaining a good reputation on social media platforms is one approach that may be used in this direction.
According to a poll conducted among 1,920 company experts, 45.9 per cent of respondents ranked “customer experience” (CX) as their top goal for the next five years in terms of ecommerce companies.
Because of this, investing in customer experience initiatives can potentially increase revenue by two during thirty-six months.
It should be no surprise that up to 86 per cent of purchasers are prepared to spend a greater price for superior customer interactions, along with a surcharge of 13 to 18 per cent for luxury goods and services that provide enjoyment.
If that isn’t enough to persuade you, consider that if a consumer has only one negative encounter with your company, they are likely to stop doing business with you altogether.
The Steps to Smooth the E-Commerce Customer Experience
Step 1: Carve Out Your Goals and Objectives
Before beginning working on sketching out the trip map, it’s vital to determine what you want to accomplish from this process. This would make it easy to pick the most effective strategies to strike your targets.
It’s better if you have answers to all these questions before the event:
- Why are you developing this layout?
- Whose viewpoint will it be from?
- What lessons would you be bringing in?
Step 2: Elaborate on All the Customer Personas
Creating consumer personas is a necessary step in creating an effective map. These semi-fictional characters depict your brand’s target audience in the form of fictitious characters.
History, demography, culture, attitude and information sources are just a few things to keep in mind while constructing personas. Actual statistics should be used to build personas according to best practices.
There are a variety of methods for obtaining client information. You may use data tools like Google Analytics or questionnaires to get direct input from customers.
Next, blend these attributes into several distinct personalities, each with distinguishing features and even a name.
There is a better likelihood of improving a customer’s buying experience if the personas are more like the actual customers they reflect. You may use tools like Xtensio, Hubspot, etc., to design a consumer profile rapidly.
Step 3: Opt for Online Change Order Forms
A customer’s request for a product or service may be recorded, managed, and fulfilled via an online change order form. It might take the shape of a simple table-formatted piece of paper or a more comprehensive web form with features like online payment.
Things are a little more complicated with online communities and forms. As a rule of thumb, order forms are considerably simpler to manage and arrange than digital (or online) purchase orders.
But if you lack programming ability, you may run into a roadblock (and you should, as they have been running all over the e-commerce world). Order forms are not exclusive to shopping carts, which should be clear to everyone.
Step 4: Align Your Data Together to Find Pain Points
It’s time to incorporate data from consumer profiles once you’ve laid the groundwork for the journey. Find out what your customers are experiencing and how you might improve it.
To have a better understanding of your consumers, you might ask these questions to uncover their problem spots:
- Every time a consumer interacts with me, I need to know what they think or feel.
- What issues are they pondering, and what activities are they undertaking in response to them?
- What are their wants, hopes, and considerations in each of these areas?
- How do their feelings and ambitions influence their actions?
- How am I meeting the needs of my customers?
- As individuals go through the phases, how does their perspective alter?
- What can be done to increase consumer confidence and foster a closer working relationship?
The next step is to create a path map for the pain issues you’ve identified.
Step 5: Evaluate and Repair Holes in Your Customer Experience
The gap analysis may begin now that you’ve created an eCommerce customer journey map that includes all the interactions and pain spots (s).
A simpler one-page checkout, for instance, might be the answer when you see that consumers are abandoning their basket because of the lengthy checkout procedure (e.g., quite so many stages or the need to register).
A/B testing is suggested to get the best results. Try sending a standard welcome email and one with a price discount to see which one is more appealing to your potential clients and which works best for you.
You may also attempt to customize your email by including the user’s name if your response rate is lower than usual. Including the names of your receivers may boost your response rates by 14%!
You may also need a mobile-friendly webpage if you discover that your website has not been designed for phone devices, which frustrates prospective clients. You can boost your exchange rate as simple as knowing where the holes are and how to fill or reduce them.
So, What’s Next?
At first, E-commerce customer journey mapping seems like a daunting task, but it is well worth the effort. This means that online retailers would be sufficient to complete and improve their consumers’ purchasing journeys before and after making a purchase.
E-merchants would have a better understanding of their customers due to this training. It’s also possible they’ll know where to put the most effort and money to obtain the best outcomes.