In today’s digital landscape, purchasing things via e-commerce enterprises has become routine. People buy everything online, from groceries to cars, and it’s allowing e-commerce companies. The US e-commerce market earned $431.6 billion in revenue in 2020, and that figure is predicted to rise to $560 billion by 2025.
However, with a quickly rising market, it’s becoming increasingly tough to outperform rival e-commerce enterprises in terms of customer experience. With so many more retailers shifting to an online strategy, owing in part to the epidemic, you must discover ways to differentiate yourself as a brand online.
A good understanding of your retail customer experience is essential for attracting and retaining customers. This trip teaches you more about your customers, including the how and why of their purchasing decisions. As a result, your e-commerce company will have a higher chance of showing each buyer the appropriate product at the right moment to elicit a purchase.
Here are five recommendations to help you establish a seamless retail client journey for your e-commerce firm.
1. Recognize Your Audience’s Needs
Every effective retail customer journey begins with a thorough understanding of your customer’s wants and needs. Depending on your product, your e-commerce company should closely track your brand’s overall purchasing habits. Knowing what entices your customers to buy might help you shape your retail customer journey.
Look for important purchasing trends across all of the channels that your business owns. What are your conversion rates from a specific paid social media ad compared to high-traffic organic pages? Knowing these kinds of facts might help your company save money by avoiding investing excessively in channels that haven’t traditionally been profitable.
It’s also critical to go further into customer psychology and uncover specifics. How many things are they purchasing at once? When are the majority of purchases made? Every piece of information you can gather about their purchasing habits can help you understand how your clients engage with your items.
2. Examine the Purchase Timeline of Your Product
To assist your customers on their trip, you must first understand your main product and its buying schedule. The purchase timeline dictates how much time you should set up to lay out your customer journey.
Consumers who purchase low-priced goods usually do it in a relatively short period of time. If you’re selling socks on your e-commerce site, you don’t need a ton of customer journey touchpoints to achieve a transaction. The consumer usually knows what size socks they require and may have a color preference. People usually go straight to a website and buy because they already know what they want.
It’s a different story with higher-priced things. When a consumer decides to buy something, such as a new sofa, it is not usually a spur-of-the-moment decision. Instead, the consumer should look into many e-commerce companies that sell sofas. They interact with many customer journey touchpoints, such as instructional blog pieces or interactions with a sales professional.
To emphasize the worth of expensive products from e-commerce enterprises, solid content and sales professionals are required. As a result, your company should anticipate that the retail client journey will take longer to complete. It’s no different than visiting a physical store and taking your time deciding whether or not to buy a high-priced item.
3. Identify Your Most Effective Conversion Paths
Conversions for e-commerce enterprises do not happen by itself, while it would be ideal if they did. It’s critical to determine the most effective conversion paths so you can focus your efforts on where your target audience actually comes from and stop wasting money on channels where they don’t.
It is vital to invest time in determining which conversion channels are most efficient for your company. It can assist you in determining each of the different steps a buyer takes on their path to making a purchase. To invest marketing dollars in the right channels, you must first identify where your customers are coming from.
The more you understand about your winning conversion paths, the more insight you’ll have into where buyers decide to buy your goods. This knowledge is crucial since it can help to inform marketing and sales strategy.
Running a Top Conversion Paths report in Google Analytics is an easy method to find out which conversion paths result in the most purchases. This report details the exact sequence of channel interactions that resulted in a conversion, as well as the number of conversions that occurred on each path.
You’ll be able to see if your top conversion channels are skewed more toward paid or organic efforts, which can help you build future content. Perhaps the majority of your audience is making purchases immediately after reading a terrific blog piece, and you don’t need to invest further money in that costly Facebook ad campaign.
E-commerce systems such as Shopify may provide you access to statistics that will show you which products are selling and which are collecting dust on your virtual shelf. Keep an eye on which products sell the most consistently and how frequently those purchases occur over a certain time period.
Make sure you’re also keeping track of important information about the discount coupons and referral programs your company provides. How do you get more potential customers to know about your offerings if sales are still down despite the amazing deals you’re offering? Perhaps you need to add more social media touchpoints, provide incentives to website visitors who live chat with your company, set up display advertisements for new or remarketed consumers, and use other channels to spread the word.
4. Demonstrate Brand Transparency Through Your Content
Great content marketing is the hidden weapon behind every successful e-commerce business, and it is frequently what your audience interacts with the most during their retail customer journey. However, content comes in a variety of flavors, and organizations should not choose one with their eyes closed.
The most successful e-commerce enterprises recognize that they are not the only show in town. It’s easy to conduct a Google search that will return a list of retail competitors in your business, many of which may offer lower prices. To fight this, your company should generate material that acknowledges the competition without painting them in a negative light.
Why? Consumers today place a premium on brand openness. They want to know where brands get their products, how they treat their staff, and what factors go into deciding a brand’s prices. Gen Z consumers, who are rapidly increasing as purchasers, value brand transparency and want to see more of it from the brands they buy from. Having content that demonstrates this knowledge is a good method to instill trust in the organization from whom they are purchasing.
5. Improve Non-Brand Touchpoints
This is the part of the retail client journey where things get a bit interesting. Retail businesses have a variety of avenues through which they can reach customers that live outside of their own locations. You may sell your goods directly on your website, but it may also be offered on sites such as Amazon and Etsy. These websites can also serve as sales and marketing outlets for your product.
With that in mind, you can’t just rely on your own channels as touchpoints. If you sell your product on another website, such as Amazon, make sure all of your product descriptions and information are always up to date. Every channel that sells your product should provide consumers with all of the information they need to comprehend what your product can help them solve.
Create a visual representation of your retail customer journey map.
It’s finally time to design a retail customer journey map for your e-commerce business, now that you have all the information you need. We’ve even put out a customer journey mapping template to assist you to get started and preserve a visual record of your retail customer journey activities.