How To Create An Ecommerce Customer Journey

The customer journey map is important for your e-commerce business because it presents a mapping of consumers’ interactions with your firm during the purchase process. It allows you to find bottlenecks and enhance UX as well as increase conversions to a substantial level. Below are some steps of an e-commerce customer journey map that shed light on how to create an effective map.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a process map that aims to describe how a customer experiences a brand or product. It covers all the steps from the moment a customer makes a purchase to customer satisfaction after the purchase. When a business knows what steps a customer goes through during the process, it is easier for the business to see what is painful for that customer, how to give the customer the best experience ever, and possibly gain customer loyalty.

A customer journey map includes touchpoints, emotions, thoughts, actions, pain points, and opportunities. Touchpoints are when a customer and brand communicate regardless of the platform, social, physical, or digital. Feelings are the emotions that customers experience at every stage, while considerations are the concerns that a customer may have at that same stage.

Activities refer to a series of related behaviors and decisions customers make, such as seeking information about available products. Pain areas describe specific areas of difficulty or discomfort for the customer and opportunities represent areas where the brand can enhance the customer experience.

Why You Should Create a Journey Map 

Creating journey maps provides companies with the following benefits: It helps them collect all the valuable information related to their customers, including their wants, needs, behavior, etc. Therefore, when all aspects of a customer’s journey are described, the ‘path’ provides information for call-to-action points for firms interested in increasing customer satisfaction and bringing customers back. Furthermore, by comparing factors such as the Amazon a+ vs premium a+ content cost, it is possible to develop additional perspectives for creating strategies to increase customer interaction in e-commerce companies.

Last but not least, journey maps can act as planning and decision-making tools as they will indicate which areas marketers should focus on and which products they should offer. In other words, therefore, creating journey maps is all about enhancing more effective, profitable relationships with customers.

Steps Create An Ecommerce Customer Journey Map

Use message-level customer journey mapping for e-commerce touchpoints, find a common touchpoint map, obtain data on customer sentiment and thoughts throughout the customer journey, research customer behavior patterns, and define pain points and opportunities in the map.

1. Define Your Customer Person

The first step before creating a customer journey map should be identifying customers. A customer persona is a description of your typical customer, based on research and containing elements of fiction. The main factors to consider:

• Age, gender, and geographic location.
• Purchasing (consumption) behavior and device (electronics)
• Motivations and challenges

It is possible to create several avatars and work on the needs of your audience with their help.

2. Outline The Main Stages Of The Customer Journey

The e-commerce customer journey typically consists of five main stages:

• Awareness: The buyer becomes aware of your brand or product.
• Consideration: They begin the differentiation and evaluation process.
• Decision: The customer is ready to make a purchase.
• Retention: Communication and interaction with the consumer after the sale has been made.
• Advocacy: The customer becomes your advocate as he or she promotes your store among other individuals.

Awareness of each stage allows you to understand the customer’s mental state at each stage.

3. Map Customer Touchpoints

Touchpoints are various points of contact for your customers at an individual level with the company they are purchasing from. These can include:

• Social media posts or digital advertisements when at the awareness stage.
• Then, it is product pages, reviews, and blogs at the consideration phase.
• Once they have decided on buying, the payment or checkout procedures.
• Email campaigns or return policies that come into effect after making a purchase and processing of support tickets.

Enumerate all the potential contact points in each stage of the journey so you assess areas that may be optimized further.

4. Understand Customer Pain Points

Pain points swimmers are the challenges that customers face in the course of doing business in your store. These could include:

• Confusing website navigation
• Lack of product information
• Trouble accessing customers

Knowing the factors inhibiting your consumer experience, you can work towards improving them, learning from aspects like page speed, checkout process, or support type and availability.

5. Gather Data to Support the Map

Real information is what makes your journey map more realistic. Valuable information sources are:

• Google Analytics. You can see the user behavior, where users are coming from what path they have taken to reach that destination, the bounce rate, and why they might have left the website without proceeding.
• Customer surveys. Honest and direct feedback on what hurts and what hasn’t worked for them.
• Heatmaps. How do your users intermingle with your website: where do they click and bounce?
• Customer support interactions. Requests and complaints and recent issues.

This information reveals problem areas where a customer gets stuck or frustrated.

6. Visualize The Journey

With all that information now in hand, it’s time to visualize. You might want to use Lucidchart, Figma, or simple flowcharts to lay out:

• Each customer persona
• The stages of their journey
• Key touchpoints and pain points
• Emotional highs and lows through the process

Improvement opportunities will be easy to identify with a visual representation that can be referred to by your team.

7. Identify Areas For Optimization

Review the potential areas for streamlining after creating the journey map. For example,

• Awareness: Improve your digital marketing to increase brand awareness 
• Consideration stage: Provide additional details in the product description or reviews from other customers. 
• Decision stage: Reduce steps and necessary selections for different payment methods during checkout.
• Retention stage: Apply loyalty initiatives or personalize after-sales emails.

Change areas are listed according to their ability to influence customer experience and ultimately, sales.

8. Test And Iterate

Customer needs change over time, so your journey map should change too. Update and test new ways of working periodically to ensure you are meeting customer expectations. Run A/B tests on checkout processes; experiment with new ways of communication channels, and monitor customer feedback.

Collect data periodically to continuously improve the journey map and enhance the electronic commerce experience.

Conclusion

An e-commerce customer journey map is a map of the path a customer takes through your e-commerce website and business, for each step, you should see that the experience is seamless and your customer is eager to continue doing business with you. Determining who the customers are, where they interact with your business, what throws them off their game, and iterating regularly helps improve usage, creating long-term loyal customers. Similarly, being aware of important factors such as cost can play a role in the improvement of specialized approaches to customers, which can be used, for example, on Amazon.