When creating a customer journey your main focus should be to understand your audience, what they do on your website, and what you can do to improve the experience and encourage them to revisit.
The customer is always the most crucial asset for any business. That is why all digital marketing strategies, including SEO, social media ads, and others focus on the needs of a specific audience.
If you want to create a customer journey, you need to understand the preferences of your current customers. This data is useful in creating a template that shows the projected behaviour of customers once they visit your website. Customer journeys are easy to create and can significantly improve your marketing strategy.
Technology and consumer behaviours are continually evolving, and customer journeys provide an excellent way of anticipating the actions that your customers will take while interacting with your business.
Benefits of Creating a Website Customer Journey
The primary objective of a customer journey map is to help marketers to know how customers interact with a website until they purchase an item, and the experience they feel during that period.
Here are the benefits of having a website customer journey map:
- It allows marketers to focus on customers and every action they take as they go through the sales funnel.
- It simplifies the buying cycle for potential customers.
By focusing on customers, you make them happy and boost sales and revenues as a result.
A Guide to Creating a Comprehensive Customer Journey
Before anything, you need to research and understand the perspective that customers have on your business. There are two types of research you should conduct;
- Analytical research – this involves using analytics software to know the location of your customers, how often they visit your site, how much they spend on it, and other related metrics.
- Anecdotal research – this deals with gauging the experience and emotions that customers have towards your business. You can do this research using surveys or looking at their comments on social platforms.
Once you are through with the research, follow these steps to create a comprehensive customer journey map.
- Prioritise the customers’ preferences
- Identify customer touchpoints
- Create a graphic
- Update and improve
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Prioritise the Customers’ Preferences
You should always create a journey from the customers’ point of view. Remember, the customer is the most critical component of your marketing funnel in Singapore.
Many marketers usually make the mistake of focusing on other areas such as digital marketing, branding, and web development. Although these are also important in growing your business, your priority should be offering a seamless experience to your customers.
If your customers are satisfied with your website, they are more likely to purchase your items. Increased loyalty also means that they can promote your brand through word-of-mouth advertising.
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Identify Customer Touch Points
You have a chance of boosting your sales every time an existing or potential customer interacts with your business. The most common customer touchpoints in the sales funnel are your ad listing, your website, the reviews and comments they leave on the site, and so on.
Make sure that every touchpoint has the right optimisation to maximise its effectiveness. For example, your ad listing should be clear and compelling, and it should be consistent with the design and copy of the landing page. Your website should be easy to use. Also, you should always reply to customer comments and reviews, especially the negative ones.
When optimising the touchpoints, keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to push the customers down the sales funnel and move them a step closer towards converting.
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Create a Graphic
Your customer journey graphic should display the findings of the anecdotal and analytical research. The graph will show you the impact of the customer journey, including the changing opinions of consumers about your business. With this information, you can always adjust your strategies to ensure that productivity is continuous.
The only shortcoming of these graphs is that you cannot anticipate all actions that a user may take. That said, you must identify the blips in your chart.
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Update and Improve
Once you have a customer journey map, you should not leave it on autopilot. The needs of your customers are ever-changing, you should continually update the journey map.
It is advisable to test, update and improve your website customer journey at least twice every year. You should also make the necessary adjustments every time you add new products to your business.
A Checklist for Creating the Right Customer Journey for Your Website
As a marketer, you always look to get more leads, increase conversions and boost the revenue earned by your business. A customer journey focuses on providing optimal user experience at every touchpoint, which is the first step to achieving the goals mentioned above.
The following is a list of the areas you should focus on when creating a customer journey map to get more people to your marketing funnel in Singapore.
- Your homepage should be attractive such that it encourages users to explore other pages on your website. The best way of creating an excellent first impression is by using a simple design with quality images.
- Your website should be easy to navigate. If a user is looking for something, they should find it quickly. Ensure that the navigation bar is visible. Also, integrate a search button with filters.
- All of your content should have a clear and compelling call to action. You should plainly state what action the user should take to go further down the sales funnel.
- Make sure that your content is relevant and valuable to your audience. It should also be engaging and easy to understand.
- Your website should have a low bounce rate. When a person stays for longer on your site, they are more likely to purchase your products.
- Your web pages should have a reasonable dwell time. If people are leaving too quickly, your site might be non-responsive, slow or hard to navigate.
What You Should Focus on When Analysing Customer journey Map
When you are analysing the phases your customers go through in the buying cycle, keep the focus on the following aspects.
- Actions – always look at what the customer is doing at each touchpoint. You should also pay attention to their response.
- Motivations – always monitor what is encouraging your customers to proceed to the next stage in the journey. Similarly, you should also identify what is deterring them from moving forward.
- Questions – if your customers are experiencing challenges, provide a channel where they can ask questions, and you respond to them. Failure to address such issues might lead to a loss of customers to rival companies.
- Obstacles – you should know what challenges your customers experience at each stage of the journey. Once you have the information, look for ways of handling the issues immediately.
10 Friction Points in the Customer Journey and How to Eliminate Them
Everyone has a preferred method of shopping.
Some people love exploring the shelves at a regular store, while there are others who choose to do their shopping online. The distinction between the two groups is that they both want quick and easy access to your brand.
Promotional strategies may be ineffective if prospective buyers encounter friction during their online journey.
Whenever a consumer is denied immediate satisfaction, either by poor customer support or poorly designed UI, they are less likely to complete the transaction, which means that all of your efforts to generate targeted traffic have been rendered ineffective.
Eliminating customer friction can help you increase sales and develop customer loyalty while also improving the customer experience. According to Facebook, decreasing customer friction represents a $213 billion opportunity for US businesses.
To eliminate friction points from your eCommerce site, first, you should identify them, as we will cover in this piece. Only once you’ve identified the pain points will you be able to remove the impediments and increase your consumers’ online satisfaction.
Are you, therefore, doing all possible to suit your customers’ demands, regardless of their preferences?
Before we go into the specifics, let’s establish a common ground and clarify the basics.
What is Customer Friction Point?
Customer friction is any stage in the customer experience that prevents the customer from purchasing, using, or getting value from the product being offered. That may feel daunting, but consider it an obstacle that stands in the client’s way.
They are one of the main challenges when it comes to user experiences, as they preclude a smooth, intuitive experience. They are the customer’s pain points, and they can sometimes hinder a consumer from taking any action at all.
Ways of Identifying Customer Friction Points
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Listen to Your Customers’ Feedback
One of the best ways of identifying friction points is by listening to your customers.
Customer feedback is information, thoughts, concerns, and questionnaires administered by your audience regarding their interactions with your brand and its products.
Consumers have tremendous expectations of the firms they choose to do business with. However, it only takes one incident of unfulfilled expectations for consumers to switch suppliers or services in search of what they consider to be a better deal.
In fact, according to Zendesk, 50% of customers will switch to a competitor after one negative encounter with your brand and its products, and 80% will switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences.
To keep this frightening figure from becoming a reality at your brand, it’s critical to truly listen to your consumers and analyse their comments so you can address major problems that are creating customer attrition.
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Look at Your Analytics Reports
It is now easy to detect customer friction with analytics tools. Sites having a high attrition rate can be identified using tools such as Google Analytics.
Google Analytics, as practically everyone who owns a site is aware, gives information about who your visitors are and what those visitors do when they access your site.
Businesses leverage Google Analytics to learn about the impacts of marketing efforts as well as how the customer experience of a website affects things like engagement and friction.
With the tool, you can discover which areas require your concentration so that you may undertake the required actions to remove customer friction points and improve their experience.
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Consider your Customer’s Perspective
Another effective method to see what’s aggravating your customers’ troubles is to put yourself in their shoes.
Customer perspective addresses the external consumers’ viewpoint, which is critical in achieving financial success from purchasing items or services.
In a Strikedeck interview, Matthew D. Tucker, an independent consultant who helps businesses achieve higher consumer performance and development, talks about the significance of viewing things through the eyes of consumers and understanding their viewpoints.
Whereby, by contemplating your customer’s point of view, you’ll discover several areas where you may improve to better assist your consumers on their journey.
10 Ways to Eliminate Customer Friction Points
If your buyers have difficulties purchasing and interacting with your brand, they will not feel inclined to shift to a company with lesser or no friction points.
Consumers desire comfort, and they prefer it in the form of simple accessibility to your brand.
Amazon and Apple have both grown their businesses by aggressively investing in minimising friction in their consumer experiences. Many of Amazon’s initiatives, such as Prime, free delivery, and easy digital ordering, are targeted at removing things that cause customer friction.
If you follow Amazon’s lead, you will not only bring in new consumers but also retain the current ones and get more return on investment with online marketing.
Eliminate these ten customer friction points to provide your buyers with what they want.
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Poorly Designed eCommerce Website
Over the previous few years, online buying has steadily increased.
In fact, according to Statista, over 2.14 billion individuals worldwide were predicted to purchase a product online in 2021, an increase from 1.66 billion global online buyers in 2016. This figure is predicted to skyrocket in 2022.
Number of Digital Buyers Worldwide Statistics – Image Source: Statista
Therefore, you wouldn’t want to skimp on your eCommerce site because eCommerce accounts for more than half of all consumer spending.
Pages that take ages to open or are difficult to browse might cause friction in your consumer experience.
Ensure your website is simple and easy to navigate. You’ll also need to ensure your page load time is under two seconds or less and that it is mobile-friendly.
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Poor Customer Service
Nothing is more aggravating for customers who have a question or a concern than having to deal with customer service.
Holding in long call centre lines, poor responses, or even a slow querying process from support desks are all examples of friction points that swiftly drive away potential customers.
According to the 2020 poll from Statista, 40% of customers said they discontinued doing business with an organisation because of bad customer service.
For first-contact response, spend on customer support software featuring several media channels for spreading marketing support and an effective help desk.
This software will concentrate all support tickets from numerous channels such as social media, phone calls, and even emails in one location.
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Product Content That Isn’t Very Helpful
Often clients use the internet to find answers to their problems or pain points. Each of your articles, be it on your eCommerce website or social networking sites, should be simple and direct, answering your consumers’ queries so that they can come to a conclusion.
Each page needs to be clear with a simple and straightforward call to action (CTA) button that takes consumers to further product details or the option to buy or subscribe to your services.
When clients discover useful material, it may encourage them to learn more about your brand and its services and finally make a purchasing decision.
This is a successful method of boosting leads and retaining consumers without the use of challenging marketing strategies.
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Long Checkout Process
Customers who experience a lengthy checkout process are more inclined to leave their carts.
According to HubSpot, 74% of people are inclined to switch to another brand if the purchasing experience is too cumbersome.
You can assist speed up checkout queues in your shop by integrating digital payment choices or other self-checkout options.
Furthermore, make sure that all fields, including delivery options, billing, taxes, and assessment, are included on a single page that is divided into stages.
You should design a simple and efficient checkout process for your clients. You can detect and address checkout problems and increase checkout page accessibility with an all-inclusive frictionless shopping experience with solutions like Pivotree Fix.
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Unclear Delivery Information
Consumers have always appreciated the ease of delivery. Buyers began depending more significantly on deliveries in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, with 15.05 billion deliveries made globally.
If your company does not currently offer shipping services, strive to include it as an option. Maintain minimal shipping costs. If at all possible, provide free delivery. High shipping rates are one of the most common factors buyers leave their carts just at checkout.
According to Invesp, 80% of buyers are more willing to acquire an item online when free shipping is offered.
Furthermore, consider timely delivery; it is important to deliver early and almost always so that there is no uncertainty or frustration for the consumer regarding delivery commitments.
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Employee Empowerment
Consumers despise interacting with employees that are unable to assist them in resolving their issues. Consumers will have to wait a bit longer to resolve their concerns if every choice must be routed up the ranks.
If you empower your front-line personnel to make decisions for the betterment of the client, you will eliminate friction along the purchase process and create delighted clients.
It is advisable to integrate these new standards progressively.
Determine which subjects and questions are often raised and consider how you might prevent an upsurge. A self-service portal can be used to allow the employee to resolve the consumer’s complaints.
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Inaccurate Search Functionality
When a buyer visits the site, there is a countdown that begins on how long they can stay engaged while being unable to discover what exactly it is they’re shopping for.
They won’t stay long if they are faced with unfinished searches or a confusing/uninteresting option menu. Consumers that use search should be provided with a highly intuitive, immediately accessible, and accurate search box with suggestions.
Consider linking your eCommerce website with a virtual associate system, which provides the aid of a real person to eliminate search friction whenever it happens.
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Lack of Customer Reviews
Buying decisions are sentimental, and if a customer begins to have doubts about the things in their checkout process, they will end up suffering from buyer’s regrets after they complete checkout payment if not cancelling their orders.
Thus, incorporate client reviews and ratings at the bottom of your payment gateway to reassure your clients that they are taking the right approach and will be happy with the product.
According to Google, business listings with three or more star reviews attract 87% of the total clicks, and customers spend 31% more on average when the brand has outstanding reviews.
Testimonials are essential; without them, buyers may cancel their orders and seek a brand with good product reviews.
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Email Spamming
Most customers dislike being inundated with emails that have nothing to do with their preferences or recent browsing activity.
This is a big oversight by many businesses, and it has the potential to result in potential customers hugely unsubscribing from your promotions and newsletters.
Therefore, utilise email subject phrases and headlines that will capture your customer’s interest and information that will entice them to click.
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Get Rid of the Unfamiliarity
Finally, if your clients are unfamiliar with some things in your eCommerce site, consider getting rid of them.
If they’ve sought out you for help, don’t make them feel like they must go through hurdles to get to you. Instead, they might spend their time attempting to comprehend what you’re saying.
Although some problems may be beyond your control, collecting feedback from your consumers on them provides you with the information you need to resolve them or forward the information to the ranks.
The Role of Website in Customer Journey
The role of the website is to be a customer’s guide for their journey with your company or business. The goal is to provide them with a sense of comfort, security, and reassurance at every step.
Further, the website should serve as an educational tool that educates customers on what they need to know at each stage. The website also needs to be easy-to-navigate and designed to know where they are within the website intuitively. It should also show the website visitors how far through the process and how long it will take them to reach their destination.
The navigation menu should always offer links to any previous pages or phases if needed. The menu also ensures no confusion about where you are within the process. The website should ensure that the customers feel they are being helped, not “shoved through a door.”
Before diving into the customer’s journey, let’s first understand the meaning of the website’s customer journey.
What Is the Website Customer Journey?
The website customer journey is a web visitor’s process to complete the action they intended when arriving at your site. The goal is to help them find what they are looking for, whether it be a place on your website to download an e-book or related content, request service online, purchase a product/service, or understand more about how you can help them.
The customer journey mapping process defines customers’ steps when they interact with your company. The first step in understanding the website’s customer journey is defining it. The website customer journey starts with an intention, which may be as simple as finding out more about something or discovering if a product exists, or it may be as complex as buying a product online.
The typical path will take them from landing on one page, clicking through links, and filling in forms until they reach their desired outcome – either completing what they set out to do or abandoning their intentions due to frustration at not finding what they want.
With this in mind, let’s look at your website’s role in a customer’s journey.
What Role Does Your Website Play on a Customer’s Journey?
Many people and businesses ask themselves the same question, and the answer is simple. The power of the internet has allowed brands to engage with customers more frequently across various channels, locations, and touchpoints. Every interaction you have with your customers is an opportunity to influence them and create a lasting impression.
That said, a website can play different roles in the customer journey. The following are five key roles:
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Get Found
The first job of a website is to get found. However, for your website to be found, it has to be optimized for Google crawling or indexing. That means that you should appropriately include your keywords in your content. For instance, if you are selling food products that help people lose weight (weight loss), examples could be “weight loss tips” or “nutrition tips.”
The key is to ensure that your content has the proper metadata in titles and tags. The next step would be to ensure that search bots can see it! The more often you include your keywords in your posts, the better chance it will show up when people are looking for similar topics online.
Your website should also be user-friendly and responsive to mobile devices. Here is how you can ensure that your website is mobile-friendly:
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- Improve usability with easy to navigate menus
- Make your website look great on all devices with responsive design
- Keep your website simple and clutter-free with a minimalist design
- Use concise and clear text to communicate your message effectively
- Use high-quality images to enhance the visual appeal of your website
After the user has found you on Google, then it’s time for them to explore your website.
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Build Trust With The Customer
After being found by your potential customer, your website is their next stop to learn more about you. Your website should focus on providing the information they need. Avoid confusing your readers with too much information. Also, strive to highlight your expertise on the topic.
The first thing that customers see on your website is the home page. The main goal of this page is to:
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- Provide an overview of what you do
- Provide some critical insight into the product or service that you offer
- Make it clear how your business can solve your web visitors’ problems.
To build trust and authority with your customer, the design of your website or product must be straightforward and reflect on what you do. The best way to understand your business from a customer’s perspective is to conduct customer interviews, surveys, or usability testing.
You should include the resulting information as a consistent theme across your digital landscape, including your homepage and product/service sub-pages. The purpose of this is to provide the customer with a clear understanding of your business, what you offer, and how it can help them.
The next step for a customer is to investigate further to determine if you are the right fit for them. The best way to do this is by offering product or service pages that provide helpful information without overwhelming the potential client. The website should also offer an action button, such as a contact form, so the customer can ask additional questions if needed.
Moreover, your website should address potential concerns or obstacles that a customer might have. The best way to do this is by providing an FAQ page to address common issues and questions that a customer might have. Your site also needs to be secure to instil trust in your potential clients.
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To Educate and Entertain
The way businesses engage with customers has changed dramatically in the past few decades. The internet has become one of the best assets for every business. That’s because it has created an avenue for communication between businesses and their customers.
Additionally, the internet is no longer just a source of information; it now acts as a platform where consumers can buy products and services. In simple terms, the internet has become an integral part of today’s business operations.
However, you need to show expertise in your field. The correct information for your website will ensure that customers recognize you as an authority in your specific industry. The correct information for your website will also help you bring qualified traffic to your site and convert them into leads and then customers.
This role also offers a chance for a potential customer to see that you are knowledgeable about what you do. Therefore, they can trust your business enough to do business with you as an authority.
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To Inform Customers
The modern era has brought us a world of information. The internet is an endless repository of knowledge, and most people know this intuitively. The customer journey now involves much more than just the end purchase itself; customers are interested in all aspects of the product or service before buying.
The role of the website is now not just to sell items, but also to inform (and potentially up-sell). An effective website can do both in one place, informatively, without being pushy. In essence, the website is a modern incarnation of a storefront in a physical location. The site serves as an extension of the sales team in the office, what customers see when they interact with the company.
The point is to help them make their purchase decision by providing all the information they need in one place, whether they ultimately make a purchase.
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Nurture and Convert Your Online Customers
Conversions are the bread of life for online marketers, but how do you get more of them? The first step is to understand the customer’s journey. The next step is to make your website part of that process. The role of a website in nurturing is to provide easy and smooth access to your customers.
The visitor should be able to get information about the product/service as quickly as possible, and the website should help them take action (either fill out a request for information form or buy something).
The best way to achieve this is to consistently provide helpful content to help visitors find the information they are looking for and make it easy to take the next step. Your content should be relevant, easy to read, and written in an understandable language for most visitors (no technical jargon).
The content on your website should be explicit and easy to understand. It should also have a call to action that makes people want to take the next step, such as becoming a follower or customer.
The best way to convert your readers into customers is through:
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- The use of solid and robust images
- The right choice of words and phrases
- The creative wording you use for the call to action
- The placement of the call to action on the website
- Using calls to action that apply to the product/service
More importantly, make sure that you encourage visitors to contact you for more information. Your website should include forms, e-mails, and phone numbers visitors can use to get in touch with you. The call to action should also include a clear statement of what happens when they click on it.
Ensure that the customer knows what will happen after clicking on the call to action. A clear statement of what will happen and how it will affect them ensures that they are fully aware of their actions and what they are getting into.
What Makes a Good Customer Journey?
The customer journey is how your customers or potential customers interact with your business, product, or service. The most important part of the journey is your online and offline touchpoints. For example, if a customer sees an ad for your product on television, they will click through to your website.
Once on your site, they look at reviews or maybe decide to read more on your blog. The customer will then go to social media, possibly Facebook or Twitter, and post something about what they just purchased from you. The customer might also retweet your latest promotion!
The critical point is that the customer journey takes place on several channels, and all of those touchpoints must work together for your business.
Below is what makes a good customer journey:
- The customer journey has a clear beginning and end.
- The touchpoints complement each other.
- The customer’s expectation is met consistently throughout the journey.
- The customer is happy at the end of the journey and wants to reach out to you with positive reviews, feedback, or referrals!
Now that you’ve understood what a good customer journey is, we can start to break down why the customer journey is essential.
Why Is the Customer Journey Important?
The customer journey is a series of actions that a potential client takes, from being aware of a brand’s existence to purchasing. The journey starts at point A and continues until a brand or product is purchased. The customer journey is important because it guides you into understanding the customers’ needs and desires. The customer journey also assists marketers in determining how they can supply their products or services effectively and encourage customers to take action.
The customer journey also covers the process of returning to a company’s website after purchasing a service or a good to be encouraged to make another purchase. The cycle then repeats. The journey then ends when a purchase is completed.
The customer journey is successful as long as the company’s products or services meet customer needs through marketing strategies that engage customers. To effectively map out the customer journey for your website, one must first identify their target market/audience and understand where they are in the existing customer journey.
Your website is the digital footprint of your business. It’s where customers learn about you, and you should treat it as such. That means ensuring that your website is up-to-date with accurate information, is easy to navigate, and provides a positive customer experience that mirrors your offline experience. If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to build a user-friendly website that improves your customer journey. Get started today!
Conclusion
A customer journey map shifts focus to the perspective of the client, ensuring that you get a better understanding of their preferences and provide a satisfying experience to them.
Although they offer no guarantees, these maps are useful in improving engagement with customers, increasing conversions, and improving the ROI. If your business is yet to create a customer journey map, you are missing out on massive opportunities.
Customer friction can be disastrous for any business.
Fortunately, by listening to your customers’ feedback, reviewing your analytics reports, and considering your customers’ perspectives, as well as implementing some simple procedures, you can identify and eliminate customer friction points along the purchasing journey.
Every stage of the customer journey, from the customer landing to your website to creating an account, has the potential to add or eliminate friction. This interference can negatively impact your marketing efforts, particularly in terms of conversion.
If you’ve effectively attracted website traffic, the very last thing you want is for them to be disappointed by a poorly designed website, poor customer service, unhelpful product content, and the other friction points we’ve addressed.
These pain points result in consumers permanently abandoning your brand and going for your competitors. Get in touch with us for more tips on how to do digital marketing in Singapore as well as monitoring and analytics.
