What is an eCommerce Customer Journey?
An eCommerce customer journey is the route that potential customers take from discovering your brand all the way to when they have completed a purchase and become brand advocates. Many different factors can impact this and it can be challenging to know where to begin when crafting a customer journey that will be effective for your business. In this blog we will be covering:
- The full eCommerce customer journey
- How understanding this journey can support your business
- Some simple ways that you can improve your customer journey
- How Sefas can support you with this
What are the main stages of the journey?
There are 5 main stages to the usual eCommerce customer journey. These are:
- Awareness – Customer learns about your brand or a product you sell.
- Consideration – The customer is considering a purchase. They will look around several sites looking for the best available option. Company trust and branding play a big role here in standing out from your competition.
- Purchase – The customer makes the purchase, this stage involves the purchase confirmation and delivery.
- Retention – This involves the after-sales process. How do you make the customer’s life with their new purchase as easy as possible?
- Advocacy – Your customers become brand advocates, whether it is leaving reviews or recommendations. This will then become free advertising for your business.
How the eCommerce Customer Journey can help your sales
Crafting an optimal customer journey will support your sales in a variety of different ways. For example, if you have a slow loading and old-fashioned website any potential new customers could be put off making a purchase. In general, any part of the journey that is difficult or inconvenient is likely to result in a big drop off in sales.
How you can improve your online customer journey
Create a simple and easy-to-navigate website, if you;
- offer solid branding with great quality pictures and descriptions,
- support this with well-crafted organic content to show off the different applications of your products, and
- offer easy-to-understand communications
You will be well on the way to increasing sales. Bringing all of these different elements together is important and is known as an omni-channel customer journey.
Some Other ways to improve your customer journey
Each stage of the journey presents a unique set of challenges to you as an eCommerce business. As well as improving your website, social media content, and customer communications. You will also want to improve other areas of your business to ensure the best possible customer experience. These include:
Logistics
If your customers are not able to receive their orders on time, the customer complaints will come rolling in quickly. Optimise your logistics department to ensure a smoother customer journey. Make sure that your customers can track their order with an email that is automatically sent out as the item is posted. Allow your customers to track their orders from start to finish. These are easy ways to incorporate online services that really improve the customer experience.
Customer Service
Your customer service department is so important in the customer journey. Issues often occur regardless of how perfectly crafted your products and services are. Often the complaints are simple misunderstandings. If these are handled correctly then your customers are likely to go from being frustrated to being even happier with their product and your business than if there had been no issue. This is because customers appreciate realness and honesty from businesses, owning up to mistakes and being ready to resolve issues with a customer’s purchase show these qualities.
How Sefas can help your craft the ideal eCommerce customer experience
As you can see there are many elements involved in creating the best customer journey. Our CCM (Customer communications management) tools enable you to craft an omni channel customer journey. This will mean that all of the main touchpoints that your customers interact with are linked together neatly. With our solution, you will be able to design templates, mail out communications with ease, audit all communications before they go out, and more! To find out more about how our CCM solution can support your eCommerce customer journey, please get in contact today.