Each customer that has ever purchased something from you has gone through the so-called customer journey. This is a term that describes all of the stages a customer goes through between the time they learn about your product’s existence up until the time they purchase it.
The way that journey pans out is extremely important because it will be the deciding factor your customers use to form an opinion about your products and your business. If you want to be successful and profitable, you can use a website proposal template to map out your customer journey without any hassle or too much work. This will enable you to create a complete customer journey for your website.
Customer journey stages
A big part of understanding the importance of the customer journey is understanding the different stages people go through before they become paying customers. There are four stages, all of them equally important.
Reach
The popularity of online shopping keeps growing every year and the eCommerce market is predicted to make over $5.5 trillion by the end of 2022. Since online shopping is the future of retail, the reach stage of your customer journey involves getting people to your website and improving your website traffic.
To improve the reach stage of your customer journey, you need to do a couple of things to ensure your site is easy to find. Get your SEO up-to-date, make sure your website is mobile-friendly, use social media and PPC ads for promotion, and get into content marketing.
Engagement
How your website visitors engage with your website after they land on it describes what actions they take while they’re on the site, how long they stick around, and if they act on your calls to action. Working on engagement also means finding ways to reduce bounce rates.
To engage your customers, you should have a fast website, encourage them to browse and explore with an easy-to-use site, and make it easy for them to complete a purchase.
Conversion
High engagement doesn’t mean anything if the website visitors don’t convert into customers. You can encourage high conversion rates by offering better prices than your competitors, having a simple checkout process, providing real-time shipping costs, and encouraging large orders.
Nurturing
A well-crafted customer journey doesn’t stop after someone converted into a customer. If you want the most out of that relationship, you need to nurture it and ensure the customer comes back to your store.
You can nurture customer relationships through good communication, creating a referral program, doing everything you can to improve satisfaction, and encouraging customers to register on your website.
How to follow these stages
One of the best ways you can make sure all of your customers are following these four stages without any issues is to write up a proposal that will take the shape of the journey. If you don’t, your customers might get lost in the journey like a traveler without a map.
You can use a website proposal template to map out your customer journey without any hassle or too much work.
Enabling omnichannel customer service and marketing
Customer expectations have changed drastically over the last couple of years and today’s consumers expect a lot of things from the businesses they work with. But more than anything else, they expect to receive a fully personalized experience that is catered to them and their wants.
Thanks to our understanding of the customer journey, it makes it easier to create a personalized and interconnected approach to both customer service and marketing. This is referred to as an omnichannel approach.
For customer service, an omnichannel approach involves customers using multiple channels to reach out to a business’ customer service. No matter if they prefer using social media, live chat, a messenger app, or the old-fashioned telephone customer service, an omnichannel approach allows that.
Understanding the customer journey also helps you to understand how your customers want to contact you. This will, in turn, improve your ability to resolve customer issues.
When it comes to marketing, mapping out the customer journey allows marketers to understand the different touchpoints they can use to reach potential customers. For example, if a potential customer browses social media a lot, they can be drawn in with a social media ad.
Creating a customer-centric culture
A lot of today’s businesses understand the importance of creating a customer-centric culture, but very few understand how to do that. Creating a customer-centric mindset within an organization can seem like an abstract concept, which is why most companies don’t bother with it.
But when you work on making your business customer-centric, you also work on providing customers with the best possible experience. And since there is an 80% increase in revenue for businesses that focus on improving customer experience, this should be a priority for you.
When you map out the customer journey, you can make customer-centricity very tangible. You’ll be able to see the different ways your organization is trying to make the customers your top priority and come up with new ways to ensure customers are at the heart of every business decision.
Final thoughts
If you’re under the impression that amazing products and a decent marketing campaign are enough to grow a business and be successful, you’re sadly mistaken. To truly succeed in the modern business world, you need to have a good understanding of your customers and the importance of the journey they take.
