Customer Journey Mapping Guide For E-Commerce

Are you ever left baffled why you have so many visitors to your site, but barely any of them are converting into paying customers? Or wonder why they spend so much time browsing your website and adding to their cart, only to abandon it at the checkout? Wouldn’t it be great to mind-read your customers to understand why they take certain actions – well, a customer journey map allows you to do just this. 

Having a visual representation of your customers’ experience on your website allows you to understand the interactions between your customers, and your products.

This indicates how your customers feel at each stage, identifies pain-points, and gives you access to how customers navigate touchpoints throughout the journey. Once you know this, you have a treasure trove of information on hand to create the ultimate customer experience to increase your conversions.

What is customer journey mapping?

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Customer journey mapping focuses on customer experience and aims to map what is happening between the customer and your product at each stage; it is a business trying to step into their customers’ shoes. A customer journey map aims to be a visual representation of this journey so that you can get a better sense and understanding of their motivations and why they are interacting in certain ways. They can help to highlight the key events that customers have to go through and any areas where there seem to be problems with their experience. When areas that need improvement or problem areas are found, businesses can then take the necessary steps to improve them.

How is customer journey mapping different for e-commerce businesses?

Customer journey mapping is different for e-commerce businesses because each customer’s journey, from their first impression to purchase, can be extremely different. A business with physical premises can have customer journey maps that are quite straightforward and easily highlight successes and problem areas. Customer journey maps for e-commerce businesses will highlight the same things, but they can end up being complex documents because of these diverse customer journeys. The complexity of these documents means that you can usually only focus on one part of the journey at a time. 

Through the use of the customer journey maps, you will be able to see all the channels and points that your customers go through when visiting your website. It allows you to understand what is happening during these interactions and how they are feeling at each stage.

Mapping customer journeys for e-commerce stores step by step

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Before you start mapping your customer’s journeys, you need to do some prep. 

Decide which part you want to focus on

Let’s say you own a private-label product e-commerce store. The area you choose should relate to the goal you want to achieve; for example, if you want to increase sales, you may want to focus on the decision part of the map to investigate why people are abandoning their carts and find solutions.

Create user-personas

The next preparation step is creating user-personas. This is where you create someone that would be the ideal customer to think about the types of goals and expectations that they would have on your website. From this, you may be able to use them to think about the touchpoints when mapping out your customer’s journey. 

Plan the stages

Once you have a persona, you will have to start planning the stages that customers will go through on your online store. The persona helps with this because it enables you to get into their mindset. Once you have some of the steps, like checking out, receiving a confirmation email, etc., you need to make sure that you have thought of every substage that you can.

Add more information

When you have the steps that your customers go through, you then have to add more information. This could be information about how customers got to your website, their behavior when they are on your website, shopping habits, and much more. When all this information has been collected, you will be able to see trends and work on ways to enhance the customer experiences so that you can meet your goals.

A form builder can be a great way to gain insights into the behavior of your customers, visitors to your site, potential clients, and form respondents. It allows you to understand your customers by collecting crucial data like form views, incomplete submissions, completion rates, sales, and drop-off questions – giving you all the information you need to boost conversions and enhance the customer experience. 

Leveraging customer journeys insights to sell more and to the right customers

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Customer journey maps can be essential to help you to do everything you can to increase the chances of selling your products or services to customers. They can highlight problem areas that may be putting customers off buying from your website, and allow you to improve them.

They can also help to ensure that you are focusing on the right customers. A customer journey map can highlight things that are interesting about your website to your customers, and what is unhelpful. You can then start making changes and creating content that will make them want to stay longer on your website. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to buy something. 

Creating content that your customers like will make sure that you aren’t targeting too broad of an audience. By trying to provide content and services for everyone, you might put off the customers who want to use your products and service. Focusing on these customers will make them more likely to become loyal, repeat customers so that their customer journey can continue. It could also help to attract new customers who are also part of this specific target market.

Wrapping it up

With technology getting more advanced every day, and an increasing number of companies jumping on the e-commerce bandwagon every day, you have to make your business stands out from your competitors to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage. One of the best ways to safeguard your business from threats and to grow conversion is to not just have a great product offering but to offer an exceptional customer experience. Utilizing a customer journey map can help you achieve your business objectives by offering the ultimate shopping experience for your customers by meeting their needs through every step of their journey.

Tegan Tedd is a content marketer at Paperform. She loves writing about marketing, technology, and workplace productivity.

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