The 4 Must Know Customer Journey at eCommerce

Online shopping is becoming more popular nowadays, especially since the outbreak of this pandemic. Sales through eCommerce have been increasing exponentially in the past few years. As the trend is not going to slow down, those who invest in getting online shops are making the right choices to thrive the business.

As an eCommerce store owner, it is important that you stay relevant to your target audience to win the game among the vast competitors. Understanding the journey of customers at eCommerce is the first step to win the game. From here, we will be sharing important elements from customers’ perspective.

What is an eCommerce Customer Journey?

It refers to the stages of a customer’s experience with online business. The journey begins the moment that the customer starts browsing the phone, knowing the brand, learning the product, and continuing to make purchases. The journey does not stop at purchase, it would be a continuity process to establish relationship and loyalty.

There are four main stages in a customer’s journey. Each step would illustrate a different business challenge and require corresponding efforts to solve it.

Stage 1: Awareness (also known as Reach)

The “Awareness” involves attracting customers to your website. It can be from organic or paid web traffic. Organic traffic refers to visitors who found your website on search engines. Paid web traffic is advertisement online, where it appeared on other websites.

Challenges:

1. Not getting enough traffic (visitors) to visit your website. It is similar to not having enough customers at offline stores. Your products will not have high exposure to the public. .
2. Might not be able to reach a relevant group of customers. For example, if you are selling baby products, your target audience should be young parents, instead of teenagers or students.

What you should do:

1. Make sure SEO is up-to-date. Search engine optimization plays a key part in getting reach. An optimized website is more likely to appear higher in search results, leading to better reach, better views, more customers.
2. Promote business on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc are good platforms to share store profiles, publish content, and promote deals to different groups of people. It could come in organic presence, but you may include paid promotion in later stages. We would be sharing another deep dive article on this 🙂
3. Make sure it is mobile-friendly. Customers nowadays spend more than 90% of their time on smartphones rather than laptops for shopping. The website design that looks good on a laptop might not have the same layout for mobile. Hence, the preferred method is to ensure that website and info deliver a responsive design on mobile.
4. Publish content regularly. Most eCommerce shoppers are looking for products that provide value. If you publish regularly, on information, to do, tips on your website, it will attract visitors. They will start noticing your products as well.

Stage 2: Interest/Consideration (Engage)

The “Interest” stage is the second step once customers come to your website. Engagement involves actions to keep them browsing and staying at the website, the longer the better. This is the part where you can showcase why your brand and products are their first choice.

Challenges:

1. Visitors might leave very quickly after landing at your site (Bounce Rate is high). It could be due to the loading speed of your website. As the attention span of eCommerce shoppers is getting shorter, they prefer to get info loaded as short a time as possible.
2. Visitors had no intention to purchase yet (No Add-to-Cart).
3. Visitors are not seeing the products (Page View is low). They might not be able to see what they want in less than 5 seconds, thus dropping off.

What you should do:

1. Get the attention – Store dress up. Get customers’ attention immediately with strong assets on the front page. Assets such as homepage banner, carousel banner, pop up banner, thumbnail banners, would be useful in highlighting the new arrivals, best sellers, categories etc.
2. Provide better product content. Product content does not end with a product name and product visuals. You should further enhance it with other info such as key message/ unique selling points, how you should use it, ingredients, the best matching of other products, and most importantly customer reviews.
3. Discovery page. Build a page in which it should consist of articles and readings that could help them to further understand your brand or products.
4. Chat bot. This is a highly encouraged feature on the website. It allows a place for shoppers to raise their doubts and questions to your shop before they start purchasing. It will help to build trust for the shoppers before they start making a purchase.

Stage 3: Conversion (Making Purchase/ Sales $$$)

You have provided unique selling points to your customers, and it is time to turn it into action that benefits the business.

Challenges:

1. Never complete the check-out. Customers may have added items to the cart for some time, but yet to complete the purchase.
2. Low value orders. Customers are only interested in buying low value items, but lesser interest in getting higher value products.
3. Visitors spend time, but never purchase. The page view is achieved, but no conversion rate.

What you should do:

1. Reminder. You could send out reminder emails to customers who have left their items in the cart for a while. Sometimes, providing a promo code could increase the chance of checking out with more items.
2. Encourage large orders, bundles and add-on deals. Selling online is easier than offline, which could offer many trade mechanics on the website. Doing mix and match bundles allows customers to select different products with additional discount.
3. Better deals. Deals include pricing and free gifts help, but it needs to be activated on the suitable timing, such as festive period, pay day, weekends.
4. Faster checkout process. Some customers abandon their checkout if they find the payment process is not convenient. There are a few ways to make the checkout process more user friendly. Digital payments or ewallet are one of the options.

Stage 4: Loyalty (Nurture and establish long term relationship)

Customers’ journey does not end after making a purchase. Business grows with a new pool of customers, but business sustains with the return customers. A return customer is simply someone who has bought your product or service once before and has returned to make another purchase.

Challenges:

Customers may not be return to your business, as they are a number of competitors who are providing the similar products or services

What you should do:

1. Loyalty program. This serves as a membership registration for customers. You can offer incentives like reward points based for buying products using membership. It also helps to let customers create an account on your website. You could do ads re-targeting to them based on their purchase behavior.
2. Review & reward. Product reviews play a very big part in helping shoppers to make decisions to purchase. Products with more and better reviews have higher sales contributions. Customers may forget to leave a review after their purchase, by incentivize them, you could collect more reviews.
3. Email marketing. Once customers sign up for memberships, you would be able to gather a number of customer audiences. This would be a channel for you to share your business updates, new arrivals, sales reminders to them. Your goal is to encourage them to remember your business, brand and products.

Remember, it is always about building brand loyalty.

Customers who are loyal to a brand will continue purchasing and will often try new products.

In brief,

Knowing the eCommerce customer journey is the first step of growing your online business. It involves 4 stages: Awareness, Interest, Conversion, Loyalty. Each stage consists of different challenges and ways to overcome them. Always check on each stage and fix accordingly to grow your business!