The e-commerce business is booming, thanks in part to the COVID-19 epidemic, which forced people to switch to offline shopping. According to Statista, international e-commerce total sales reached $4.28 trillion in 2020 and will reach $5.4 trillion in 2021. New websites pop up regularly to get a piece of this pie, adding to the growing number of rivals. So, how are you going to succeed in the face of such a large number of players?

Some marketers rely on unique content, while others rely on design and utility, but without satisfied clients, all their efforts would be for nought. Any negative experience with your website may steer prospective customers to your competitors sooner than adding stuff to their basket. Furthermore, no one can guarantee that customers will continue with you if they have a negative post-purchase experience.

As a result, you should create a fantastic, user-friendly website and attract, retain, and provide an exceptional client experience. But how do you go about doing it? Journey mapping is your go-to method for seeing into the brains of your customers and determining what they want and anticipate from your e-commerce website.

What is a travel map, exactly?

A customer journey map depicts a customer’s path to achieving their goals and their interactions with a product, service, or company at all touchpoints and across all media.

The finest example of the shopping trip is:

1.Assume that Ben, a 30-year-old developer, wanted to buy a digicam.

2.He looked for the greatest cameras on the internet, read the reviews, chose the dummy, and looked for the best price.

3.He found the digital camera in your online store.

4.Finally, Ben bought it.

On the other hand, the buyer’s trip usually does not end with a purchase order. It also includes stages like delivery, use of the goods, recommendations, and receiving newsletters notifying customers about new discounts or asking them to make a new purchase. This case will be continued as follows:

5.Ben took pictures using his digital camera.

6.He made some recommendations.

7.On social media, he recommended your online store to his friends.

8.Ben went back to the store to buy some more purchases.

When creating a buyer journey map, keep in mind the desires, sentiments, goals, expectations, ideas, difficulties, and pain points your customers have after working with you.

We’ll just increase the number of instances we have. Consider Ben’s situation: he couldn’t add an item to his basket and wanted to call the store manager. Or he may have purchased a faulty mannequin and needed to call the supply service to get it replaced. Alternatively, the digicam may have broken down after its first usage, necessitating Ben’s contact with the assistance service. All of these activities will be reflected on the map that represents the whole customer experience with your website, and it will look like this:

Building a buyer journey map will allow you to understand your customers’ genuine experience, identify the weak points, and make the necessary improvements and modifications to improve the customer experience, increase their pleasure with the product, and gain loyalty. As a result, your map should be based on exact facts rather than relying on assumptions.

Determine your target market and gather as much information as possible about your customers to achieve this aim. This information will enable you to construct buyer personas, which will likely represent real people with real expectations and desires. Allow them to communicate for themselves rather than assuming their wants.

If you don’t know how to make a map from scratch, you may utilize various tools, such as Paint or Google Spreadsheets. Specialized tools, such as expression, provide simple and easy-to-use buyer journey map templates.

What role does journey mapping play in your e-commerce business?

Let’s look at how creating a buyer journey map might help your business.

1. Identifying touchpoints

Constructing a map will allow you to easily see when your customers come into touch with your model, whether directly or indirectly. You won’t fully comprehend a customer’s experience if you don’t understand these touchpoints and observe what happens with them at each one. As a result, you’ll miss current difficulties with expertise at these touchpoints and won’t be able to fix them. Furthermore, you should have no idea what’s wrong or why you couldn’t match your customers’ expectations.

While you’re looking at the big picture, you may improve your competence at the touchpoints you’re in charge of (e.g. your website). Your employees are often unaware of what is happening on the customer’s end. They’re in charge of their responsibilities and keep track of their metrics. The designer creates the user interface; the marketing devises strategies for attracting visitors to the website, copywriters strive to offer the needed information, etc. They know what clients are doing on the website and strive to improve their experience.

However, they don’t know what happens before the customer visits the website or what happens after they leave. Prospects may meet challenges such as a lack of supply and, despite the best efforts of entrepreneurs and designers, will not arrive in your market. You could think that clients choose your competition because of their substantial discounts, but the reality is very different. The map allows you to examine the customer’s experience from the skin and identify and fix soreness reasons (e.g., change the supply service from the instance as mentioned earlier).

2. Determining whether or not your customers meet their objectives

Your customer’s experience starts even before they reach your online store. You must examine all stages of their journey and interactions with the product to see if they meet their objectives at each level, there will be hurdles that prevent customers from achieving their goals at each point of the process. It’s your responsibility to figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Take the information you’ve obtained and compare it to how easily your customers can do what they need to. Pose the following questions to yourself:

• Were there any stumbling blocks?
• Why do so many people leave their shopping carts on the checkout page?
• Why do consumers visit our opt-in obtain page but not complete the form?

You should use two Google Analytics reviews to track the consumers’ behaviours and observe what actions they took and what actions they didn’t take at each stage:

• The Habits Stream analysis shows how consumers navigate the web pages and identifies content material concerns.
• Aim to disseminate a report that shows how consumers use the site and what activities they do.

If you see that clients cannot meet their objectives for whatever reason, check for pain reasons. Let’s have a look at what it is in the next section.

3. Identifying and eliminating soreness triggers

According to the Baymard Institute, approximately 70% of customers abandon items in an online retailer’s shopping cart without purchasing. What is the reason behind this? There might be a variety of reasons for this. For example, a customer cannot add a certain number of items to their basket; the website does not provide information about delivery costs, a registration form is just too long, and so on.

Let’s pretend that Lizzie, a 24-year-old trainee, is attending her first corporate social event and is looking for a costume. Her friend suggests she go to one website to discover a few styles she loves. Nonetheless, due to her financial constraints, she will not acquire them. Lizzie browses the products once again and discovers several outfits at a price that she can afford. The sizes, however, are not shown on the website. She searches by measurement and discovers that just a few outfits in her size are available on the marketplace. Finally, she finds a costume that suits her both size and price. Lizzie must complete the registration form to add a costume to the cart. It irritates her since she doesn’t want to spend time on unnecessary activities. She gets confirmation from the business after registering and purchasing the outfit.

You must eliminate the pain points and improve the customer experience after identifying them. Prioritize the pain reasons if there are many. Remove the most uncomfortable elements in the first turn, then go to the rest of the barriers. In the example above, you may first fix the problem with the registration form, then add more options with value and measurement.

4. Design problem-solving assistance

As a result of the trip map, you’ll be able to understand how you may improve your website to increase client loyalty and attract new consumers. For example, how to create a website, organize sections and buttons, include a call to action, and so on.

When considering which new alternatives to include or trying to get people excited about recently introduced ones, keep in mind the customer’s goals and actions at each point of their journey, current expertise, and hurdles. Examine the map and provide your customers with choices to help them achieve their goals.

The last sentence

The growth of knowledge and the Internet has resulted in the rise of new e-commerce websites, which has increased competition. Companies can no longer tempt customers with traditional advertising, as they could a few years ago. They should now compete for customers at every level. What’s the best approach to go about it?

There is just one correct option: get to know your customers better, learn what drives their decisions, and their challenges while dealing with your brand. Building a customer journey map can enable you to improve your company’s procedures and become more customer-focused. Maps can help you better understand what your customers want from your website and what problems they’re having. They can provide you with ideas on how to avoid these problems and improve the customer experience to come back to you again and again.