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Discovering The Secrets Of The Customer Journey

Discovering The Secrets Of The Customer Journey

How much do you understand about the customer journey from your digital marketing campaign to your website?

Today’s website analytics don’t just help organisations track and monitor website traffic and page views, they can also be used to analyse multiple channels including social media, video, email, mobile and PPC campaigns.

Hopefully you’re all using some form of tracking and data analytics to monitor your efforts, but that can be a time consuming and laborious process, even with Google Analytics helping you to measure the actions people take once they arrive on your website.

If you pay for traffic, for example through Google Ads or by promoting social media posts, it is absolutely crucial that you know the returns on your investment (ROI) and how to measure ROI.

Where Does The Customer Journey Begin?

It’s a mistake to think the customer journey begins when they see a social media post you’ve made or read an email you’ve sent out. It’s much earlier than that.

First introduced more than twenty years ago by OxfordSM as part of the Eurostar development, the concept of the customer journey is still relatively new to the business world. 

Back in 2016 research by Econsultancy found that 50% of organisations have little to no understanding about their customer journey.

Most customer journeys begin when they have a problem or they’re looking for something specific. We’ve blogged about the specific customer journey from email to website before. That article covers many things which are equally relevant to this one, so it’s worth a read.

Understanding what fuels your customer journey is where any tracking and monitoring should begin. According to recent research from Salesforce:

  • 80% of customers now consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products; 
  • 69% of consumers want to talk with a company in real-time;
  • 60% of customers in the UK expect the customer experience to be connected.

The research also points out that customers want to be understood and treated as individuals, with 84% of them saying they want to be treated as a person, not a number, and it’s important enough to influence which businesses get their money.

This makes it a tricky situation for teams who are only used to controlling one aspect of the customer journey as people are judging brands based on their experience as a whole – not just interactions with individual departments – and they expect to see consistency.

Understanding How Customers Behave

Getting into the mindset of your customers can be a challenge. Not only do you need to work out why one customer spends so long browsing your selection and putting products in a cart, only to ultimately close the tab and leave, you also need to know if they’re taking several steps to get from A to B when it should only take one.

According to SurveyMonkey, it’s important to remember:

“The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.”

By using a customer journey map to analyse your visitor behaviour, you can help your clients or brands understand how their customers travel through the entire sales process from beginning to end and, more importantly, understand how they feel while doing so.

Mapping your customer journeys provides two clear benefits because it allows your decision makers to focus their efforts on customer satisfaction, and it helps make each step of the buying experience easier for your potential leads.

So, where do you start? 

With research, both analytics and anecdotal.

The increasing complexity of the journey a potential buyer makes means businesses need to look at new ways to measure customer attitudes, brand performance and awareness, and the effectiveness of existing marketing strategies.

Getting snapshots of consumer sentiment and behaviour at a specific point on the buying journey can be used to inform future marketing strategies and help you decide where to focus your social media and digital advertising efforts.

Veracity Brings This Knowledge

With Veracity, you can combine a number of factors to determine an overall score for each website visit. This includes metrics around user engagement, which is displayed next to each visitor journey from the  moment they land on your website, to the point at which they leave.

Veracity is able to tell marketers how their visitors engage using metrics including:

  • Campaign Goals: Including specific target URLs both internal and external.
  • Page Scrolling: Did they go down to the bottom of the page?
  • Pages Visited: Where else did they go on your website?
  • Forms: Did they begin to start filling in a form and did they submit it?

With this data, online marketers can determine how well their landing pages are performing and which marketing channels are sending the most engaged traffic.

This helps you to not only gain new leads, but also to follow the customer journey from campaign beginning through to conversion.

This following series of screenshots show the exact path our potential lead took to arrive at the end destination.

tracking the customer journey
tracking the customer journey

With this information, we’re able to go back to the successful advert and see how we can replicate that with other campaigns.

Having this type of knowledge available at our fingertips means we’re reducing the amount of time spent trying to analyse multiple data sources from various different tools and it means planning campaigns and social media activities can be focussed on areas we know bring in results.

Being able to track the customer journey is a vital part of today’s marketing efforts. 

Why not give us a call or use the website to book yourself a Veracity audit to see what’s happening with your visitors, and how you can make their experiences better?

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