As we all know, your customers always have countless options in this increasingly competitive business environment. A poor online customer experience will lead to customer loss and even reduced brand influence.
Delivering a high-quality and personalized digital customer journey is vitally important to improve your customer satisfaction and loyalty. So, how to optimize and map a digital customer journey? Are there real examples to refer to? In today’s blog post, Solvea will explore all these questions together with you.
What Is Digital Customer Journey
An entire digital customer journey encompasses all online activities where a customer interacts with a brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase loyalty. It includes all digital customer touchpoints and engagements through channels, such as websites, social media, email, live chat, and mobile apps.
What Is a Digital Customer Journey Map
A digital customer journey visually displays the entire process that your customers take from the first time they start interacting with your business until they end the journey. It helps you track customer behavior from when they first visit your website until they leave, complete a purchase, or abandon the product. Then you can identify which areas on your sites need to be optimized and reduce the chances of customer loss.
What Is a B2B Digital Customer Journey
A B2B digital customer journey refers to the complete interactions and experiences that occur between a buyer and a B2B company, such as Salesforce. A B2B company sells its products or services to other businesses, rather than to individual consumers. So, B2B customer journeys are more complex and longer, involving multiple stakeholders and steps to reach a decision compared with B2C businesses, which sells products or services directly to individual customers for personal use.
What Are the 5 Stages of the Digital Customer Journey
Analyzing each stage of the digital customer journey helps companies understand motivations and influences that drive a prospect to become a loyal customer. The digital customer journey may vary from different industries and businesses, but eventually goes through the following 5 key stages.
1.Awareness - The Discovery Phase
This stage is where potential customers have a need for a product and first notice your brand. It might come from social media, search engines, affiliate marketing, reviews, or word-of-mouth recommendations. During this phase, these potential customers become aware of the product you’re selling and the brand’s existence.
2.Consideration – The Evaluation Phase
Once you capture their attention, interested customers are going to collect all the information about your product and start evaluating whether they should make a purchase. During this stage, customers may visit your website, read reviews, watch product videos, or compare your product with those of competitors.
3.Purchase – The Decision Phase
In this stage, customers will select a brand they want to proceed with and make their decision. That’s when your customers need a final push, such as a special offer, free demos, discounts, a pre-order bonus, or a positive review from a previous customer. You should ensure the entire purchasing process is seamless to increase the chances of completing the deal.
4.Retention – Turn Your Customers into Regulars
One of the greatest challenges is to turn your customers into regulars. To ensure stickiness with your product, you can follow up with a personalized thank-you message, invite them to join your loyalty program, or give them reasons to come back. Additionally, exclusive offers or upcoming product activities can stir their interest and make your customers feel valued.
5.Advocacy – The Promoting Phase
Finally, the most vital stage is to drive customer advocacy. During this stage, customers might recommend your products to their friends and peers. This obviously helps you save valuable marketing fees. To achieve promotion goals, you can encourage customers to share their journey online, such as holding an event where customers can showcase their favorite features on Instagram.
Why Is It Important to Optimize the Digital Customer Journey
Nowadays, customers not only compare product quality but also compare different companies to the best customer journey they’ve ever had. Optimizing the digital customer journey is equally important for all businesses. Here are some key reasons for optimizing the customer journey:
- Create a smooth and enjoyable customer experience.
- Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Reduce marketing costs and increase sales.
- Predict potential needs of customers.
- Adapt to the changing market.
How to Optimize Your Digital Customer Journey
Now, it’s high time to explore how to optimize your digital customer journey. This section outlines six key steps to enhance the customer journey and ensure your customers have a seamless experience.
Step 1. Understand Your Customer Deeply
Having a deep understanding of your customer is the first and most foundational step. An effective method is to create detailed customer personas based on real data, such as purchase preferences, behaviors, and demographics. With these personas, you can customize strategies that meet the actual needs of customers.
Step 2. Map out the Digital Customer Journey
Once you confirm your customers’ needs, create a digital customer journey map to visually show each stage of the journey, from the first interaction with your brand to post-purchase advocates. The map should include all online and offline interactions, like website interaction, emails, social media engagement, and in-store visits, to get a complete view of the customer experience.
Step 3. Identify Key Touchpoints and Opportunities
With the digital customer journey map, you can analyze each stage and identify customers’ pain points and opportunities for improvement. Here, you can utilize digital analytics tools, like Insider and Google Analytics, to find these important touchpoints. Then leverage digital experience intelligence tools to generate actionable insights that can solve pain points and improve customer satisfaction.
Step 4. Improve Website Usability
Improving website usability is a crucial point of optimizing the digital customer journey. For that, design a user-friendly website to let your customers easily navigate and find what they need. Don’t forget to optimize your website for all devices, simplifying navigation with clear menus and smooth loading. This can help you retain visitors and reduce bounce rates.
Step 5. Personalize the Customer Experience
In the world of digital customer journey, personalization is the key to success. The personalized customer experience usually includes personalized marketing campaigns, product recommendations based on browsing history, upgraded service plans, or other activities to show how much you value each customer.
Step 6. Adopt Omnichannel Marketing
Utilize the omnichannel marketing method to provide a consistent and high-quality brand experience. The marketing channels include calls, email, social media, mobile apps, messaging, etc. Besides, evaluate and optimize your omnichannel marketing strategy continually, which ensures all customers enjoy a consistent experience across touchpoints.
Best Real-life Digital Customer Journey Map Examples
If you are trying to create a digital customer journey mapping from scratch, you may need some real-life examples to learn from. Below are several of the best digital customer journey examples from well-known businesses.
Example 1. Customer SaaS Customer Journey Map – Spotify
Spotify is a leading audio streaming service around the world. To improve its music-sharing experience for customers, it utilized an expert marketing firm to design a digital customer journey map. The goal of the map is to identify the best way to integrate the music sharing feature into the customer journey.
In this example, we can see the detailed information of the journey mapped out from opening Spotify on the phone to interacting with shared songs. Spotify analyzes each stage and touchpoint to identify improvements for a smoother music-sharing experience.
Example 2. E-commerce Customer Journey Map – Amazon
Amazon is one of the world's greatest e-commerce giants, with its own technology and custom systems designed to drive customers through the sales journey. In this map, we can view Amazon’s customer conversion funnel as well as how its products drive customers through the sales process to complete the journey, maximizing customer engagement.
The highlight of this map is that Amazon incorporates key metrics, like CTR, purchase assists, conversion rate, reviews, subscriptions, and impressions, for each stage to monitor success and gain insights into customer experience. These are the metrics almost every e-commerce store should monitor.
Example 3. B2B Customer Journey Map – HubSpot
If your company has a relatively long sales cycle that needs to consider more products and services, the customer journey map, like HubSpot, is more complex. In this map, you can find that it uses color coding to mark each pain point and opportunity, making it easy to understand and accessible for other teams.
In addition, this map has incorporated customer feedback and categorized them based on their position in the journey to provide a first-hand view of interactions. These humanized stories make the identified issues more tangible and urgent to your team.
Example 4. Entertainment Customer Journey Map – Netflix
Netflix’s digital customer journey map has incorporated stages, actions, thoughts, emotions, pain points, touchpoints, and opportunities. In the map, each touchpoint is customized according to the customer’s expectations, with a focus on meeting these expectations by identifying pain points and solving them.
More importantly, the map is designed with a clear target persona in mind and predefined scenarios. This method makes the customer’s journey more actionable and more focused on achieving its goals.
How to Create a Digital Customer Journey Map
After learning about the above real-life customer journey mapping example, you can start building your own customer journey map. Here are several key steps in the mapping process.
1.Set clear objectives
First, you need to clearly define what you want this customer journey map to achieve. To ensure its effectiveness, align the mapping goals with your current bottlenecks and key performance indicators. Ask yourself the key questions when creating the map:
- What are your customers’ expectations?
- How can you attract customers to buy your product?
- Why do your customers buy from your business?
- How to give your customers a smooth experience?
2.Developed detailed personas
Customer personas are a typical representation of your average customers that form the foundation of your map. It’s necessary to develop detailed personas based on actual customer data and interviews, not assumptions.
Additionally, create different maps for each unique customer persona because everyone is different, or you may alienate customers who use different purchase paths. You can first build maps for the most common customer types who buy your most valuable product, and create maps for other buyers later.
3.Map out key touchpoints
Touchpoints encompass all customer interactions with your business. It’s crucial to map out all key touchpoints, from the first ad impression to the post-purchase, to improve the overall CX. In addition to existing key touchpoints, you should project future interactions to identify customer experience gaps.
4.Create and validate the customer journey map
Now, you can try creating a comprehensive map that covers customer expectations, emotions, pain points, actions, and all key touchpoints. The map should be flexible, allowing you to evolve as you gather new customer insights. Don’t forget to validate the map with real customer experiences to spot subtle issues. Moreover, this validation should continuously refine with customer journey analytics data or direct customer feedback.
Digital Customer Journey FAQ
1.What are the 5 main points of a customer journey?
The five main points of a customer journey include awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. It involves the process of a customer’s first recognition of a brand to become its loyal advocate.
2.What is an example of digital customer experience?
There are many real-life digital customer experience examples. One of them is Amazon. It offers a hyper-personalized digital customer experience most of us are familiar with, from browsing products, receiving product recommendations, to tracking orders’ status
