So your business has been booming, but now it’s not. You’re spending more than ever on marketing and advertising, but revenue, profits and customer retention is dipping. How do you fix it?
You’ve got three options:
1) Do nothing (… not really an option)
2) Spend even more on marketing (flashy graphics and glitzy ads may not give you the result you want, particularly if you haven’t completed a customer journey analysis)
3) Examine your customer journey and dig into your analytics.
If you like option 3, you’re off to a good start. But what if you don’t have any data or you’re not sure about the quality of your data? If that’s the case, perhaps you could benefit from some consultation for some deeper insight. After all, good data helps you understand what’s working for your customers, what’s not working, and what you need to do differently to keep delighting your customers.
The Customer Journey: It’s More Than Just Customer Touch-Points
Put simply, a customer journey identifies a customer’s experience with your brand from initial introduction, to purchase, right through to the formation of a long-term relationship. The customer journey is often ‘mapped’ out visually to help provide a holistic view of the customers’ touch-points with your brand. Unlike traditional individual touch-points, a customer journey (or user journey) offers a clearer view of how your customers interact with you at every stage of the buying process. A standard touchpoint examines a user’s experience at one point in time or location. A journey, on the other hand, looks holistically at the flow of engagement and user experience along the way. Taking a high-level view from the customer’s perspective makes it easier to identify customer pain points and spot opportunities to improve campaigns, programs, processes, and sometimes even products.
Using Data Analytics to Improve the Customer Experience
In today’s digital world, we’re able to pull robust reports from Google Analytics, Facebook Business Manager, or any number of back-end analytics platforms. They have the data you need, and a healthy dose of extraneous data to go along with it, as well. So, what does your data mean, why is it so important and how can you use data to enhance the customer journey and the experience? More importantly, how do you know you’re measuring the right thing so you can make good, customer-centric business decisions?
On-Site Conversion Rate — Arguably one of the most important metrics to identify the success of a campaign, this metric calculates whether users did what you wanted them to do once they reached your website. A strong conversion rate means you were successful in incentivising a prospect or customer to complete their journey with an action (purchase, form submission, etc.). A high abandon rate means something wasn’t working for the customer. Is your unique value proposition and call to action clear enough? Is the purchase process simple enough? Not sure how to answer these questions or where to start? You might want to talk to a digital strategy expert.
Landing Page Bounce Rate — This metric can provide some insight into whether or not you have met the expectations of your users. A fast exit without moving to another page could mean that your landing page content, graphics or brand promise does not match the message that drove prospects to the page in the first place. Bounce rates differ greatly among industries and campaigns. Suffice it to say that, a high bounce rate ends the customer journey virtually before it has begun.
Click-Through Rate — Does your marketing content pique the interest of customers and prospects enough to get them to click through to your site? If not, you’ll see a lower click-through rate. Your viewers are savvy and time crunched. Content needs to be short, intriguing and on-point with their immediate needs prioritised for them to click from your content onto your site.
Every organisation is unique and every organisation collects different data. The trick is to collect and analyse the right data, so you can identify improvements that help create a more singular, unified, delightful customer experience
Using Data Analytics to Improve the Customer Experience
A carefully planned customer journey is simple and has clear outcomes, yet the work and analysis required to build it calls for organisational collaboration, data integration and strategic design thinking.
A customer journey design experts can identify potential opportunities to make your programs, campaigns, systems and platforms more effective. They can also evaluate marketing automation software to support optimal customer experience and make data analysis easier. After all, understanding what your user journey looks like today is the first step to improving it tomorrow. And that’s a proven path to business growth.
