How to Optimize Conversions With Customer Journey Analytics

Taher Batterywala August 20, 2024

Collected at: https://datafloq.com/read/how-to-optimize-conversions-with-customer-journey-analytics/

Having a great website, a strong social media presence, and a solid marketing strategy sometimes fail to get expected conversions.

It happens because marketing managers ignore how customers or users interact with their website. Even if they do, they look at single touchpoints instead of the bigger picture.

This means hundreds if not thousands of dollars wasted on ad spending, which could have been saved.

Here we will look at how marketers can drastically increase their conversions by analyzing each and every touchpoint throughout the customer journey.

Understanding the Customer Journey & Touchpoints

Before we start discussing how to boost your conversion rate, let’s first understand what a customer journey is about.

The customer journey is a step-by-step process that customers go through when interacting with a website or an app.

It consists of various stages and touchpoints that play a crucial role in influencing their decision-making and ultimately impacting conversions. The touchpoints include various digital or customer relationship management (CRM) touchpoints.

The customer journey comprises of 4 key stages:

1. Awareness Stage

When you are introducing your product or service in the market, the prospect is not aware about it. In this case, you need to raise awareness through different marketing efforts like social media campaigns, paid advertising, search engine optimization, and content marketing.

Building a strong brand presence and capturing the attention of potential customers is crucial. The important touch points may include your website, application, social media post, blog post or video.

2. Consideration Stage

In this stage, prospects are aware of their needs and also about the products or services that can fulfill their needs. But they are not sure which one would be the best for them.

So, they actively research and evaluate different options and weigh their pros & cons before zeroing down to the final decision.

For evaluation, they read reviews from other customers, compare features and pricing, or consume educational content like whitepapers or webinars. These serve as key touchpoints for a brand to give the customers crucial information to make a favorable choice.

And for marketing teams, this is the most important stage as it also includes nurturing the lead and passing them over to the sales team to convert that qualified lead.

3. Purchase Stage

This is the stage where prospects make their final decision to purchase the product or service.

The touchpoints in this stage may include free trials, product demos, pricing discussions, and direct communication with sales representatives.

Since this is the most important stage for any business, a significant amount of effort is made to convince the prospect to buy from them.

4. Retention Stage

The customer journey doesn’t end at purchase. Businesses need to retain customers by offering loyalty programs, discounts on repeat purchases, referral bonuses, and excellent customer support.

The goal here is to make the first-time customer a loyal customer, which not only gives repeat business but brings other customers too.

Now that we are familiar with the customer journey let’s explore how customer journey analytics can provide valuable insights to optimize conversions at each stage of the customer journey.

Customer Journey Analytics: What is It and How to Use?

Organizations use customer journey analytics to measure and improve their customer experience and, at the same time, identify gaps that deter conversions.

It gives you insights about customer behavior that helps marketing teams to strategize every touchpoint for optimal business performance.

To better understand it, let’s first explore what customer journey analytics actually means and its components.

Meaning of Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics is a methodical approach to analyzing customer behavior across different touchpoints to measure the impact of their activity on business performance.

With customer journey analytics data, teams gain insights into every customer touchpoint, which enables them to view a complete picture. Instead of solely relying on one source, e.g. customer feedback, they can see exactly what steps a customer took before making the purchase.

Customer journey analytics can be done through real-time analytics, predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and other methods, depending on the organization’s needs and strategy.

Components of Customer Journey Analytics

To analyze the key touchpoints across the customer journey, marketers must understand the key components involved in this process.

1. Data Collection

To analyze the data, you need to capture it first. Marketers collect and consolidate data from multiple sources, such as website analytics, CRM module of your ERP, marketing automation platforms, and more. This data is then fed to the models to start the analysis process.

2. Data Analysis

Once the data is collected, marketers decode meaningful patterns and trends. Here they use advanced analytics techniques, such as segmentation, predictive modeling, and machine learning algorithms, to identify key insights.

This analysis helps businesses understand customer behavior, preferences, and pain points at each stage of the journey.

3. Visualization and Mapping

Customer journey mapping refers to creating a visual story of the customer experience that includes all the touchpoints across different stages.

It is a powerful way to gain a holistic view of the entire experience from the customer’s perspective, highlighting key moments of truth and avenues for optimization.

4. Touchpoint Analysis

In marketing, touchpoints refer to the points of contact between the company and the customer. Through touchpoint analysis, marketers can assess the performance of individual touchpoints, identify bottlenecks hindering customer engagement and optimize them.

During the purchase process, the customer encounters different touchpoints and they can be broadly classified as:

Influencing Touchpoints: These refer to information search and finding information.
Pre-Purchase Touchpoints: They help in the preparation of a decision that is not still taken.
Purchase Touchpoints: They influence the purchase decision made by the customer.
After-Purchase Touchpoints: They assist in any kind of support regarding usage and repurchase of the product or service.
Influencing Touchpoints: These touchpoints help the customer to influence others to buy a company’s offerings.

5. Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation refers to identifying the target audience based on how they interact with a product or an app.

Grouping customers with similar behavior and usage patterns, businesses helps to predict the next-best action and create personalized marketing communication strategies. This approach increases the chances of converting leads into paying customers.

Overall if all of these are put together, it would look something like this:

Optimizing Conversions With Customer Journey Analytics

As we saw above, the customer journey comprises of 4 key stages, from Awareness to Retention. Each stage has multiple touchpoints, and by assessing them we can fix the gaps to improve the customer rate.

Let’s now look at how to optimize each stage of customer journey with help of analytics: