Customer Journey – A journey with return

Start of the journey

The tasks of a good web store concept are to accompany customers from the first contact to the conclusion of the purchase, to provide them with the right information and to support them in the decision-making process. Not to forget: The customer should be happy to come back again. The customer journey is not always a straight line, and it will not always start or end in the web store. But what influence does the customer journey have on our webshop?

The Route

The most important thing in a customer journey is to know the customer's routes. Only when they are known, it is possible to understand the buying process or the non-buying process. With the knowledge of the route, it is possible to understand where the path is bumpy or where the customer is even induced to leave the store - without buying. With this knowledge, we can check whether we are giving the customer the right information along the way and whether the paths to the "Buy" button are purposeful.

Touchpoints with your products

There are countless touchpoints (=touchpoints with the company, the products or the services) for our customers. These touchpoints mark the path and can be customized as needed. How do I find out which touchpoints my customer has had? Tools like Google Analytics help with this. They help us understand and optimize the customer journey. For example: a customer has decided to make a purchase, but they can't find relevant information they need to make their purchase. This information could be: Payment methods, delivery terms, total price, product descriptions and so on.

The goal - the conversion

The goal of the journey is to complete the purchase - the so-called conversion. The conversion is an action that you want to lead the customer to. It does not always have to be the conclusion of a purchase, it can also be a registration in a customer database, a subscription to a newsletter or something similar.

A journey with return

In order for the journey to be interesting and exciting for our customers - and for them not to want to abandon it right away - we should design it well. To achieve this, we can fall back on the proven sales formula AIDA. The acronym is made up of the terms Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. So it's all about drawing the customer's attention to our products, providing the right information, supporting the desire to buy, and guiding the customer to the conclusion of the deal - always assuming, of course, that the customer wants to buy and that we have the right products. And that's crucial: our products offer the customer added value.

Omnichannel commerce approach

By addressing the right target group, I reach the people who find my products interesting and want to buy them. The approach is not just via the web store, but via several sales channels, for example via social media. Communication via the various channels should be well coordinated and complement each other. In doing so, the special features of the individual media should be taken into account in order to be able to exploit the advantages.

Key takeaways

Design your store so that your customers can find their way around. You can achieve this with the usual design rules of stores (e.g. menu at the top, shopping cart and search box at the top right, contact details in the footer, etc.). The direct way is the right way. Put your checkout button in the right places. The navigation and menu should be targeted. Provide the right information so that your customer can make a decision. This can be achieved by making the store SEO-ready with the apt keywords. Contact om3 for the journey with your customer: info@om3.ch