The key to building a successful website is understanding what your customers or clients really want. When you know what they really want, you can craft a website that creates a successful customer journey, one that guides the site visitor from just looking at your webpage to making a purchase or scheduling an appointment.
Skillfully defining your customer journey and building your sales process around it will ensure that more of the people who find out about you eventually become your customers or clients.
What is a customer journey?
Your customer’s journey is the experiences that they have with your brand. It begins from the moment they hear about you, click on your link in search results, or see their very first advertisement for your brand and continues until they are no longer your customer. It encapsulates everything your customer knows about your brand, how they feel about it, what it means to them, and how they interact with you. If this seems like a big concept, that’s because it is.
Many people hear about the customer journey and give up before even trying to define it, simply because they do not understand how important defining the journey is. It is all about creating the very best possible experience for your customers.
When most people make a purchase, it is because they are anticipating the good feelings that go along with making that purchase. They are completely satisfied, knowing that they have made the right choice, found what they need, and bought from a company they can trust.
Customers readily recognize the feelings associated with making a purchase—they might not fully understand the impact of their experience with a brand and how it affects their decision to buy, but they know, when they come to the end of the experience, that it was a good one. This is the journey that you want to create for your customers.
Step One: Understand the Physical Journey
The first thing you want to do is look at the different ways that customers arrive at making a purchase. This is often called your sales funnel. It is basically the average number of pages or steps that your customer has to take before they actually make a purchase. How many pages do they have to visit before they can make a purchase? How do they find you?
What content are they looking at and interacting with? Knowing where your customer has to go before they can make a purchase will tell you where you need to place content and calls to action in order to improve their journey.
Step Two: Define Your Customer’s Goals
What does your customer want? Think carefully about this question. It should not be what you want your customers to want, but what they actually want or need. What are their goals when they are buying what you have to offer?
This is a fairly amorphous question, but one you have probably thought about a lot as you built your business. You might assume that the most obvious answer is that their goal is to buy something like what you have to offer, and that’s true, but their goals are also likely broader and more difficult to nail down. Why do they want what you have to offer?
Why do they need it in their lives? If you are unsure, it is worth your time to actually ask your customers what their goals are. Talk to them, ask they to complete surveys, to provide feedback, or look carefully at customer service interactions.
Step Three: Align Their Goals with the Physical Journey
Your next step is to look at the goals and to align those goals with their physical journey through your website.
For example, if the goal of your customers is to save time by buying a product that makes their lives easier, you will want to include content along their journey to making a purchase that proves to that customer how your product saves their time and therefore makes their life easier.
When it comes to knowing exactly where to put this content, the concept of touchpoints can help.
Touchpoints are essentially the locations on your website where customers are likely to interact with that website. For example, for most retailers, the product description page would be a very common touchpoint.
For a business that sells services, on the other hand, it would likely be something like a pricing list or a form that allows your potential clients to contact you.
You can get a good idea of what the touchpoints are on your website by looking at the behavior flow chart reported by Google Analytics. It will tell you which parts of your website are getting the most attention, where that attention is coming from, and where it eventually leads.
This report will also tell you where people are abandoning your website, which should help you find a way to realign those touchpoints with your customer’s goals, so they are more likely to stick with your company and continue their journey.
Related: Connecting Webmasters Tools to Google Analytics
Step Four: Determine How Many of Your Customers Achieve the Ultimate Goal
How many of your customers complete their journey? This is probably one of your most important metrics, especially because it prompts you to look at the journey as a whole and see if there are sticking points anywhere along the path. Where are people starting to have negative experiences with your company? Where are they facing roadblocks?
How often are people opting out of your email list or getting halfway through the signup process, only to abandon it?
Step Five: Drawing Your Journey Map
Start out by defining the different ways that most of your site visitors find you. This will likely be through search engines and social media. Write out the goals of your site visitors. Make a list of the ways in which what you have to offer will help your site visitors achieve those goals.
Then, write down your most common touch points. How can you craft those touch points so that they prove to your customer just how worthy your product or service is of their time?
Your ultimate goal should be to prove to that person at every stage of their interaction with your company that you are worth their time and, eventually, their money.
Write out the steps that a person has to take in order to make a purchase, and then write out the steps that you as a company take in order to retain that customer. All of these steps together are your customer’s journey.
Now that you know exactly what your customer goes through before they make a purchase, you have the opportunity to mold that journey so that more people complete it and actually become your customers.
The key to building a successful website is understanding what your customers or clients really want. When you know what they really want, you can craft a website that creates a successful customer journey, one that guides the site visitor from just looking at your webpage to making a purchase or scheduling an appointment.
Skillfully defining your customer journey and building your sales process around it will ensure that more of the people who find out about you eventually become your customers or clients.
What is a customer journey?
Your customer’s journey is the experiences that they have with your brand. It begins from the moment they hear about you, click on your link in search results, or see their very first advertisement for your brand and continues until they are no longer your customer. It encapsulates everything your customer knows about your brand, how they feel about it, what it means to them, and how they interact with you. If this seems like a big concept, that’s because it is.
Many people hear about the customer journey and give up before even trying to define it, simply because they do not understand how important defining the journey is. It is all about creating the very best possible experience for your customers.
When most people make a purchase, it is because they are anticipating the good feelings that go along with making that purchase. They are completely satisfied, knowing that they have made the right choice, found what they need, and bought from a company they can trust.
Customers readily recognize the feelings associated with making a purchase—they might not fully understand the impact of their experience with a brand and how it affects their decision to buy, but they know, when they come to the end of the experience, that it was a good one. This is the journey that you want to create for your customers.
Step One: Understand the Physical Journey
The first thing you want to do is look at the different ways that customers arrive at making a purchase. This is often called your sales funnel. It is basically the average number of pages or steps that your customer has to take before they actually make a purchase. How many pages do they have to visit before they can make a purchase? How do they find you?
What content are they looking at and interacting with? Knowing where your customer has to go before they can make a purchase will tell you where you need to place content and calls to action in order to improve their journey.
Step Two: Define Your Customer’s Goals
What does your customer want? Think carefully about this question. It should not be what you want your customers to want, but what they actually want or need. What are their goals when they are buying what you have to offer?
This is a fairly amorphous question, but one you have probably thought about a lot as you built your business. You might assume that the most obvious answer is that their goal is to buy something like what you have to offer, and that’s true, but their goals are also likely broader and more difficult to nail down. Why do they want what you have to offer?
Why do they need it in their lives? If you are unsure, it is worth your time to actually ask your customers what their goals are. Talk to them, ask they to complete surveys, to provide feedback, or look carefully at customer service interactions.
Step Three: Align Their Goals with the Physical Journey
Your next step is to look at the goals and to align those goals with their physical journey through your website.
For example, if the goal of your customers is to save time by buying a product that makes their lives easier, you will want to include content along their journey to making a purchase that proves to that customer how your product saves their time and therefore makes their life easier.
When it comes to knowing exactly where to put this content, the concept of touchpoints can help.
Touchpoints are essentially the locations on your website where customers are likely to interact with that website. For example, for most retailers, the product description page would be a very common touchpoint.
For a business that sells services, on the other hand, it would likely be something like a pricing list or a form that allows your potential clients to contact you.
You can get a good idea of what the touchpoints are on your website by looking at the behavior flow chart reported by Google Analytics. It will tell you which parts of your website are getting the most attention, where that attention is coming from, and where it eventually leads.
This report will also tell you where people are abandoning your website, which should help you find a way to realign those touchpoints with your customer’s goals, so they are more likely to stick with your company and continue their journey.
Related: Connecting Webmasters Tools to Google Analytics
Step Four: Determine How Many of Your Customers Achieve the Ultimate Goal
How many of your customers complete their journey? This is probably one of your most important metrics, especially because it prompts you to look at the journey as a whole and see if there are sticking points anywhere along the path. Where are people starting to have negative experiences with your company? Where are they facing roadblocks?
How often are people opting out of your email list or getting halfway through the signup process, only to abandon it?
Step Five: Drawing Your Journey Map
Start out by defining the different ways that most of your site visitors find you. This will likely be through search engines and social media. Write out the goals of your site visitors. Make a list of the ways in which what you have to offer will help your site visitors achieve those goals.
Then, write down your most common touch points. How can you craft those touch points so that they prove to your customer just how worthy your product or service is of their time?
Your ultimate goal should be to prove to that person at every stage of their interaction with your company that you are worth their time and, eventually, their money.
Write out the steps that a person has to take in order to make a purchase, and then write out the steps that you as a company take in order to retain that customer. All of these steps together are your customer’s journey.
Now that you know exactly what your customer goes through before they make a purchase, you have the opportunity to mold that journey so that more people complete it and actually become your customers.
Published on May 5, 2016
About the Author: Chris Williams
