6 Simple Steps To Create An E-commerce
Customer Journey Map

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a powerful tool not only illustrating steps a customer makes when relating to your business but also entering into their emotions at each touch point. It gives businesses an insight into the joy and frustration a customer experiences on his journey, hence designing a more empathetic customer experience.

Key Components of a Customer Journey Map

• Buyer Personas: They are typical customers with their goals.
• Stages of Actions: Awareness, consideration, decision, and retention stages.
• Touchpoints: Points of interaction between customers and your brand.
• Opportunities: Places to improve or optimise the experience.

A well-crafted journey orchestration map is the best route to enhancing customer satisfaction, encouraging loyalty, and increasing revenue. It shows the needs and pain points at each stage for the business to form a strong bond of trust and commitment with the audience.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for E-commerce

There must be a systematic process to create a customer journey map. Follow the steps below, and your map will be not only comprehensive but also actionable.

1. Define Your Buyer Personas

Get to know your customers. Determine who they are. Prepare several buyer profiles based on the demographics, preferences, and buying habits of your target market. A millennial checking out eco-friendly stuff should be treated differently than a gadget-hunting tech enthusiast.

2. Analyse and Optimise Customer Touchpoints

It is essential to identify all touchpoints for a customer-from websites and social media to email and offline channels and analyse, optimise, and personalise every single interaction. This tool maps customer paths in real time, so brands can make dynamic adjustments and improvements at each point along the way.

3. Identify Goals and Pain Points

Identify what the customer wants to achieve and the pain points he faces at each stage. Surveys, analytics, and feedback can help gather insights.

4. Visualise the Journey Stages

Outline the stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and retention. For each stage, outline what customers do, think, and feel.

5. Analyse Data and Collect Feedback

Use data analytics tools to test your hypotheses. Tools like TechMonk assist businesses in identifying behavioural patterns and adjusting their strategy.

6. Refine and Update the Map

A customer journey map is not a one-time exercise. It should be updated from time to time as customer behaviour evolves, market conditions change, and business objectives change.

Customer Journey Map Example

Imagine the first time a customer comes to your e-commerce site. The customer finds a product, reads reviews, places it in the shopping cart, and finally makes the purchase. Afterwards, they get a personalised thank-you email with an invitation to join your loyalty program. And that is a fully defined customer journey.

Why Is a Customer Journey Map Essential For E-Commerce Business?

For any e-commerce business, the customer journey map gives a strategic advantage for understanding insights into customer behaviour and needs.

1. Informed Decision-Making

By giving e-commerce businesses actionable insights, customer journey maps help them make more informed decisions that will boost customer happiness and performance.

2. Transformation Focused on the Customer

Through the use of journey mapping tools, companies have effectively matched their objectives with consumer expectations, resulting in more relationship-driven and customer-focused operations.

3. Improving the Acquisition of Customers

Enhancing the customer journey increases brand reach and sales potential by making it simpler to find and convert new customers.

4. Increased Return on Investment

By cutting down on inefficiencies and developing more individualised, effective tactics, companies that use customer journey data realise notable increases in return on investment.

Interestingly, companies that organise and manage customer experience rightly realise a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction and a 15% increase in sales conversion. (McKinsey & Company)

Stages of an E-commerce Customer Journey Map

Understanding the distinct stages of the customer journey is crucial for creating an effective map. Each stage represents a phase in the customer's interaction with your brand.

1. Awareness Stage

Here, at this preliminary stage, the prospects become aware of your brand or products. They may notice your business via social networks, search engines, and word-of-mouth. Results here are designed to capture awareness and make that all-important good first impression.

2. Consideration Stage

This is the stage where potential customers do research and compare their options. They come to your website, read reviews, and compare what you offer against your competition. Providing your potential customers with details about your products and services, answering their questions, can eventually lead them to purchase.

3. Decision Stage

This stage describes the customer in the action of buying. You might as well let a seamless, intuitive checkout process and clear calls to action enable conversion. Enhancing the buying experience by providing multiple payment options and transparent shipping information can also help.

4. Retention and Advocacy Stage

After the customer has made the purchase, the emphasis becomes keeping the customer and optimising repeat business. How to build customer loyalty: Creating loyalty through personalised follow-ups, creating loyalty programs, and leveraging responsive customer service can go a long way. Happy customers are ambassadors, promoting you to others.

Best Practices for Creating an Effective Customer Journey Map

1. Use Real Data for Accuracy

Ensuring that your map is based on real customer data makes sure your map is representing real behaviors and experiences. Use analytics to gain visibility into customer engagement and preferences.

2. Collaborate Across Teams

Include different functions—like marketing, sales, and customer service—in the mapping process. It brings both diverse perspectives and a united front in improving the customer experience.

3. Regularly Update the Map

Customer behaviours and market dynamics change over time. This also helps you keep your customer journey map relevant and ensure that it is addressing current challenges and capturing opportunities.

4. Focus on Emotional Triggers

By examining the emotions that customers are feeling throughout these touchpoints, someone can design interactions that are in alignment. A more enjoyable customer journey can come from addressing pain points and amplifying positive emotions.

Build An Ideal E-Commerce Customer Journey With TechMonk

TechMonk is an agent-as-a-service full-stack customer engagement platform for e-commerce businesses. TechMonk's Customer Journey Builder empowers you to design personalised customer journeys that guide users towards a specific outcome.

For instance, you can successfully take them to complete an order or confirm payment. By defining customer actions and response strategies, you have full control over how you engage with their customers at every step.

Let us break down TechMonk's customer journey builder for better understanding.

• Setting Trigger Event & Goal Event : With the journey builder, you can define the trigger event, which is the customer’s initial action to start the journey. It can be anything like visiting a product page or adding an item to the cart.
• Setting Time Duration : You can also specify the start and end time of the journey, ensuring it only runs within the desired window. This allows you to align customer engagement with campaigns, promotions, or specific time frames.
• Adding Flow Actions :After setting the trigger and goal events, you can define the flow actions, such as sending emails or WhatsApp messages. Flow Actions can be customised for different customer cohorts, letting you create personalised journeys based on various customer segments' specific needs and behaviours.
  Flow actions help keep customers engaged and push them toward the goal event.
• Switch Case Block :It allows you to set different actions based on previous events, customer KYC (Know Your Customer) data, or customer segments. This ensures that the customer journey can adapt dynamically to individual customer profiles and actions.
• Creating or Using Templates :You can easily create and use custom templates for emails and WhatsApp messages. Instead, you can also use pre-built templates available in the library. These templates can be tailored to fit your business’s tone and messaging needs.
• Selecting Time Delays :You can also set time delays between flow actions, giving you control over the pacing of communication. For example, you can choose to send a follow-up email after a few hours or days, ensuring customers aren’t bombarded with too many messages at once.
• A/B Testing :Conduct A/B testing to experiment with different messaging, offers, and timing strategies to determine what works best. This allows you to refine the customer journey and improve the effectiveness of their communications.

Here is an example of how a beauty brand can use TechMonk’s customer journey builder.

The beauty brand sets the trigger event as a customer visiting the product page for a skincare cream. Once the customer visits the page, they receive an email with a discount offer. If the customer opens the email, they move to the next flow action, which is receiving a WhatsApp message after 2 days, reminding them of the offer.

If they open the WhatsApp message, they proceed to the next step, which could be another email offering a better deal. The journey concludes when the customer purchases the product, completing the goal event.

Here is how exactly customer journey orchestration helps your e-commerce business.

Not just customer journey orchestration, TechMonk has in stock for you more solutions. Here is what makes TechMonk unique.

• • E-Commerce Personalisation : By harnessing the power of GenAI, TechMonk delivers custom-tailored experiences that address individual customer needs, driving loyalty and repeat purchases.
• • Omni-Channel Communication : TechMonk facilitates consistent communication across platforms like WhatsApp, SMS, email, and social media, ensuring all customer information is consolidated into a single dashboard.
• • Customer Segmentation : TechMonk helps e-commerce businesses to target customers with precision using its segmentation tools. This ensures that your campaigns, surveys, and other efforts target the right customers.
• • AI-Powered Campaigns : Engage customers with GenAI-powered 2-way conversational campaigns that engage the customers and retain them effectively.