There are many ways you can go about improving your eCommerce sales. You could boost your marketing efforts, hire more sales staff or run a new advertising campaign. However, at the heart of all these strategies are your customers. You need to know more about them and how they interact with your business if you want to get the most of your other efforts.

To that end, we highly recommend building a customer journey map. A customer journey map makes it easier to improve your business in a number of ways. Below, we’ll outline the benefits of a customer journey map along with how to start building one.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how customers experience your brand. The purpose of a customer journey map is to better picture how customers move through your business, from first hearing about you to becoming recurring customers. By creating a customer journey map, you’ll have an organized way to view information about your customers, which can lead to improvements throughout your business. In fact, according to one study, 85% of professionals who use customer journey maps find improvements in customer satisfaction, lower churn and fewer complaints.

Perhaps the best way to understand how they work is by looking at some customer journey examples. In them, you’ll see how businesses divide the customer journey into stages and provide details for each of those stages. Once you see some examples, you can then start to brainstorm how one for your business might look.

Research Your Audience

The first step in creating a customer journey map is to conduct audience research. The more you learn about your customers, the more detailed your map will be. There are several ways for gathering information about your target audience:

Customer Surveys

One way is to send out a survey. Through a customer survey, you can learn things such as how your customers found you, which aspects of your business they like and which they don’t like. It’s easy to send out these surveys online, such as when a customer visits your website or completes the checkout. Try to ask a range of questions, but don’t keep it too long, as you don’t want to take up too much of your customers’ time.

Customer Location Identification

Another method you can try is using an IP lookup tool. With an IP lookup tool, you can determine the location of your customers, which is ideal if your business operates locally or if it needs to calculate shipping costs.

Social Media

If your business has active social media profiles, these platforms provide many tools you can use to understand more about your audience. Make use of these tools to learn more about your audience’s demographics, location, likes, and dislikes. However, if you only have a small audience on social media, you may not get representative results from your entire customer base.

Artificial Intelligence

Finally, you can use AI tools to help you conduct research. For example, there are AI and UX research tools that can help you learn more about how customers interact with your website. You can then learn which pages perform the best and which elements your customers like the most.

Identify Your Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where customers interact with your business. They can vary depending on the type of business. For example, a local coffee shop has a touchpoint of customers coming into their stores, while an eCommerce business has pages on its website. Essentially, you want to think about all of the methods that customers can use to interact with your business.

Create a Timeline Using Graphic Software

The final step is to use graphic software to create a timeline. A timeline is a path that your average customer follows. For example, a customer may start off by hearing about you through an advertisement, then visit your website, then purchase a product. Break up your customer’s journey into stages, then put those stages into chronological order.

Once you have these stages laid out, you can begin to add more details to each. For instance, under each stage, you can list the likely touchpoints that the customer will experience during that stage. You can also add details such as how your customer might be feeling at that point or what their thought process is.

Create Your Own Customer Journey Map

Each business will have its own unique customer journey map. While you can look at others to give you an idea as to how to create yours, in the end, you’ll need to modify it to meet your needs. However, if you take the time to develop a customer journey map for your eCommerce business, you’ll likely find it easier to strategize for your sales and marketing plans. This in turn will fuel your sales growth for a long time to come.

Also Read: Future Of eCommerce: Improve Your Position In Market