Customer journey optimization is regularly at the top of the list when we ask marketers about their priorities. This method helps to increase more conversions, revenue, and long-term loyalty for many successful businesses. However, optimizing the journey is a complex process and not something that every eCommerce platform supports. Luckily, Magento 2 provides a lot of features that support the optimization of the customer’s journey.
What is the customer journey?
Customer journey’ is the term that describes the stages of a shopper’s experience with an online store, from the moment they first become aware of its products through the moment they complete a purchase. Satisfied and smooth customer experience tends to have a positive impact on your prospective customers. For example:
- If your site loads quickly and without problems, provide and prices are clear, web pages are simple to navigate, and support teams are easy to reach, users might feel convenient with making a purchase
- If your online store is slow to load, unexpected costs pop up, the product page is complex to navigate, or there are too many forms to fill out, visitors might select to bounce or exit—which is both a disrupted journey and a missed chance
The phases of the customer journey
You may be familiar with the traditional terms for the phases of the customer journey, which are often something like:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Decision
- Advocacy
How to optimize Customer Journey in Magento 2
Stage 1: Awareness
At this phase, you can know where visitors are coming from, what brought them to your store, which pages they’re landing on and moving to, and the path that took them from one page to another. This is a chance to know what new visitors want — what they’re seeking for on your website.
Your aims at this phase:
- Provide info, answer questions, show legitimacy and expertise
- Gain trust
- Justify word of mouth
- Create interest
For the Magento eCommerce website, there are some great ways to optimize your customer journey when they are in the awareness process.
- Adding your social media channels to your website will allow customers to connect with you. Ensure your visitors can access your social media profiles from your website. You can place it by the side or at the top of the website. Don’t forget to always link your social media posts to your product pages.
- Wield more word of mouth marketing power: You can give an incentive to users that share their experiences in your store with friends and family. You can allow them to share the product they are viewing on their social media profiles. When they do that, you provide them with incentives through a reward program.
Stage 2: Interest
After they are conversant with your e-commerce store, they will develop an interest in your product. This is the time for you to capture their attention to enable them to make a purchase decision. Below are ways you can make your website stand out. At this customer journey, you need to figure out the way to decrease bounce rates and encourage users to browse more items. This phase is a chance for you to assist customers to find what they’re looking for.
Your aims at this phase:
- Present products as a solution
- Explain the benefits and justify the price
- Gain customer’s favor
- Keep interested
At this phase, make sure your Magento 2 website has a good UX design and professional product images
- The first thing your users will come in contact with on your online store is your design. If you don’t have a good UX design on your Magento 2 websites, it will turn them off. Besides, if your website is loading slowly, you will lose customers. This is where you will need the services of a good Magento developer that can assist you to build a highly optimized Magento online store that loads faster with friendly user experience.
- The product images should be clearly showing the items in the right dimension. You can hire a professional product photographer to have good images of your product.
Stage 3: Desire
That’s when you gain the first order from the visitors. The ease of choice and transaction is most essential here as well as the customer service and proper information about fees, delivery, and returns. This phase is also where a new marketing channel may enter the journey: the email list (which you can utilize to get the addresses of people who are concerned, but not ready to commit).
It is very important to apply the most important engagement features of Magento 2 in the desire stage
- Email-a-friend (which allow customers to share links to your products)
- Wish lists (desired products saved by customers )
- Use User Reviews: Build trust and credibility of your store with real review Magento 2
- Product comparisons
- Gift-related features (which assists customers to shop for gifts in your Magento website)
- Use product tags: Optimize your Magento store products by adding more functionality such as social proof or tags like “bestseller”, “top-rated”, “new product
- Use upselling and cross-selling to encourage shoppers to add items to their cart or purchase bundles with shop by look extension
Stage 4: Purchase
At this phase, you can keep or lose the customer. It’s the time to nurture customers, keep them close, stay on top of mind. If you offer a compelling enough experience, the customer would stick around long enough to reach a purchase decision. That’s probably the stage where you can do the most.
Your aims at this phase:
- Engage customer
- Get feedback and act on it
- Provide relevant offers
- Make them part of your community
- Inform about new things
- Stimulate more purchases
Magento 2 provides a lot of helpful features, both for customers to serve themselves and to support assisted purchases where appropriate. For example:
- Provide multiple shipping and payment options
- Fully customized order processing workflow
- Manage Shopping Cart tool that allows customer-service staff to change orders, apply discounts, accept payment, and perform other duties on behalf of the customer.
- Allow the customers to choose a convenient time to receive their orders for their orders with delivery time and date Magento 2
Stage 5: Advocacy
You should be working to get to this phase, but not all businesses succeed. The goal should be to turn each visitor into a loyal customer and an advocate of your brand. However, most of the customer journey ends after one or a few purchases because they fail at stage 4.
Your aims at this phase:
- Include the customer in product development
- Reward for loyalty
- Get referrals and word of mouth
- Utilize user-generated content
With Magento 2 platform, you get a handful of personalization functionalities to obtain this
- Segment your clients base into categories in order to create targeted promotions.
- Generate coupons and discount codes to send personalized offers to your clients
- Develop reward offers to boost customer loyalty (such as buy 1 get 1 free) to encourage repeat visits to your store
- Create store credits to problems as refunds, discouraging customers from defecting to competitors after problems arise and are resolved.
- Compile opt-in lists and send them to your clients
- Create newsletters to showcase your new and best-selling products
- Create coupon and discount codes on similar products and send it to them through their emails
Every users desires to have a seamless customer journey when making a purchase on an e-commerce website. However, this far from reality. To gain an optimized customer journey, you must bring together the best of Magento and its extensions.
