Our guest speaker, John Rowley, Digital Marketing Manager at Thorntons Ferrero, talked about elements to consider when creating an eCommerce customer journey on a large eCommerce site, from brand awareness through to data evaluation.
How to Create a High-Quality eCommerce Customer Experience
An online customer journey will have many touchpoints, including brand awareness increase through offline marketing. A customer journey towards a site can include social media advertising, Google advertising, television advertising and even in-store experiences.
However, when we decide how to segment our ad budgets, we must create profitable customer journeys.
The Importance of Customer Personas
Audience mapping and creating audience personas can help uncover problems which you can then work to solve and create high-quality customer journeys.
Examples include:
‘Chloe’, a professional in her early 30s who struggles to buy clothes online because she wants to buy outfits in person.
The solution:
Offer easy returns and confirmed payment 28 days after purchase
‘Keith’, a taxi driver in his 50s who doesn’t want to give his personal data to a website
The solution:
Increased data transparency and security guarantees.
Persona marketing also allows your marketing to be personal to those segments. You can change your messaging to reflect your ad targeting.
Creating Customer Experiences Which Leave a Lasting Impression
A high-quality customer experience relies on three rules:
- Be There – work on increasing brand awareness, introduce incentives such as free delivery or special discounts, and retain customers through high-quality personalised content
- Be Quick – Work on page loading speeds across your website and consider the amount of steps in your purchasing journey
- Be Useful – Make sure your website prioritises content which fulfils the query. Your site needs to be both quick to load and easy to navigate
Analysis of Performance – Did Your Strategy Work?
Strategy analysis depends on reliable attribution models, so you can track which parts of your campaign are successfully selling the product, and which channels contributed to the successful customer journey.
Attribution models include last click, first click, time decay and position-based.
Digital marketing is now moving towards data-driven attribution models, using machine learning to work out the exact journey taken, including all of the touchpoints.
Key Takeaways:
A quality customer experience will inspire customer loyalty, which leads to revenue growth.
For a good customer journey….
You need audience personas
These will help identify common problems you can provide solutions for
Personalisation is key
To form the journey….
Be there, be quick and be useful
To make the journey profitable…
Focus on attribution
Make sure your insights are data-driven
Keep on evolving your strategy
