Improving the Customer Journey with Social Proof - eCommerce Tips

If you have been running an eCommerce business for any length of time, you know that understanding the customer journey is essential to making more sales!  However, understanding the eCommerce customer journey better is easier said than done. 

eCommerce isn't like a typical retail business where you can physically see customers browsing the store. You need something to help you 

1. visualize customer journey
2. get to the bottom of why online shoppers aren't converting into buyers, and 
3. help you make the experience better

Follow along as I explain 

1. Why understanding the customer journey (and specifically the shopper and order journeys) is crucial for your eCommerce store
2. Why you should add social proof along the way to improve the experience for customers
3. How Fera.ai can help you achieve all of this!

The customer journey defined

When it comes to eCommerce, the customer journey is defined as the process or path a person takes to buy your product online. When you create a customer journey map, you are effectively creating a visual representation of that process. 

Creating a customer journey map

To create a useful customer journey map, you will need a few things:

Customer Persona

Think of your customer persona as a semi-fictional representation of one of your ideal buyers. Typically, this representation of based on past customers, research, and web analytics.  When making your customer persona, make sure you cover a couple of things

1. Their mindset - the questions they have about your product, the problems they are facing, and the information that they have or don't have to make the right decision.
2. Their emotions - are they feeling anxious to find a solution to their problem, looking to feel better about themselves, or sad about an event in their life that your product can fix? 

This 'emotional' aspect of the customer persona can also tell you if they're frustrated or delighted with your or your business and how they should be feeling depending on the point of the journey they are on. Having a customer persona makes mapping the touchpoints and goals on your customer journey easier! 

Touchpoints 

The next thing you will need to create a customer journey map is your customers' touchpoints on the path to buying your product.  The more information here, the better, but don't get too bogged down about every touchpoint your customer may encounter. Cover the most important ones like

• Your website
• Social media
• Customer service
• Packing upon delivery

Goals

Your customers may have different goals depending on your product offerings. For example, your ideal client may be a socially conscious woman in her late 40s looking for a new beauty routine and makeup routine. She will have different goals, such as researching the best beauty products for her type of skin or the right kind of eye shadow for her skin tone. The journey for skincare and make up will be different for her!

A specific example

Typically the customer journey covers these broad steps. Your customer

1. Discovers that they have a problem (they want to look fabulous for the summer)
2. Researches their problem 
   1. Googles: 'cute dresses for the summer' or 'where do find sustainably made sundresses in Los Angles'
   2. Heads over to Instagram to check out what their favorite influencers are wearing
   3. Sees an ad online with your product
3. Purchases a product (hopefully yours) that checks all their boxes
4. Gets their dress delivered (expects a shipped notification and it to be packaged well)
5. Interacts with your brand after the fact (with a review or a mention on social media)

As you can see, the customer journey can start with an organic search, word of mouth, or paid advertising, but as you get further along the journey, the shopping journey and the order journey are where you will want to make the best optimizations.

Customer journey: order journey 

So what exactly is the customer's order journey? This is the part of the journey that your customer takes on your website that ends in a sale!  This is the conversion part of the journey when a potential customer becomes a real customer. This stage usually focuses on new customers, but you should also be looking at return customers during this stage.

Customer journey: shopper journey

The shopper journey also encompasses the order journey, but this is primarily the acquisition stage where your potential customers interact with your website and your brand

Why the order and shopper journeys are important

Why track the order and shopper journey differently?  You should track these customer journeys differently because not all shoppers will turn into orders.  If you just track order journeys, you will miss out on discovering where your shoppers abandon your website. If you miss this, you won't be able to plug the holes on your funnel. 

Compare what your shoppers and buyers are doing

There is a lot of value to be had in seeing how your shoppers are navigating your site and contrasting that with how your actual buyers are navigating. 

When you are looking at your shopper v order journeys ask yourself

1. Where are shoppers coming from? Where are buyers coming from?
2. At what point in the shopper journey are shoppers leaving
3. Are buyers getting to the same point as shoppers but overcoming whatever friction occurs and buying?
4. How long are shoppers on the site? How long are buyers on the site?
5. What are the things shoppers are interacting with on the site? Is it the same for buyers?

How Fera can help create a better customer experience

Visualize the customer journey 

If you want to make your customer journey better, you need to know what your shoppers are doing on your website.  With Fera.ai, you can see exactly what products and pages shoppers and buyers are interacting with. Once you have this information you can 

• map out your customer journey
• learn from your customer data
• build-in elements that earn the trust of your customer

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Build trust along the way

There are many conversion rate optimizations that you can implement depending on your customers' behavior, but building trust with social proof is one of the best ways to turn your shoppers into buyers. 

But don't take my word for it! 10,000 + online stores have found that the best way to improve the customer journey is to build trust along the way, and they use Fera to do that!  Some of the best ways to build trust are to add things like

• Customer photos walls
• Testimonials
• Free shipping
• A good about us page 
• Solid shipping & return policy

Adding Social Proof

You can use Fera to add social proof along the acquisition and conversion stage of the customer journey. We will show you how your customers respond to these things and then aggregate the revenue we influenced in your dashboard!

In-Depth Examples: Order Journeys

Here is an order journey of a shopper turned buyer that interacted with social proof, the about us page (several times), and checked out the product descriptions in detail. 

Lesson: Seeing this makes me understand that

1. I need to have a great about us page
2. Answer questions that shoppers may have about my brand
3. Maintain consistent product descriptions

Here is an example of another buyer that came from a paid ad and interacted with the push notifications.

Lesson: Sometimes shoppers need a bit of a reminder to buy something that they love! Also, to make sure shipping and return policies are clear (as they are) on the product page. You can use Fera to learn from your customer behavior and data to create a better user experience and foster trust along the way. 

If you want to see how you can create a better user experience, then download Fera today and try it free for 30 days.

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