The customer journey: How do you recognize where your customer is?
The customer journey is how your customer goes through your webshop. There are several stages to this. Curious about which ones? Read our blog about the customer journey and its different stages. How do you recognise which stage your customer is in, specifically by his behaviour? Only when you know which stage your customer is in, you can communicate with them in the right way. You don't (yet) need to have a sales conversation with a customer who is orientating, while you already do that with other customers in other stages. In this article, I will show you how to recognise your customer and which communication fits.
How do you recognise when your customer is in the awareness phase?
If your customer is in the awareness phase of the customer journey, your customer is not yet ready to proceed to purchase. But, how do you see on your website that the customer is here? We have listed a number of things for you to look at.
1. Identify your customer through Google Analytics data
- Sessions: This is important when you send your traffic to specific pages. Think about product pages but also blog pages.
- Percentage of existing vs. new visitors: Do your visitors return? Or do they drop out?
- Engagement: How long do your customers stay on your website? And do they click through to your website?
In Google Analytics, the customer journey can be viewed reasonably well via a funnel. When you go to behaviour and then behavioural flow, you can see on which page your customers enter and on which pages they might leave. Besides looking at the funnel, it is certainly advisable to look at the other figures such as sessions. Only then will you know for sure whether you are dealing with new or existing visitors.
Are you sure you are dealing with new visitors? Great! Then let's have a look at how these customers were triggered. This means: how did these customers end up on your website? What led (the trigger) to people coming to you? For example: you have an important event and you need a tie. You then ask Google how to tie a tie, which ultimately led you to a website that sells ties. The trigger was then the how question. These triggers can be identified. Make clever use of them!
Do you use Google Ads for your acquisition? Then go to 'Acquisition > Google Ads > Search queries' in Google Analytics:
Do you use organic traffic? Then go to 'acquisition > search console > queries' in Google Analytics:
Customers in the awareness phase can be recognised by the type of query they make, such as what, who, where, when, why and how (how to tie my tie). Tip: exclude brand queries. You want to identify customers who don't yet know who you are. Analyse the queries well. Only then will you know what your customer's needs and interests are.
Seventy-two percent of buyers turn to Google during the awareness phase, so it's important not to neglect the importance of identifying what you already rank for in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Use the data of your existing customers
It is not a bad idea to ask your current customer base about their data.
💡 Tip: email marketing is extremely useful for this!
In this way you can find out how your current customer base came to your website. This way it is easier to analyse where your new customers are. Go for quantitative (measurable) data and qualitative (observable only) data. Quantitative data is for example the number of purchases a customer makes per month. What is also important to include. Qualitative data is, for example, reasons why a customer orders specifically from you and not from your competitor.
Using software like Typeform, you can ask customers a lot of questions:
- What is the biggest challenge you face at the moment?
- How would you describe yourself in one sentence?
- What will happen if you do not overcome the challenge you are experiencing?
- Where exactly did you first hear of us?
- What is the one thing we are missing?
- What are the top three things that almost stopped you from buying from us?
As a rule of thumb, aim for a minimum of 100 answers. Remember, the more data you have, the easier it is to identify where your customers want to go to and where they want to leave. These insights are very useful for your new customers.
3. Use your collected data to create personas
With enough qualitative and quantitative answers, patterns will emerge in your customer's behaviour. With your data and your knowledge of the market, you now create buyer personas. This is actually a kind of profile of your customer. It may be that you extract one persona from your data, but it is common to extract multiple personas from your data. It is then up to you to decide which persona to focus on.
When you have your personas in order, you know what content your customer is looking for, what tone of voice is needed, what visuals are needed and other preferences. This helps enormously in the communication towards the customer.
How do you recognise when your customer is in the consideration phase?
The customer only enters the consideration phase when the problem is clear and your customer has found all the methods to solve his problem. You can recognise the customer who is in the consideration phase by the following statistics in Google Analytics:
- Returning visitors: These customers have been to your website multiple times and are genuinely interested
- Webinar/demo registrations: Are you offering a webinar or demo? The customers who register for it are in the consideration phase
Do you have these customers in your email file? Great! In Reloadify, it is possible to segment customers based on the pages viewed or how long someone has been on a page. This way, Reloadify also offers the possibility to recognise your customers in the consideration phase:
If you are smart, you know that these customers are not yet convinced to make a purchase. Don't use your email to promote the purchase of a product, but rather the advantages of your web shop and the product. Think about showing customer reviews about the specific product, a how-to video about the product or an advantage of your web shop regarding the shipping time. With an email like this, you win over your potential customers and get them to the last phase: the decision phase.
How do you recognise when your customer is in the decision phase?
The last phase is the decision phase. Your customer is fully convinced to make the purchase. You will, of course, recognise these customers by the fact that they have paid. Be aware of the fact that a large part of the customers who are in the decision phase are going to abandon the site. Often this is in the check-out.
As many as 69% of the shopping carts are still abandoned. Source: Baymard
Oh no! You've gone through so much trouble to recognise your customer and to persuade them to make a purchase, but they still give up. Not surprising that many web shops have an abandoned cart email ready. With the abandoned cart email you push your customer in the right direction, even in the last step.
👉 Want to know more about the abandoned shopping cart email? Check out all the abandoned shopping cart strategies.
Not every customer ends up at the check-out. For some customers it takes longer. These customers respond very well to email campaigns with free shipping, free tests or an email with testimonials.
So you see, in each phase of the customer journey you can do a lot yourself to move the customer in the right direction. For this, it is necessary that you know in which phase your customer is in the customer journey. Of course, you also want to retain your customers after their customer journey. Read our 5 strategies to retain your customers.
