Customer experience (CX) is critical to a business’s success. In a recent study, customer-centric brands reported an 80% increase in their revenue. Proactively measuring CX will make sure you identify and optimize any weak points in your strategy.
However, most businesses miss the boat in their analysis and instead focus on simply understanding how to better convert leads and increase sales. They miss seeing things from the customer’s point of view: their holistic journey interacting with the brand, as well as the points that either increase their engagement or lead them to drop off. This is where customer journey measurement and analysis comes into play.
Instead of focusing solely on conversion, you’ll track metrics that best reflect your customers’ experience with your brand. Using these figures, you can monitor the steps each customer takes to reach their goal and gain the insights you need to improve your CX.
Among the multiple data points available for customer behavior, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start and which metrics to track. When you’re looking for customer journey analytics ideas, where do you even start?
Too much irrelevant or misleading data can mean you ignore the actionable insights from your analysis, so it’s important to focus on the metrics that matter at every stage of the journey.
“Numerous customer journey points are monitored by us, such as website visits, social media activity, customer service conversations, and purchasing trends. Key metrics like how long customers spend on our website, conversion rates, and the feedback we gather from surveys are incredibly telling. They draw attention to the areas of our business where we are succeeding as well as those where we might be falling short of what our customers want.” —Jake Munday, Co-Founder & CEO at Custom Neon
When customers aren’t even aware of the problems your product can solve, how can you be sure you’re on the right track? By measuring these metrics:
Your reach quantifies the potential audience exposed to your content—a broader reach expands your brand’s visibility. To enhance your reach:
Impressions indicate how often your content is displayed to your audience. This offers insights into findability, search ranking, and content shareability.
Similarly, SEO ranking determines how well your content ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs.) Higher rankings contribute to increased organic traffic, which is often highly targeted and valuable for conversions.
Optimize your impressions and SEO ranking by focusing on factors like:
Bounce Rate and Time on page are crucial metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of a website in engaging visitors and guiding them through the customer journey.
A high bounce rate shows that users are leaving without interacting, which can mean your pages aren’t attracting or retaining the right audience.
On the other hand, time on page helps gauge user engagement by revealing how much time visitors spend consuming content. It indicates which pages are captivating and which can be optimized.
To improve these metrics, follow these best practices:
When customers have finished their research and start actively considering solutions, clicks become a leading sign of a healthy customer journey.
While clicks indicate the overall user engagement with website elements, media content, links, and CTAs, CTR measure the success of specific links by comparing the number of clicks to the number of impressions.
Here’s how to improve both these metrics:
“Recognizing a high drop-off rate at the inquiry stage, we simplified our inquiry process, making it more intuitive. The change led to a significant uptick in inquiries, and demonstrated the value of listening to—and acting on—customer journey insights. Adjustments will improve current customer interactions and also lay the groundwork for future client engagements.” —Alex Ugarte, Marketing & Operations Manager at London Office Space
The decision (or purchase) stage means the customer has chosen your product– or not. These metrics can indicate success or a need for improvement:
Conversion Rate represents the percentage of users who complete a desired action (conversion) out of the total number of website visitors. It tells you how well a website or campaign guides users through the customer journey to take a specific action.
Here’s how you can improve your conversion rate:
Sales represent the ultimate conversion, indicating that users have progressed through the customer journey to become paying customers. Meanwhile, CPC measures the cost of a website element or advertisement relative to the conversions it drives.
Both metrics provide insights into revenue generation, conversion efficiency, and the overall success of your marketing efforts.
“The main information that we look at is:
What we learn from these details really helps us build a stronger business:
Here’s how to optimize these metrics:
How do you retain customers after the initial purchase? Measuring these metrics can help to spotlight opportunities:
Loyalty measures the likelihood of customers engaging in repeat business with a company or recommending them to others. It also indicates the customer satisfaction levels with your products.
Satisfied and loyal customers are likely to become advocates for the brand, contributing to positive word-of-mouth marketing and a great brand reputation.
Here’s how you can improve this metric:
NPS gauges customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your brand to others.
Here’s how to improve your NPS score:
CLV measures the revenue generated over the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with a company. It provides insights into the long-term profitability of the business based on customer interactions.
Here’s how to improve it:
Every customer journey is different, but the general method to measure and improve them can be summarized in four steps:
Not all customer journeys are the same—one customer may have found you through Google ads, while the other may have found you through word-of-mouth. You may be looking at hundreds of customer journeys, which can be overwhelming to analyze without a structured process.
Here, you need to determine the top priority for your business and focus on analyzing customer journeys in that area. Here’s how to go about it:
In the end, the selection of customer journeys depends on what conversion means to you and what aligns with your business and marketing goals the best.
Customer journeys are a lot more than channels—your customers may be reaching a common goal through different touchpoints.
Customer touchpoints are specific interaction points between a customer and a business throughout the entire customer journey. For example, in a scenario where a customer interacts with a company’s mobile app to browse products, track orders, or participate in loyalty programs, mobile apps serve as a touchpoint.
Once you’ve decided on the customer journey you’re going to measure, start collecting data points stage by stage—from awareness to loyalty.
Here’s how to go about it:
By now, you may have collected tons of data in isolated databases—you need to integrate it all to interpret it well and make data-informed decisions.
That’s when funnel mapping comes into play.
“Monitoring these indicators provides a lot of advantages. They give us guidance on how to improve every customer experience, assess the effectiveness of our advertising, and streamline our operations. Each time a customer interacts with our brand, it is now more distinct and rewarding, because of CX optimization. And that’s only been possible because of the insights gained from analyzing their journey measurements.” —Jake Munday, Co-Founder & CEO at Custom Neon
Using funnel analytics tools like Funnelytics, you can visualize this data into a canvas and gain actionable insights to streamline your customer journey. It acts as a central repository of all your data—just integrate all your analytics tools into it, and it’ll help you create stunning—and understandable—journey maps.
Here are different ways to use Funnelytics for reporting and analysis:
Scores determine how a customer journey is performing. You can define journey scores using a combination of metrics that capture the unique customer experience and the value generated when customers complete a specific journey.
Here are the factors to consider when scoring your customer journeys:
Analyzing customer journeys doesn’t have to be complicated—all you need is the right approach and tools. You can conduct a customer journey analysis across multiple touchpoints and find out what makes them take an action or drop off from your funnel.
“Customer journey measurement is crucial for understanding our clients’ experiences from initial interest to final transaction. It has taught us the importance of each touchpoint when shaping customer perceptions and decisions. The end transaction isn’t even the half of it. Ensuring a positive experience at every step builds long-term, loyal customer relationships.” —Alex Ugarte, Marketing & Operations Manager at London Office Space
While there are many customer journey analytics platforms to help you measure your customer journeys effectively, Funnelytics makes this process fun and engaging. Easily visualize your data and interpret it with ease without spending hours analyzing journeys manually—simply drag-and-drop elements into the canvas to create steps, fetch data, and build a stunning journey map.
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Measuring the customer journey is an ongoing and iterative process. You can do it in the pre-purchase, post-purchase, and purchase stages to track a marketing campaign's success or simply optimize your processes.
Measure key customer journey metrics like conversion rates, customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), churn rates, and time spent at various touchpoints. Analyze these metrics to understand engagement, identify pain points, and optimize the customer experience, ensuring continual improvement in alignment with business objectives.
Relying solely on traditional approaches such as NPS surveys fails as they don’t show the whole picture. With the abundance of surveys your customers might be already drowning in, getting their attention is challenging.
Founder & CEO @ Funnelytics Inc.
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