9 Customer Journey Analytics Examples (+3 Tools for Better CX)

9 customer journey analytics examples and use cases

Not every customer follows the same journey.

Chances are, some may have found you through a Google search or discovered your ad on Facebook. Similarly, some customers prefer to engage with your brand through your blogs, while others are more interested in checking out your social media accounts.

You’re probably already mapping the journey your customers are taking. But how do you squeeze quality results from your analytics?

“Customer journey analysis gives visibility on all levels of the customer journey. It makes it easier to propose improvement plans and have the decision makers on board with the changes.” —Adrienn Szilagyi, Global Customer Experience Project Manager at NI

Here’s how to examine customer journeys across multiple touchpoints and use your findings to optimize your CX.

1. Track the impact of paid ad campaigns

Paid ads can bring tons of traffic and conversion for your business if leveraged properly. You need to make sure they’re well-optimized (in terms of copy and design), have an engaging landing page, and target the right kind of audience.

More importantly, you need to understand what works for your target audience—the tone that clicks with them, the benefits that appeal to them, and the experiences that matter to them.

A customer journey analytics report helps you break down your ad campaigns step-by-step, and track and analyze the conversions and return on investment (ROI) throughout the journey—from the landing page to the pricing page.

Let’s say you’re getting many clicks on your display ads, but the bounce rates are equally high. This means your audience is looking for the specific keywords your ad is ranking for, but they aren’t finding your landing page relevant.

The results of analyzing ad data

• You can employ different strategies to make your landing page more effective. Offer whitepapers, ebooks, tutorials, or other valuable information, or perhaps take another look at the design or usability of the page. This can reduce your bounce rate and support your campaign goals.
• You can use topic targeting to make sure your display ad appears on relevant websites. This helps ensure the right audience sees your ad where it’s more likely to catch their interest.

2. Understand how customers interact with your brand

When you’re looking to make data-driven decisions for your business, mapping customer journeys throughout the customer lifecycle is crucial.

This is something Four Sigmatic—a subscription-based ecommerce brand—struggled with. To drive better decision-making, they wanted to understand their customer journey better.

They were using multiple tools, such as Google Analytics and Data Studio. Still, they didn’t know which customer journeys were helping their business.

So, they turned to Funnelytics, a customer journey analytics tool that helped them see their customer journeys more clearly while making other tools redundant.

Results of simplifying analytics and reporting

• They increased their average order value by 46% by gaining more clarity into their customer journeys and understanding where they were and weren’t making money.
• Everyone in their company—from sales to business divisions—switched to the same customer analytics tool to stay on the same page.

3. Identify and segment your target audience

When building a business, make sure you’re targeting customers who are in it for the long haul and see value in your offerings.

Using customer journey analytics, you can segment customers based on their demographics, behavior, and interests.

Doing this, you gain insight into how prospective customers are more likely to behave while interacting with your brand. Then, you can apply appropriate strategies to convert them.

Let’s consider an example.

Say you’re a fitness apparel and equipment retailer. To identify your target audience, you’d track metrics around website visits, interactions on social media, purchase history, and demographic information about your customers.

Using customer journey analytics, you’d then identify patterns and trends in specific customer segments. For example, you may deduce that customers reading blog posts about marathon training are more likely to be interested in high-performance running shoes.

Results of segmenting your audience

• You can send targeted communication that helps keep your customers engaged.
• You can craft a solid lead magnet funnel to attract your ideal customers and convert them down the line.
• You can craft highly personalized product recommendations and find opportunities to convert hot leads into clients.

4. Focus on the most profitable customers

Not all customers are equally motivated. Some make only one-time purchases and never return. However, some customers will find your product useful, feel connected to your brand, and see a long-term association with you. The latter is the kind of customer you want to focus on and improve your interactions with them.

The best way forward is to determine how much money each customer makes the business and identify the most profitable ones. This is where a customer journey analytics tool will get you a detailed and quantitative picture of the entire customer journey.

Once you’ve found your ideal customers, find ways to make them even more happy. Group them into a separate segment and proactively engage with them.

Results of focusing on profitable customers

• You find opportunities to upsell or cross-sell to those customers, making more revenue.
• It helps you retain these customers even longer by offering them top-class customer service.

5. Identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling

Cross-selling and upselling account for up to 30% of sales revenue. That’s according to 500 surveyed sales professionals. A reported 72% of those who upsell and 74% who cross-sell saw these gains.

A classic example of cross-selling and upselling is seen in retail and hospitality. Hotels and resorts often leverage loyalty programs to convert an existing customer into a higher-paying one.

To place these up-selling and cross-selling offers in your customer journey map, you need to understand the high points. These could be touchpoints where customers are responding really well or areas where customers could use an upgrade. Customer journey analytics helps identify these.

For example, banks may use customer journey analytics software to figure out the channels their customers respond positively to when learning about their new credit card offerings.

Say people respond positively to emails instead of text messages. As a result, they’d decide to invest in this channel and send personalized email campaigns to prospective customers.

Results of cross-selling and upselling

• You generate additional channels of revenue with existing customers.
• With insights into what your customers want and need, you build stronger and deeper customer relationships.
• When customers see long-term benefits in associating with you, they tend to stick with you for the long haul. This increases customer lifetime value, ie the total net profit you can generate from a customer throughout their interaction with you.

6. Analyze the cause of churn and reduce it

Customer churn can significantly impact your revenue, especially if you’re a subscription-based business. This is why most top enterprises (including SaaS businesses) and small and medium businesses (SMBs) aim for an annual churn rate of below 7% and approximately 20%, respectively.

However, with multiple touchpoints between you and your customers in different funnel stages, it’s hard to know the exact trigger that influenced a customer’s behavior.

This is where customer journey analytics helps you map their end-to-end journey and discover loose ends in your sales process.

“Review customer feedback, and ask for feedback from teams working closely with the customers. Identify the top five pain points and check the level of effort that is needed to resolve these. Start with the most impactful one in the customer journey (supposing there is enough internal capacity to resolve it in a shorter amount of time).” — Adrienn Szilagyi, Global Customer Experience Project Manager at NI

CashorTrade—a website that allows people to sell and trade concert and event tickets—struggled to understand why their website visitors were leaving without buying tickets.

They had access to analytics data from different platforms such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Google Analytics, but they couldn’t consolidate their findings from this scattered data.

They used CX analytics to gather all the data from different sources and collect them in one place.

The results of consolidating analytics data

• They could pinpoint where people were leaving their websites. They targeted these spots for improvement.
• By optimizing their website, they made their customer journey smoother. This resulted in more sales.
• They could see how effective their advertisements were and figure out ways to improve their ad strategy for a better ROI.

7. Build effective loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are an effective way to retain customers and elevate your brand’s reputation. In its CX 2023 report, Zendesk notes that 52% of loyal customers will go out of their way to buy from a brand they admire.

But it’s not enough to just have a loyalty program, you need to understand if it’s delivering the desired results. That’s where customer journey analytics data comes in—helping you to optimize your loyalty program for better results.

Here’s how.

• Identify what you want to achieve through your loyalty program—like increasing retention, spending, or referrals. Based on your goals, define KPIs such as targetted retention rates, churn rates, or lifetime value, and track your progress.
• Collect data from multiple sources, including your loyalty program platform, point of sales (PoS) system, email marketing platform, social media, customer feedback surveys, and other relevant sources. Combine and organize the data.
• Then, analyze and segment your data to understand your program’s patterns, trends, and anomalies.

For example, SaaS businesses can segment their users based on their level of engagement with the organization. Let’s call them power users and casual users.

Since power users are more engaged and more likely to upgrade their purchase, you can offer them access to premium features or priority customer support in the loyalty program.

For casual users, the company can offer incentives like extended free trial periods or discounts on upgrades.

Results of optimizing your loyalty program

• You achieve better conversion rates.
• You can experiment with different elements of your loyalty program—rewards, redemption options, and communication channels—and dig deep into your customer journey.

8. Gather channel-specific insights

Customer journey analytics helps you understand how customers interact with your business across channels like your website, mobile app, or social media. You can see all their steps—from discovering your product to purchasing it.

You can pinpoint the platform where users are leaving without taking action and the issues causing it—like slow loading time, glitches, or confusing navigation.

This allows you to look deeper into that platform’s design, user interface, and functionality, and improve them.

Results of analyzing channel-specific insights

• You’re able to identify and fix any bugs that might hamper a channel’s performance.
• You can create a more personalized and satisfying experience for your customers by optimizing these platforms.

9. Optimize customer onboarding

In a 2020 Wyzowl report, 55% of surveyed customers admitted to having returned a product that they didn’t understand how to use. This goes to show that no matter how effective and useful your product is, if your customer isn’t actively using it, you’ve already lost the battle.

So get them onboarded right, and use customer journey analytics to optimize the process. Monitor metrics such as abandonment rate, success rate, and the total number of interactions.

This will help you understand how many customers have successfully completed their onboarding journey and how many are stuck or facing challenges.

Here are a few metrics to track:

• Rate of new downloads and installations
• Average daily or weekly logins
• The adoption rate of features available for every user

Use these data points to identify the problems in your onboarding process and fix them.

Say you run a mobile banking app, and through customer journey analytics, you discovered the point where most users were dropping off—while linking their bank accounts.

This is your chance to reduce the friction of this process and ensure your users feel safe about linking their accounts.

Results of optimizing customer onboarding

• Customers will use their accounts more often, which leads to higher retention and profitability.
• Once you create a 360-degree customer view during the onboarding process, it’s easier to identify high-risk activities.