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The journey from brand awareness to purchase is not as linear as what’s depicted on your marketing team’s whiteboard presentation. Many factors, such as customers’ experience with your business and their buying behaviour and needs, influences how the customer journey pans out.
Thus, getting insight into how customers interact with your business across multiple channels is key to knowing their expectations and how you can continually improve the process to aid conversion. This is where customer journey analytics saves the day.
In this article, we will examine what customer journey analytics is, its benefits, use cases, and how to make the data work for you.
Let’s dive in.
Key Takeaways
- Customer journey analytics allows you to track, understand, and improve customer interactions with your business.
- It can be used to improve CX, enhance customer retention, reduce bottlenecks in the customer journey, and improve marketing ROI.
- To conduct customer journey analytics, you set goals, gather data, continuously optimize the journey, and track your results.
What is Customer Journey Analytics?
Customer journey analytics involves tracking how customers interact with your business based on various touchpoints and channels to understand how each interaction impacts buying decisions.
Customer journey analytics provides you with accurate data that informs you on what customers experience when dealing with your business and obstructions met on the way; helping you make informed decisions to increase customer satisfaction and boost sales. The data provides insights into the what, when, why, and how of customer behavior giving your team the information required to optimize the customer experience.
Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics
Properly incorporating customer journey analytics into your marketing strategy provides priceless insights into customer behavior which has plenty of important benefits for businesses.
Improve Customer Experience
With 73% of customers saying customer experience is a deciding factor in their purchasing decision, understanding customers’ preferences and expectations is key to a successful business.
With insights from customer journey analytics, your customer care team can detect what customers expect in their interaction with your brand, to continually improve this process—reducing friction and ultimately improving customer experience.
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Enhance Customer Retention
There is a 60–70% chance of selling to an existing customer, compared to 5–20% for new customers. Thus, customer retention is as important as ever.Using customer journey analytics data you can identify the reasons for churn, where drop-offs occur in the buyer journey, and how to address them. Addressing these issues at certain touchpoints aids customer retention and long-term loyalty.
Detect and Address Bottlenecks in the Entire Customer Journey
When designing the customer journey map, it can be difficult to identify the obstructions restricting customers from taking the next step. However, with insights from customer journey analytics, you can visualize the journey performance to detect roadblocks, enabling you to address friction for a smooth flow in the customer journey.
Identify Channels and Metrics that Matter
Customer journey analytics helps you identify the channels that perform well and bring in the most conversion, as well as touchpoints with the highest churn rate. With this, you are able to redefine your strategy to invest more in pathways that bring in the greatest ROI and focus on metrics that truly matter.
Improve Marketing ROI and Boosts Sales
Customer journey analytics helps you understand buyer behavior, to know what motivates buying decisions. For example, data obtained from the analysis can help you detect if a user is ready to move to a paid option or upgrade their subscription.
With this knowledge, you can send a well-targeted message at a specific time to encourage them to take the desired action. Ultimately, this works towards increasing marketing ROI and boosting conversions.
5 Customer Journey Analytics Use Cases to Apply in Your Business
Customer journey analytics can aid business operations in many ways. Here are five use cases to apply in your business, for optimal growth.
Relieve the Customer Care Team of Support Overload
With a clear view of the customer journey, bottlenecks, and restrictions are quickly detected and removed to ensure smooth transactions for customers. This results in great relief for the customer care team, since there will be reduced complaints made by customers, thus reducing support overload.
When your customer support team is well-armed with information on what happens in the customer journey, they are better equipped to trace the root causes of issues to provide support.
Target Specific Customers to Move Them Down the Funnel
Understanding buyer behavior is key to achieving business goals. With insights from customer journey analytics, you are able to detect what influences purchase decisions, to target specific customers, and move them down the buyer journey.
For example, customer journey analytics can help you detect the kind of funnel that encourages a segment of customers to take a step forward in the buyer journey. With this, you can send targeted messages and offers to move them further down the sales funnel.
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Identify Key Marketing Channels With the Greatest ROI
Getting great ROI on marketing efforts delights the heart of every CMO, and customer journey analytics will get you there faster. With insights from data analyzed, you can detect key marketing channels that bring in the best leads, to focus your attention there.
For example, if your fastest converting leads are from your email list, that points to the value of that marketing channel. Thus, you are able to make informed decisions to optimize it for more results. This could be by increasing the allocated budget or sending more targeted emails at increased intervals, for example.
You can also use customer journey analytics in detecting marketing tactics that impact the business’s bottom line. For example, if a lead magnet influences people to sign up for your product, or if call-out banners on blog posts impact signups on free trials, etc. This knowledge enables you to prioritize those tactics moving forward.
Track Customer Experience to Improve Your Product
Understanding what happens in the customer journey, from when users land on your page to when they exit your site, is a customer journey analytics benefit your business can reap.
With this, your product team can track the end-to-end customer journey to see how people interact with your product, where they come from, where they get stuck, where they spend the most time, and even where they drop off. You can detect common bottlenecks that prospects face that restrict them from converting, as well as unnecessary steps that lengthen the buyer journey that needs to be eliminated.
Improve the Onboarding Process to avoid Churn
Gaining new customers and losing them every month, only to get new ones and lose them again is a vicious cycle that can suck up your entire marketing budget. And since 86% of customers say they will remain loyal if onboarding and continuous education are provided, then improving your onboarding process is key to reducing churn rate and retaining existing customers.
Using customer journey analytics, you can discover a product feature that customers find difficult to use, which makes them churn. With this insight, you can improve your onboarding process to better familiarise prospects with your tool, right from the beginning.
Customer Journey Analytics in 6 Steps
Now that you know how customer journey analytics can benefit your business, it’s time to learn how to set it into motion.
1. Set Goals
To start the customer journey analytics process, set clear goals on what you are looking to achieve, to enable you to look out for the right variables. This could be to examine how the lead magnet funnel impacts paid signups, how sales landing pages aid conversion, and more.
With clear goals, everyone on the team is on the same page and there is clarity on how to correctly set up the analytics process. This ensures that maximum rewards are reaped and aids the swift application of insights received. All in all, your analytics goals should tie to business goals and impact business outcomes.
2. Choose the Right Analytics Tools
Your tool can either make or mar your analytics process. Thus, it is key to adopt the best customer journey analytics solution that helps you visualize the customer journey and understand customer behavior.
Your chosen tool should also be able to generate near real-time data that reflects what happens in the customer journey as it happens, integrate data across various channels, detect bottlenecks and roadblocks, and measure relevant KPIs that impact the business bottom line.
Leveraging customer journey analytics is made easy with tools such as Funnelytics with which you can map your customer journey and see how it’s performing in real-time. Funnelytics connects whiteboarding technology to your data so that you can visualize customer data and the entire journey.
3. Customer Journey Mapping to Gather Data
After choosing your customer journey analytics tool, it is time to map out the customer journey across various touch points on different channels.
Start this step by gathering feedback from customers and the internal customer care team. Then pay attention to information like geographical location, channels mostly interacted with, action taken on each channel, time spent on each channel, and areas where drop-offs occur.
With Funnelytics, you can build a close-to-reality customer journey map, with the information gathered. And for different segments of your audience across the channels of interaction, separate customer journey maps can also be made for efficient tracking.
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4. Analyze Data to Determine Areas for Improvement
Now, it’s time to analyze each touchpoint in the journey map. Using a customer analytics tool, such as Funnelytics, you should get a visual outlook of how customers interact with your brand, right from when they land on your website, till their exit and all the points along the way.In analyzing data, look out for bottlenecks that restrict customers from taking the next action. You should also identify unnecessary touchpoints that can be eliminated or combined. Watch for how long customers spend in a particular touch point, as well as the most effective channels that aid easy conversion.
5. Implement Solutions for Continuous Improvement
At this step, you’re going to apply the insights received from the customer journey data to make improvements. This is a critical point in the customer journey analytics process which ensures you are getting returns on your analytics efforts with customer experience initiatives.
You’ve identified the issues or areas for improvement, and now it’s time to take action with targeted initiatives to optimize touchpoints and marketing channels.
6. Periodically Track Progress and Optimize
Customers’ behavior needs to evolve with time, thus, your analytics process should be continuous to keep up. Periodically optimize your business channels and touchpoints, to ensure you’re always offering your customers the best possible experience alongside their changing needs.
Analyze Customer Journeys with Funnelytics
First impressions matter. So, prioritizing customer experience is key to attracting both new prospects and retaining existing customers.
With insights from customer journey analytics, you can keep a bird’s eye view of your customer journey and adapt it as necessary to ensure a smooth journey and optimal experience for your customers.With Funnelytics, you get a visual overview of how customers interact with your business across various channels.Plus, with our real-time analytics tools and performance reporting, you’re equipped with everything you need to decisions that are rooted in data and primed to make an impact.“It offers a much more robust level of insight into consumer behavior that other analytics tools don’t and it’s more responsive as far as it’s real-time reporting.” Dusty Rich, CMO CashorTrade. (Check out their Funnelytics success story here.)
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Mikael Dia
Founder & CEO @ Funnelytics Inc.
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Mikael Dia
5 September 2024
Mikael Dia
5 September 2024
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