Table of Contents
Customer journey mapping helps businesses stand out in a fiercely competitive retail sector. By looking at things from a customer’s perspective, retailers can tailor experiences that resonate with their audience. Ultimately, this personalised customer experience helps build loyalty and satisfaction.
The importance of the customer journey cannot be understated. Salesforce’s survey of over 6,000 people revealed that two-thirds of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations from the beginning. Likewise, CX Index found that customer-centric brands enjoy profits 60% higher than those who overlook the customer experience.
What is retail customer journey mapping?
Retail customer journey mapping helps place brands in their customers’ shoes. The journey comprises five stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Retention
- Advocacy
Each stage is a stepping stone towards a customer-supplier relationship that goes deeper than the sale alone. By focusing on a thorough retail journey map, businesses can craft a sales journey that is genuinely connected to customers’ needs.
With expectations constantly changing, mastering the retail customer journey is the key to staying ahead of the competition. In this blog, we’ll learn about the buyer journey mapping process and how it can help your business.
What is the retail customer journey?
The retail customer journey maps the path a potential customer takes from first hearing about your brand to becoming a loyal supporter. Understanding this process through customer journey mapping gives retailers valuable insights. You’ll learn about consumer behaviour, purchase decisions and demographic metrics, including ideas for improving your customer experience.
What are the 5 stages of the customer journey map?
The stages of the customer journey map show how a buyer interacts with your company at each step.
1. Awareness
The customer journey begins with brand awareness. A potential buyer discovers your company through many channels — from messaging to social media or word-of-mouth referrals. For example, a shopper might see an ad for a new product offered by your retail store. The ad sparks their interest, leading them to explore further.
2. Consideration
In the consideration stage, the customer starts thinking about your product or service. They might compare it with others, read reviews and consider its benefits. For your store, this might mean the shopper compares your product’s features and convenience against alternatives.
At this stage of the sales funnel, some consumers may need reassurance or convincing that your product is right for their needs.
3. Purchase
During the purchase phase, the customer decides to buy an item. At this stage, ease and efficiency are critical. Everything from the pricing to the checkout process must provide zero friction for the buyer.
A seamless transaction not only completes the sale but also enhances the customer’s experience, making them more likely to return in future.
4. Retention
Post-purchase, retailers should make an effort to keep the customer engaged. This might be through excellent service, customer loyalty programmes or regular updates. For instance, your store might tell buyers about an improved selection of payment methods they can use when shopping with you. Better user experiences lead to enhanced customer retention.
5. Advocacy
Ideally, the final advocacy stage sees satisfied customers become your brand ambassadors. Positive shopping experiences and ongoing customer support can lead customers to recommend your store to others, increasing revenue in the long term. Incorporating these stages into a retail experience map offers a clear vision of the customer purchase journey.
A well-structured customer journey map for retail doesn’t just focus on sales. It uses customer feedback to improve and grow. By understanding and optimising each stage of the retail customer journey map, retailers can improve their customer satisfaction and increase loyalty.
Why is the retail customer journey important?
The benefits of mapping the retail customer journey are threefold:
Helping to understand more about the customer
Mapping the consumer decision journey gets to the heart of the issue – the pain points that may drive us to buy products. A user buying a pair of shoes might then search for insoles. This illustrates their pain points and informs vendors on what products work well together.
We can even use a retail journey map to tap into a user’s emotions. Are they more likely to buy in a particular season or time of day? Every transaction helps vendors make data-led decisions.
Improving customer satisfaction and loyalty
Studying the shopper journey helps retailers understand what might be preventing the sale. Let’s say a customer drops off when they discover delivery fees. A vendor might change the copy on the page to be more transparent about additional charges.
Even better, they might create personalised delivery discounts to delight the customer and have them coming back for more. Some 73% of buyers say customer experience is an important factor.
Refining marketing strategies
Marketers can even study the customer journey in a retail store. Analysing data such as popular products in seasonal periods helps to inform store layout and product placement. This overlaps into the online journey, too – imagine a ‘you may also like’ tab mimicking end-of-aisle accessories.
With this user journey data, retailers can personalise product recommendations, refine email lists and tailor offers.
How to create your retail customer journey map
The customer journey mapping process looks at key factors like goals, customer profiles and stages of the marketing funnel. We can also speed this up for future review by creating a retail customer journey map template.
Step 1: Define your goals
The first step is to identify what you want from your customer journey analysis. Do you want to improve customer satisfaction, find pain points or increase sales? Perhaps you want to do all three – and different tactics will help.
Your analysis may identify gaps, such as barriers to conversion at the checkout. It may also present opportunities to better improve your customer service, like onboarding live chat.
Step 2: Identify your customer personas
Next up, we can use these templates to create customer personas. These are segments of your target audience, categorised by attributes such as pain points, likes and dislikes, and customer behaviour.
This helps to adjust marketing tactics based on user interaction, such as sending a retargeting email to convert dormant buyers.
Step 3: Map out your customer touchpoints
For better targeting, retailers need to be cognizant of every way that customers can interact with the business. This includes online channels such as social media and websites, as well as physical locations.
Understanding customer touchpoints helps to refine messaging. If more people are likely to convert through an email newsletter, retailers can make the most of this real estate. If they’re more responsive to ads, then graphics and headlines need to be snappy.
Step 4: Define your customer purchase journey
Thinking about the awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy stages, it’s important to consider the goals for each. Increasing awareness might encourage more advertising spend on social media platforms. Clinching the sale might need some conversion rate optimisation at the checkout stage, such as checking if the customer’s preferred payment method is compatible.
There may be different emotions at actions at each of these stages. Loyal customers might be more incentivised to buy during holiday periods, so retailers can target them at these peak times for retention. Their actions may also mimic retailers’ goals – is the drop-off at the consideration stage a sign to invest in customer service?
Step 5: Plot your touchpoints
Now we align the customer journey with the touchpoint. Search marketing ads, often a first touchpoint for buyers, can help to increase awareness. Later, optimised website content may convince a customer that they’re making the right decision – like a comparison article.
Then we might think about getting those customers through the door again. Prompts such as an invitation to download an app or subscribe to a newsletter keep your brand front of mind.
Step 6: Identify any gaps
Retailers need to consider customer goals as well as their own. How well is each customer touchpoint satisfying these goals? For example, if the user wants to know more about a product, is a well-optimised article answering their questions? Could an additional channel like an FAQ or live chat help push them down the funnel?
Each of these six stages requires resource from different departments. To make it truly holistic, the retail experience map will benefit from collaboration with:
- Marketing teams: designing ads and writing copy to address customer pain points
- Sales teams: identifying customer wants and needs to tailor messaging
- UX teams: spotting barriers to conversion and optimising the website
- Product teams: listening to customer feedback and adjusting products or services
- IT teams: discovering the need for new technologies to encourage omnichannel buying.
Making the most of your retail customer journey map
Sales journey mapping is only the beginning. With these insights, businesses need to make key decisions that address pain points and improve the overall user experience. These may include:
- Looking at the impact of each pain point and identifying how it influences sales, such as slow delivery times
- Focusing on the most urgent areas such as barriers to conversion like failed payments or broken links
- Implementing new channels or technologies to guide users down the funnel, such as an FAQ page.
This is not a ‘set and forget’ task. The customer decision journey needs to be continually reviewed in line with changing customer trends. For example, Gen Zs and Millennials are more likely to shop on sites with personalisation. Vendors should not overlook the retail store customer journey, either. This helps to create a more consistent brand experience.
Conclusion
Wherever and whoever our customers are, each of them follows the same buying journey stages. It is what they do at each stage that retailers should be aware of – including how they interact with customer touchpoints, and whether they come back for more.
The best marketers will assess the customer purchase journey and look for potential pain points or gaps in a strategy. Every transaction arms vendors with essential data, from likes and dislikes to user behaviour. With this data, vendors can trial different channels, optimise their checkout processes, and convert more customers.
As the retail customer journey becomes more user-centric, digital tools come to the fore. Services like Trust Payments help to identify any barriers to conversion – mapping the whole customer journey and feeding data into one platform. In turn, this helps marketers make long-term decisions and better target customers, assuring higher sales and better retention rates.
Get in touch today to get started with customer journey analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
A great retail customer journey map example will feature pain points, buyer segments and overall goals. It will look at these in the context of the marketing funnel, addressing each stage of the buying journey with tailored channels. This will streamline the eCommerce journey and keep the brand present in the buyer’s mind, both online and offline.
To measure customer touchpoints, marketers need to consider the measurable aspects of customer interactions. These include metrics like search volume, dwell time, click-through rates, open rates and conversion rates. Marketers can assess the ROI of each to inform future decisions.
The consumer decision journey is a process from awareness right through to brand advocacy. Many marketers use the visual representation of a ‘funnel’, looking at stages including awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy. Retailers can use online and in-store channels to target customers at every stage, from well-designed product aisles to social media ads.
To analyse customer journeys, retailers need to consider their overall business goals, as well as customer expectations. Every interaction with a brand offers valuable customer data – such as likes and dislikes, buying habits or preferred touchpoints. Marketers need to look at the channels they use for these touchpoints and think about how each one solves a particular problem throughout the buying cycle.
