In today's crowded marketplace, understanding B2B customer retention is more important than ever. Your business must stand out to win over potential new customers and keep them engaged over the long term. It all comes down to understanding what your customer wants—and then providing it.
Define a strategy.
Before you start mapping the customer journey, define a strategy. This step is critical to ensure that your efforts focus on creating value for your business and customers.
The first thing you need to do is decide what problem you're trying to solve--and make sure it's the right one. Once you consider this, ask yourself: "How can we help our customers achieve their goals?"
As recommended by Munro Agency, before you start mapping the customer journey, define a strategy properly. This step is critical to ensure that your efforts focus on creating value for your business and customers.
If there are multiple ways of accomplishing this goal (or various stakeholders who may want different outcomes), ensure everyone involved has agreed upon which route to take before proceeding further down that path.
What is a B2B eCommerce customer journey?
A customer journey is a sequence of interactions between a user and a brand. It starts with the first touchpoint and ends with the conversion.
The journey can be made up of multiple touch points, including:
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Online browsing
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Product research
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Content consumption (e.g., blog posts)
The goal is to create an experience that's personalized, relevant, and seamless across all channels so that customers can navigate through each stage seamlessly by themselves or with minimal assistance from you as they move along their individualized paths toward purchase.
Start with a clear understanding of your customer's needs and behaviors.
To create a robust customer journey mapping process, you must start with a clear understanding of your customer's needs and behaviors. This means knowing who your customers are, what they need from you to feel satisfied, how they want to interact with your brand and products or services in general--and how those needs have changed over time as technology has advanced.
It also means having an effective way of collecting data about these things so that when it comes time for mapping out the customer journey.
Think about how you want to interact with your customers.
When mapping your customer journey, it's essential to consider how you want to interact with them. Are there any specific touch points that are particularly important for your business?
For example:
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Customer service. You can map out the steps a customer goes through when they contact support or return an item. This could include reaching out via email or phone, filling out a form on the website and waiting for an answer (or not), or chatting live with someone through an app like Zendesk or Drift.
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Product recommendations based on past purchases or browsing history (upselling). For example, if someone buys a pair of shoes from your store but doesn't buy socks at the same time, it may be helpful for them to see some suggestions when they log back into their account next time--like "Hey. You bought these shoes but forgot socks. We have some great ones right here..." Or maybe this person has been looking at boots all day but hasn't bought anything yet; now might be a good time for an email offering free shipping on all orders over $50 until midnight tonight.
Map your customer journey from the first touch point to conversion.
To map the customer journey, you must identify all the touch points between first contact and conversion. This can be a challenge because there are many ways that your customers might interact with your brand: Through social media, email marketing, search engines, or other online channels; in person at retail stores; over the phone; or even on a mobile device while they're out shopping (or not).
If you haven't done so already, take some time now to think about these various touch points and how they affect each other. Are there any gaps in this process? If so, how could those be addressed?
Uncover opportunities for personalization, upselling, and cross-selling.
Personalization is a way to make your customers feel special, and there are many ways to do this. You can use email marketing, chatbots, or social media marketing to personalize the experience for your customers.
Upselling and cross-selling are ways of selling more products at once by offering an upgraded version of the same product or introducing another product that complements it well.
Upselling involves offering an upgraded version of the customer's purchase (for example, upgrading from economy class flight seats). Cross-selling means selling related items together (for example, when buying clothes online, we might be offered accessories or jewelry).
Identify areas where you can create new touch points in your customer journey.
You can add new touchpoints at any stage of the customer journey:
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In the pre-purchase phase: You might want to add a new touchpoint before someone has even decided on what they would like to purchase, for example, by providing additional information about products and services on your website. This can be done through product pages or pop-ups that appear when visitors click on certain items, which will help them make informed decisions when needed.
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In the post-purchase phase: When customers have already made their choice but are still looking around or browsing other products or categories within your shop, these users must also receive personalized attention. That's why many eCommerce businesses use automated emails with recommendations based on previous purchases--this way, people get customized suggestions based on their interests and needs rather than generic content sent out indiscriminately across all users (which risks being ignored).
Benefits of mapping a B2B eCommerce customer journey
Mapping your customer journey is a great way to understand the people buying from you. By mapping out all of the touchpoints, interactions, and conversations that go into making a sale, you can better understand what they want and need from your product or service.
The result: More effective marketing strategies that help convert more customers into loyal advocates for your brand.
A well-defined customer journey will help you improve sales, customer satisfaction, and retention rates. You can achieve this by:
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Increasing sales: By understanding the path your customers take when buying from your store, you can better anticipate their needs at each process step. This will allow you to provide relevant information at every stage of their journey to increase conversions and boost revenue.
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Increasing customer satisfaction: Knowing what content they need throughout the buying process allows you to deliver more relevant information on each page of your website, which will result in happier buyers who feel like they're getting what they want from their experience with your brand or product line (and no one likes shopping at stores where there isn't anything "right" for them).
Key takeaway
Mapping the customer journey in eCommerce can be daunting, but it is an essential part of any successful eCommerce business. With the right tools and strategies, you can create a clear picture of how your customers move through your website or app from start to finish.
This will help you understand where they get stuck along their path and how you can better serve them by improving navigation or adding new features that make shopping easier for everyone involved--including yourself.