The Customer Journey
A useful exercise for businesses at any level is to map what your customer's journey is leading up to, and beyond, purchasing items from your online shop. This can be as simple as a scribble on some A4 up to a full Flow chart or spreadsheet.
Mapping this journey will allow you to see potential touch-points in the customer journey and any direct or indirect blockers. For example, the following may be a customer journey for someone who is struggling to efficiently move stock around their warehouse:
The customer has a problem they need to solve - in this instance they're struggling to move their stock around their warehouse efficiently and safely
They are currently at the Awareness Stage of their Journey
The customer moves over to their computer and researches ways to fix their issue. They may look at various industry blogs or forums or websites to find what they need.
They now vaguely know what they need to fix the problem, in this instance they need a more stable and stronger trolley; perhaps a platform trolley.
They are at the Consideration stage.
They need to compare how each trolley performs and how much weight it can take, what height it is, which brand is best, etc.
After much deliberation they have worked out they need a 300kg Platform Trolley which can fold up for easy transport and storage. They have short-listed their options down from "Warehouse trolley" to "300kg foldable warehouse platform trolley".
They are now at the Decision stage of their journey.
As they're honing in on very specific information they may check comparison reviews and customer feedback reviews on the models they're interested in.
Finally, after reviewing their short-list, previous reviews, customer feedback and their own needs they purchase their favoured trolley.
This is of course the Purchase stage of their journey, which hopefully was from your Shop.
This logical flow of refining options from a vague beginning is the bread and butter of all marketing companies and should be a focus for all eCommerce shops too. The opportunity to define where, when and how to reach your customers through-out their journey will be crucial to reinforce your authority and reputation on your chosen niche.
Conversion and Drop-off
Visitors to your online shop could be at any stage of their journey to find the solution to their problem. This of course leads to a drop-off (or bounce) from your site as customers work out what they do and do not need and whether you can fulfil that need.
The conversion funnel (or simply funnel) covers the route this visitor takes on your site. Regardless of how they found your online shop (via advertising, social media, search engine, etc) they will come through to a landing page; more than likely this will be your home page. At this point some will leave (bounce) away from your site as they cannot see what they need.
The remaining visitors will check out a product(s), some of these will go no further and bounce away.
The visitors (now Leads) who stayed may now add a product to their basket but for whatever reason, some again leave the site.
Some now continue into the checkout process and ass their details in. Some of the Leads leave at this stage without leaving any information.
Leads (now Prospects) confirm their payment details. Again, some have left without adding information - we can send them abandoned cart emails.
Prospects press the all important 'Buy' button and successfully complete their purchase. Win! Time to welcome your new Customers.
Your conversion from Visitor to Lead to Prospect to Customer (or Conversion Rate) will differ depending upon a lot of factors but you should aim for a conversion rate of 6.25% which is according to the wonderful WordStream is amongst the top 25% of eCommerce conversion rates. 1.84% conversion (again from WordSteam) in July 2018 was the median for eCommerce sites so don't despair if you're struggling to hit Unicorn status.
Funnel Tracking
If you've seen our resource on Google analytics and have setup the connection between your Analytics account and Stor Admin area then it's a good idea to start tracking these customer journeys. There's a really good post from Patrick Han here which discusses the step by step process to do this as well as some pros and cons of using only Google Analytics.
If you have not setup your Google Analytics account then read our resource document on adding Analytics to your Shop and some Analytics Essentials.
There are also some Heatmapping software providers who can track your customer's journey through the funnel such as HotJar.
You'll need to know the appends to your URLs:
Pre-payment pages end in: /cart
Successful payment URLs contain: "complete?transaction_id"