Finding meaningful insights from your customer journey
Previously, we wrote an article about how Google Analytics has much more value to uncover. But what does a new perspective on your customer journey mean? Which insights can you extract from data to better understand the customer journey of your business? In this article, we present five dimensions for finding meaningful insights from your customer journey.
1. (Not) Every Start Is Unique
A starting point sounds like something not to dwell on, but once you really start working with concrete data, it’s a lot less straightforward than you think. What is the start of your customer journey? Is it the first (measurable) touchpoint? The first time interacting with a product? A first engaged visit? And how do you deal with every subsequent ‘start’ before the journey is finished? Can there be multiple (product) journeys intertwined, each with their own start? Only once you have defined this – and this is certainly a discussion that needs to be held in conjunction with the business – can you truly see how your customers come to a goal.
2. The Time Each Step May Take
What is the time between two touchpoints? This is not only useful for shortening endless journeys, but also very telling about the engagement with your company. In this case, look not just at the average time but also the variation between and within journeys. The former tells you whether your journeys are reasonably similar, while the latter whether an average visitor ‘accelerates’ or ‘slows down’ in their contacts. It’s very enlightening to see what drives this. Perhaps after a certain stage, your prospects need some deliberation time (which you might use to deliver more value). Or is it the case that there are defining moments, make or break, after a sign-up?
Once you have those insights in place, you can also start thinking about when to intervene in such journeys.
3. Order Matters
From a performance perspective, we often dissect a customer journey into touchpoints and marketing channels. But do you also look at what type of content is viewed and in what order? Perhaps that blog series works much less well than expected, or maybe there are paths in your FAQs that lead to purchases more often. By looking at how your visitors find their way towards conversion, you can maximize the impact of your content. All in all, this makes for a more complete view of what a customer needs before making an (informed) decision.
4. Each Journey Has A Cost
If you have an idea of what each of your segments typically goes through in terms of touchpoints, campaigns and service before a conversion, you also have insight into the rough costs. Paid media such as SEA and social campaigns are quite transparent, but don’t forget the efforts for your email campaigns either. Just by looking at an average journey in this way, you can estimate the investment you make in a potential customer even before you start with proper attribution.
Don’t have an exact picture of your campaign costs? Then give it an intuitive weighting that represents the relative ratios between your media channels. For instance, clicks on LinkedIn Ads are often more expensive than your Google Display clicks. By assigning the former a higher (arbitrary) number, you at least make the impact visible. That might not meet the full expectations of marketing accountability, but does provide a priority structure when certain segments have too expensive journeys. As a result, you at least have actionable information when making business decisions.
5. The End(?)
Of course, finding meaningful insights from your customer journey is often tied to a goal you have in mind. However, there might be multiple ways a journey might end. When does a customer journey stop? The easiest way: at a purchase event. Yet, that does not cover everything. Not only is there often a phase after the purchase (service, upsell, retention offers…) but you also forget all the visitors who drop out. Not the most pleasant statistic to be reminded of, but certainly the most telling. When is an exit really an exit? When someone doesn’t buy? But what if that person clicks on an ad again next week: does a new customer journey begin, or was the original journey just not over yet?
Definitions about this are important if you want to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and content. Perhaps there are dead-ends in your customer journeys that seem doomed to fail. A deeper analysis could result in a whole new set of customers (or at least save unnecessary marketing spend when you find out what types of visitors are not likely to ever make it to checkout).
Are you interested in finding out more? You’ll be happy to know that HiGem has automated all of the above. Schedule a cup of coffee with us for a quick demo.
