How to Understand Your Customers’ Buying Journeys And Engage Them at Each Touchpoint

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With advancing technology, the buyer journey has changed dramatically.

Empowered with multiple devices and tools (price comparison platforms, discount shopping platforms, shopping rewards platforms, product review aggregating platforms, etc.), purchasing decisions have become more unpredictable, and the buyer journey has become scattered and spontaneous.

One can start a buying journey on Facebook by seeing an ad, go off to a mobile device to research the advertised product in Google, get distracted by reading Google review, find an alternative product that comes better recommended and complete a purchase he/she didn’t even intend to make from a retailer he/she had no idea about.

One customer’s buying journey can include several devices and multiple touchpoints.

In this B2C case study, Google details how one consumer had more than 900 digital interactions while researching, comparing, and asking about car models before making a final purchase.

For B2B marketers, purchasing journeys are getting more complicated too. The average purchasing journey is now twice as long as it was 6 short years ago, and it is getting longer every year.

The average #B2B buyer journey is now twice as long as it was 6 short years ago. Click To Tweet

With that in mind, businesses need to invest more time and effort in exploring their customers’ buying journeys to find ways to engage them better on each step.

How to Explore Your Customers’ Buying Journey

Here are a few tools to help:

1. Oribi

Oribi turns your multiple analytics data points into actionable results. With Oribi, you can see each customer journey through your site to better understand what engaged your visitors best.

You can pin every event in the journey. Pinned events represent your main conversions and other actions you’d like to keep a close eye on. With Oribi, you don’t need any technical coding skills to set up your events: just locate them in the list and click “Pin this event” button.

You can also create event groups to better organize them and create more insightful reports (make sure to use descriptive, easily identifiable group names).

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2. Heatmap Tools

Previously, I wrote an article on how to use heatmaps to increase conversions. Since heatmaps are so useful in understanding how users interact with your page elements and sections, I highly recommend using heatmaps for analyzing your customers’ buying journeys as well.

A heatmap may come in different forms: a move map, a click map, and a scroll map. All of these tools record different types of on-page interactions (mouse moves, clicks and scrolling). All of these are important in understanding how people navigate your page, so run a few tests on your key landing pages.

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Image source: UXmag.com.

3. TouchPoint Dashboard

Touchpoint Dashboard allows you to create customer journey maps throughout various touchpoints and evaluate customer experience at each given step. Each touchpoint has images, audio/video files, data attributes, and real-time feedback from customers.

The dashboard offers powerful collaborative features allowing the whole team to add touchpoints they are responsible for and make notes.

On top of all, you can gain even more insight by involving your current customers: ask customers to rank the importance of touchpoints. The dashboard is very actionable, prompting you to:

• Assess the touchpoints by cost and effort to identify low-hanging fruit opportunities and quick wins
• Create campaigns, tasks, and set due dates on top of any touchpoints
• Add tasks, deadlines and team members, and filter items that are due soon
• Generate reports and strategic plans.

How to Engage Your Customers at Each Step

There are many ways to engage your customers, and there’s no way to give one single recipe to building a more engaged customer base. Your engagement tactics should be as diverse as your customer’s journey is scattered.

Your engagement tactics should be as diverse as your customer’s journey is scattered. Click To Tweet

For the sake of providing some actionable tips in this article, here is a quick look at your basic sales funnel and some tool ideas for each part of the funnel.

1. Top of Funnel: Create More Engaging Copy

For organic visibility, well-written copy is fundamental to success. Good copy helps your content rank, can improve organic click-throughs and keeps visitors on your site. As such, your content “handles”
a lot of tasks your Top of the Funnel strategy includes:

• Organic visibility
• Attracting clicks
• Time on the page (keeping your page visitors long enough for them to be willing to proceed to the Middle of the Funnel).

Text Optimizer is the tool that can help you generate higher rankings and more engaging copy for your page. It uses semantic analysis to identify underlying concepts and entities for you to include in content. The result: copy meets both Google’s and its users’ expectations.

In-content calls-to-actions will further improve your copy performance, so think what your users are supposed to do next, once they land on your page

2. Middle of Funnel: Use Smart Engagement Tools

To drive your site visitors further into the site, trying to sell them something right away is not always the best idea (especially if your visitor is at the research phase). So in many cases, engaging them with more content suggestions will deliver better results than trying to convert them with your primary CTA.

Using tools like Alter will help you drive your site visitors further into the site by generating personalized content suggested. Alter uses Artificial Intelligence to personalize its engagement tactics and needs minimum (if any) set-up beyond using a Javascript code to enable it.

3. Bottom of Funnel: Exit-Intent Chatbot

When your site visitor has reached the bottom of your sales funnel (your shopping cart), you need to handle them with special care: avoid including any distractions. According to studies, as many as 70% of your customers will leave the shopping cart without making a purchase, so something needs to be done here.

The safest route to take is to implement some type of exit-intent technology that identifies when a user is about to leave and engages them immediately. Exit-intent software is often used to boost grow your email list. But it can also be successfully used to improve your sales funnel performance.

Using an exit-intent bot seems like a good idea here as a smart chatbot is able to save the sale by holding your customer’s hand through the purchase process.

DontGo is the smart bot technology which specializes in exit-intent technology, so this is something I’d look into:

You can see how it works by clicking through to some of their featured clients. You’ll see a popup up just when you are about to leave.

For WordPress users, there’s a variety of chatbot solutions that integrate through plugins to look into.

4. Post Funnel: Invest in Retargeting Ads

Whatever you do, you can’t convert all those visitors. This is where retargeting campaigns help you reach those site visitors around the web.

The power of remarketing is that those people already know your brand, so there’s a good chance they will complete the purchase.

Retargeting campaigns are offered By Facebook (and consequently, Instagram) and Google. For best results, I suggest using both of these powerful remarketing channels.

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Conclusion

It is getting harder and harder to engage and convert your customers, but it doesn’t mean that you should stop trying. I hope the above tools will give you some ideas on how to get more of your customers into your sales funnel.