What is a Customer Journey and How Can You Prioritise Yours?
No matter what kind of service or product your business has to offer, planning the route you’d like your customers to take across your website and marketing channels is crucial when it comes to streamlining your strategy and reaching more customers. Understanding how you can make your customer journey a central point will help you tie together every element of your business’s marketing strategy.
Why is your customer journey so important?
Prioritising the experience your customers have with you has multiple benefits for your business. By paying attention to the route users take across your site, you can improve sales, boost your brand identity and ensure customers return to your site time and time again.
When customers visit your site, it’s vital you provide them with the best user experience possible. User experience is not just an important ranking factor, it’ll affect your brand perception too – it’s incredibly easy for users to simply click onto your competitor’s sites if they can’t find the information they need. Because of this, creating a strong customer journey that allows users to easily move through your site will help you stay at the top of search rankings.
In addition to helping you bring more users to your website, a strong customer journey will help you track how and why consumers are considering buying from you. Understanding at which point your potential customers are clicking on – or off – your marketing channels will help you hone in on more specific areas of your strategy, and take a closer look at what needs improving in order to achieve the best results possible.
If you’re struggling to track your customer’s movements across your marketing channels, an automated SEO tool could help you monitor your metrics easily and effectively. Rather than investing in a tool you’re not sure is the best fit for your business, Digital Marketing Reviews have a range of detailed reviews, to help you find the most appropriate marketing tool for you.
How can you make your customer journey a priority?
The easiest way to begin focusing on your customer journey is simply to consider your marketing channels from a consumer’s perspective. There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking onto a site and being unable to find what you’re looking for or not being able to reach the page you’re really after. Taking a step back, and viewing your site from a user’s perspective will help you map out the best course of action to take.
Clear any pop-ups
As Google switches to mobile-first browsing, you need to be mindful of the impact pop-ups can have on your customer journey. Pop-ups that cover the entire screen, are difficult to navigate away from or continually show on your site can have a very negative impact on your overall rankings. Pop-ups can also impact on your site’s loading time, putting off users who want to find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily.
Include natural links where you can
Rather than slotting unnecessary links into every piece of content on your site, be strategic about where you want your customers to head next. The ideal customer journey will take users from an informational landing page to a checkout or contact form without any hassle. Rather than leading your customers down a confusing path, with links pointing to inconsistent pages within your website, try and make each page as relevant and user-friendly as possible.
Keep things clear and simple
Ultimately, users browsing your site want things to be easy and seamless. While it can be tempting to showcase your entire product range or wealth of informational knowledge, remember that customers could find your site overwhelming – in which case, they’ll be tempted to simply switch off.