Why read this? : We share how to create and use an e-Commerce customer journey map. Learn how to identify needs, pain points and touchpoints for online shopping. Follow our pizza delivery case study to see how a typical customer journey works. Read this to learn how to make your e-Commerce customer journey work better.
There’s lots to think about in e-Commerce.
For a start, you need to build your online store strategy. That means finding insights and deciding on your competitive strategy and positioning (see our D2C experience article for more on this).
There’s also lots of activation areas. Digital media. Setting up your store website. Running your CRM and customer service programs. Not to mention all the back-end order-to delivery systems.
When you list all these tasks out, like on this D2C dashboard from our setting up an online store guide, it’s a lot to keep track of.
You need all these tasks to work together to win customers. So, you need tools which help you organise the work. Tools which help clarify your thinking.
One of those tools is the customer journey map. It comes from customer experience and defines what’s needed at each stage of the customer’s journey.
Customer Journey Map
The customer journey map outlines the key stages customers go through. From being unaware of your brand to becoming loyal customers.
It shares the same thought process as the brand choice funnel. The stages roughly correlate to brand objectives like awareness, consideration and trial.
However, where it differs is it puts the customer needs and pain points front and centre. Plus, it also asks you to think about touchpoints. Those are where, when and how you interact with customers.
It leads with the customer rather than the brand.
This helps you avoid over-thinking the brand and under-thinking the customer. That can happen if you only look at the brand choice funnel. Customers don’t need awareness, consideration and trial. They need what your brand can do for them. Your brand has to meet their needs, and fix their pain points.
The journey map helps you keep the customer top of mind. You deliver more relevant solutions for customers, which drives more sales.
E-Commerce Customer Journey - case study set-up
To bring this to life, we’ve created a customer journey map for a made-up e-Commerce business.
It’s called the Sydney Pineapple Pizza Company, a pizza delivery business in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs.
We chose pizza delivery as it’s a relatively easy business model to get your head round. (we’ve also used it in other articles such as on market attractiveness and 6 Hats creative thinking).
It’s also good for case studies because finding your competitive advantage is key. There’s lots of other businesses going after the same target audience.
To set the scene, imagine we’re the new manager of this business and we’ve just run a workshop. We brainstormed ideas about the customer journey. These ideas came from different sources. Insights from our market research. Customer feedback. We also used what we know from areas like behavioural science and design psychology.
Our next step would be to map these ideas to the relevant areas of the customer journey :-
- needs.
- pain points.
- online touchpoints.
- offline touchpoints.
Needs
Meeting customer needs is a core part of marketing (and e-Commerce). But it’s easy to get distracted by what the brand needs, and overlook what the customer needs. The model stops you doing that.
Remember, customers don’t need your advert, your social post, or your website. They need solutions to their problems. Answers to their questions.
Informative or entertaining content, for example. And for e-Commerce, a way to research products and place and manage orders.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
One common tool used in needs identification and analysis is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It dates back to the 1940s. Opinions are mixed on how useful it is.
On the plus side, the tool’s well-known, and helps make sense of different types of needs. There’s 8 different groups of needs. From low level survival needs such as food, air and water, up to more personal growth driven needs like self-actualisation.
However, many argue it doesn’t give a realistic view of how people’s needs actually work. For example, there’s no evidence customer needs start at the lowest level and then work up. And in fact, you can have multiple needs happening at the same time, and higher level needs overruling lower level needs. Monks who fast while mediating, for example. People plunging into ice baths to improve their endurance and resilience.
Plus, the model itself was only ever a theory. It’s never been proven. And, it was only based on interviews with successful and healthy people. So, it’s got a biased view which ignores a wider range of personality and lifestyle types.
What would the customer say?
Maslow’s hierarchy is helpful as a prompt to think about needs. But don’t rely on it as evidence of customer needs.
For that, you need market research. You have to ask customers what they need at each stage.
Your e-Commerce customer journey map is stronger when based on what customers say they actually need. Use their exact words if you can.
For example, you might think the need you’re solving is to help people feel more confident.
But many things can do this. Customers are usually more specific. They’ll say something like “I need to feel more confident about meeting new people”. That helps focus what you need to do to meet their need.
This is important because each stage usually has specific and different needs. The need for a piece of information. The need for a service. It’s easier to plan for meeting specific needs than for meeting more general ones.
Pain points
Pain points are usually the problem which triggers the need. Hunger is a pain point which drives the need to eat, for example.
You include these on the e-Commerce customer journey map because they help explain what’s causing the problem.
Knowing the cause helps you generate better ideas on how to fix it.
These pain points can be relatively minor.
For example, for our pizza deliveries, customers might say, I need to find the right information on your product page.
But in some cases, they can be major issues.
Let’s say it’s an important medicine coming from an online pharmacy, for example e.g. if this product doesn’t arrive in time, my life could be at risk. That would be a major pain point.
Online touchpoints
“Touchpoint” is a marketing jargon word which covers any interaction between the customer and the brand. It’s where, when and how they “touch” each other.
Most customer journey maps (including this e-Commerce one) identify online and offline touchpoints separately.
This makes them easier to organise. Digital marketing activities naturally sit together. And similarly, traditional marketing activities also naturally sit together.
As you fill in the journey map, you identify touchpoints relevant to each need / pain point. These may be broad (e.g. digital media), or very specific (e.g. copy on your product page).
Offline touchpoints
Offline touchpoints are usually activities you can physically touch.
Outdoor and print advertising, for example. Posters and leaflets. Specific real-life interactions you have with a customer which don’t happen online.
Again, specific and short is key here.
You note which ones you’ll use at each stage of the customer journey.
This helps you look at touchpoints across the whole journey, and how they need to work together.
E-Commerce customer journey map - case study
Pizza delivery is a relatively low involvement / low informational need purchase. (see our sales copy article for more on these terms).
Customer decisions and actions at each stage are likely to be fast and not take much thought.
However, when doing an e-Commerce customer journey map, it’s usually worth imagining it’s the journey of your fussiest, most questioning customer. The one who’s the hardest work to win over.
That way you capture every possible need, pain point and touchpoint.
You can always cut or merge areas later when you move to execution. That’s better than starting too high level and missing an important customer insight.
For this case study, we’ve also made the following assumptions :-
- it’s a relatively new business so awareness is low.
- our target audience are pizza lovers who live in the neighbourhood we deliver to.
- our target audience regularly use search, social and websites
E-Commerce customer journey - Spark my interest
The first job in the e-Commerce customer journey is to spark their interest.
We want to grab the customer’s attention. If they don’t know who we are, they can’t buy from us.
There’s 2 objectives here.
First is to reach them. To get our name and message in front of interested customers. And then, for that message to be persuasive enough for them to want to find out more.
The customer need here is very basic. We want to reach them when they’re hungry and most likely to order takeaway food. As you can see, we’ve broken down this need into 3 parts. To eat. To eat now. And to eat tasty food. Hungry is the key pain point. But we’ve also added that they’re too lazy (or tired) to cook. And they haven’t been food shopping so can’t cook dinner themselves.
Media driven
In this case, reach will be driven by media, led by digital media. Banner adverts and boosted social media posts. Digital leads here, because we can use it to target the right customer groups. We can control who sees the adverts, and when and where they see them. Digital also means we can include a direct call to action link to the website.
We’d also look at how we use PR to get mentions of our business into relevant online publications. Local listing sites and food / entertainment related sites, for example.
Plus, we’d also use more traditional media channels to raise awareness. Flyers and brochures dropped into letterboxes, for example. And making sure the signage on the store and delivery vans also grabbed attention.
Advertising message
We’d develop an advertising message based on our positioning. It would highlight our benefit and point of difference. We’d test these with market research, and use this to brief an agency to create the adverts.
The objective would be to make customers want to find out more.
E-Commerce customer journey - Find out more
Having sparked the customer’s initial interest, we now need to fuel the flames of their desire.
This stage is about answering questions from interested customers. You listen to their questions and make the answers easy to find. It’s usually about telling them who you are, what you do, and how you can help them.
Search usually leads this stage. It’s how customers find out more about most things. In this case, that’d mean paid and organic search.
We’d focus on keywords which make ordering our pizzas sound easy and enticing. We’d also highlight the website on our offline touchpoints. Though we’d also include other contact methods (e.g. a phone number) as some customers prefer direct contact.
We’d also research what questions customers are most likely to have about our offer. For this case study, we’ve assumed their key questions are :-
- is it food I’ll like?
- will they deliver to my address?
- is it affordable?
These questions would then shape the content on our landing page. We’d lead with our competitive advantage so customers know why they should choose us over other food delivery options. Then, we’d make sure we used images and copy to make our products look and sound appealing. And we’d make sure answers to key questions like delivery coverage and delivery cost were easy to find.
E-Commerce customer journey - Persuade me
When customers reach the next stage of the e-Commerce customer journey, they’re almost but not quite on the point of buying.
The goal here is to nudge those who have doubts over the line.
Often, some sort of price discount or sales promotion might be enough.
But there are other subtler, longer-lasting ways to persuade customers to buy. For example, many businesses use social proof to do this.
This is when you show that other customers have tried and enjoyed the product. You highlight positive reviews and testimonials. These reassure new customers. If others have tried it and rated it positively, there’s less risk in buying. (see Robert Cialdini’s book Influence for more on social proof).
Another commonly used persuasion tool is scarcity.
Scarcity works on the principle that the less available a product is, the more we want it. We fear missing out on the chance to buy it. It’s what drives limited time offers and online exclusives, for example. For our pizza shop, we’d create a compelling offer for new customers.
Get a 20% discount on your first order, until the end of the month, for example. That “end of the month” tells them they’ll miss out if they don’t order in time. This can be hard to resist. (see our advanced e-Commerce techniques article for more on scarcity).
For customers who hadn’t yet made it to the website, we’d deliver those same social proof and scarcity messages using posts and paid ads on social media. We could encourage customers to rate and recommend us. For example, we could give them money off their next order for leaving a review.
E-Commerce customer journey - Make it easy to buy
Up to this stage of the e-Commerce customer journey, the focus is on creating experiences which influence customers to choose you.
But once they’ve made that decision, the focus changes to removing barriers to purchase. The buying process needs to be easy. The customer need here is a quick and hassle-free purchase.
They accept they need to give a minimum amount of information to make the order happen. But they don’t want to do any more than that.
That minimum information usually covers :-
- what they want to buy.
- the delivery details.
- their contact and payment details.
You make it easy to find products on your store website. Clearly written category labels and good on-site SEO, for example. Easy to navigate product pages, and an obvious add to cart call to action. If customers need to customise an order (e.g. choosing the size of the pizza, and adding or removing ingredients), you make it easy to do so.
You make entering delivery, contact and payment details as easy as you can.
For example, you can ask them to save their details and so they’re auto-filled on future orders. You make the security of your payment system very clear, and makes payment options as flexible as you can.
If delivery time is important (as it is with pizza delivery), you include updates on that as part of the overall experience.
What time it’s expected to arrive, for example. How the customer can check / track the delivery. How they can contact the driver if it’s late. These help reassure the customer.
E-Commerce customer journey - Reassure me
The customer’s need changes to being kept informed once they’ve placed an order.
So you set up a notification system (by email or SMS) to alert the customer as their order goes through your order to delivery system.
For example, we’ve got your order. We’re making your order. Your order is on its way. It’s nearly there. It’s arrived.
The general rule with notifications is it’s better to over-communicate, than under-communicate.
That stops customers calling up your customer service team to find out what’s going on. You should only have to intervene when there’s an actual problem. In our pizza shop example, notifications would mean we’d have to deal with less customer calls asking where their pizza was.
If you have the budget, you can also do notifications and tracking with an app, which brands like Uber Eats and Menulog do.
E-Commerce customer journey - Delight me
The actual delivery of the order into the hands of the customer means we’re almost at the end of the e-Commerce customer journey. The proof is in the pudding (or pizza!) at this point.
Products should arrive with the customer in good condition. No damages. No missing items. Everything they ordered in the way they wanted it.
If something’s gone wrong, you need clear customer service processes to deal with issues. Refunds or returns, for example.
You should also consider including extras with the delivery to add to the level of “delight”. In the pizza delivery example, that’d be something like free garlic bread when the customer has spent over a certain amount. Even something simple like a thank you note or discount voucher can add delight.
Small unexpected touches like this can make a big difference. Customers remember them because they’re unexpected. They’re an easy and cheap way to drive repeat sales.
E-Commerce customer journey - Motivate me to share
The e-Commerce customer journey has one final step, even if it feels like it’s over once the customer has the product. That’s how you use the customer’s satisfaction with the order to drive future sales.
Ideally, you sign happy customers up to your CRM system. You use this to share news and loyalty offers with them. Exclusive member-only deals, for example, or discounts after a set number of orders.
You’d also look at activities which drive positive word of mouth. Satisfied customers telling others about their happy experience.
This is often driven via social media. Content which encourages customers to like and follow you. Content which encourages them to make positive comments and post reviews on other sites. Maybe a “refer a friend” offer which gives them a discount if they persuade someone else to order?
This last stage is all about good customer service. You keep existing customers happy, so they tell others how good you are.
Conclusion - e-Commerce customer journey
The customer journey map is a helpful tool in building your e-Commerce customer experience because it gets so specific.
It forces you to think about specific customer needs and pain points and how to fix them. You define clear touchpoints and identify clear jobs to be done to help customers at each stage.
It’s a great way to organise key tasks and see how all your brand activation fits together. You use it to shape your briefs, and structure and prioritise actions in your marketing plan.
It gives you a clear picture of how to link different activities together with clear calls to action. You meet the customer’s needs and pain points at each stage, so their overall journey runs more smoothly. That makes for a better customer experience and happier, more loyal customers.
For more on this topic check out our D2C experience article and our customer experience guide. Or get in touch if you need help putting together your own e-Commerce customer journey map.
Photo credits
Woman blowing sprinkles : Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash
Dog ears : Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash
Man crying : Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash
Laptops : Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
Blank outdoor billboard : Photo by Kate Trysh on Unsplash
Shout (adapted) : Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash
Google Tablet : Photo by PhotoMIX Ltd. from Pexels
Thumbs up (adapted) : Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Online shopping with phone and credit card : Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels
Food delivery cyclist : Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Phone notification : Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
Doorstep delivery (adapted) : Photo by MealPro on Unsplash
Game pieces (adapted) : Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
