How To Increase Conversions By Improving The Customer Journey

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There are many ways to improve conversions, but most of the time it all comes down to how you treat your customer. Treat them well, and they’ll not only make a purchase, but they’ll keep coming back, too.

The customer journey is at the heart of your success in 2019. An awesome customer journey is one that ensures you’re able to turn a mere prospect into a paying customer – and then into a loyal customer who simply can’t get enough of your business.

In this article, we take a look at ways you can make your customer journey irresistible to improve conversions at every step of the funnel.

Solicit Feedback

Before you properly dive into making changes to your customer journey, it’s always a good idea to know what you’ve got already.

What’s working with your customer journey so far and what isn’t?

In order to establish this, you should ask for feedback from your customers. Send them an email or survey with questions that help you gather the information you need. For example, you could ask they if their expectations are being met, if there’s anything you can improve on and so on.

Capture Prospects With a Lead Magnet

For many businesses, the start of the customer journey isn’t a sale – it’s awareness.

In other words, the top of the funnel shouldn’t be an immediate sale. Instead, it should be a lead magnet that captures your prospects email address. Once you’ve got their email address, you can then send out content that builds a long term relationship.

In essence, what you’re doing at this point is not converting visitors into customers. Instead, you’re converting them into subscribers. Email marketing continues to be a super powerful way of retaining customers. You can use your emails to send out personalized content, promotional emails, discounts, educational content, coupons, cart recovery emails, post purchase emails and so on.

To capture a customers email address, you need to offer them something in exchange. This is known as a lead magnet and it comes in the form of a free gift. It should be something your prospects see as high value, and which will add something to their life. It might be an eBook, a cheat sheet or any other piece of content.

Once prospects are on your email list, you can then work out a solid email marketing strategy that converts them into paying customers who are in it for the long haul. You will also need to make sure you avoid the spam folder.

Also, don’t forget to create a professional-looking page for your lead magnet. If you’re struggling with this, we suggest using a WordPress editor that will help you to create an awesome-looking, responsive website that won’t use up too many of your resources.

Understand Your Audience Personas

One of the most effective ways to improve the customer journey is to understand your different audience personas. This means understanding their specific desires, buying habits and the way they use your products.

It also means going beyond mere demographics. You’ve got your subscribers but now you need to target them with personalized content that hits home.

This is key because if you build your audience personas around just demographics, you won’t improve the customer journey for everyone. Instead, you’ll be lumping your whole customer base into the same persona. This will lead to a deluge of unsubscribe’s.

For example, the sneakers brand Adidas has two different audience personas. The first type of customers are fashion-oriented and will pay lots of money for sneakers that they’ll wear now and then. The second type are sporty and will pay for shoes they know will need to be replaced at some point.

The more detailed your buyer personas are, the easier it will be to create smoother customer journeys that ensure prospects don’t fall through the net. Remember that good marketing is all about empathy – understanding your prospects needs, desires and preferences. As well as understanding their demographics, here are a few more things you need to learn about your customers:

Background
Challenges
Biggest fears
Goals
Hobbies and interests
Common objections

Once you understand your different buyer personas, you can adjust your content, emails and so on so that they’re more personalized and thus more persuasive.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to create a unique buyer persona for everything single target customer there is. Instead, it’s a good idea to focus on your top three in terms of performance.

Have a Mid-Journey Marketing Plan

A lot of businesses focus on the start and end of their customer journey, but it’s often in the middle that customers fall away.

Why? There are many reasons, but one is that they might be confused about your brand and what it is that you want them to do.

To improve the middle of your customer journey, you need to understand what it is about your marketing efforts that is driving prospects away. What information is missing? Where are customers dropping off, and why?

To tighten up the mid-point of your customer journey, and to convert hesitant prospects into paying customers, it might be a good idea to develop a persistent email marketing plan. Remember, a mid-funnel prospect will be engaging with you in some way but, for whatever reason, they haven’t yet converted.

To this end, send daily or weekly emails to your prospects, offering them discounts, promotions and educational content. Over time, your efforts will slowly grind them down until they’re in a position where they trust you and see the value in what you’re offering. At this point, they’re ready to buy.

Make The Payment Process Easy

Understanding your audience also means understanding how they shop. As technologies and trends evolve, you need to make sure that you stay abreast of things and continue giving your customers the experience they want.

For example, the modern shopper wants more payment options. Studies show that millennials use PayPal more than any other generation, but the likes of Square and Stripe are also on the rise. Moreover, one of the chief reasons customers abandon their carts is because of payment security doubt. In other words, they want to see their preferred payment method on your website. As you get closer to the sale, don’t play yourself by limiting payment options.

It’s also worth considering adding a POS card reader. Not only does this make the payment process much more seamless, it also allows you to collect valuable data on your customers and their buying behavior that you can then use at a later date. Using this data, you can create a more personalized and targeted customer journey that boosts conversions.

Remove Doubts and Clinch the Sale

At the top of the customer journey is the sale. Before the sale, however, prospects might have a few final doubts that prevent them from handing over their hard earned cash.

There are a few ways you can remove these final objections. For example, if you’re left with lots of abandoned carts, you can re-engage with targeted ads that remind them of the benefits, create urgency, or which offer free shipping or digital coupons and discounts.

Other ways you can improve this part of the customer journey is to create video reviews that demonstrate social proof. This is a powerful way of alleviating customer concerns as it shows them that others just like them are already enjoying your products or services.

You could also offer to get on a call with your prospects and handle their objections that way. Reach out to them, show you care, and ask them to contact you if they have any doubts or concerns.

Consider hosting a Q&A session too, in which you answer common customer objections.

Conclusion

All in all, the more you understand about the modern customer, including their needs, wants and biggest obstacles, the easier it will be to improve conversions. Take your data, act on it and use it to grow your website. The more seamless the customer journey is, the happier your customers will be.

About the Author:

Michelle Deery is a freelance copywriter for Heroic Search that specializes in writing content for SaaS and eCommerce companies. She has contributed to Entrepreneur magazine. You can find her @MichWriting.