Curious to know how your customers are actually engaging with your site?
You probably think customer journey is all about clicks and navigation. But it’s so much more than that. With customer journey analytics done right, you can start connecting the dots between different interactions, touchpoints, and decisions. Good customer journey analytics should be able to help you extract useful insights and move the needle. That’s why the customer journey analytics market is expected to reach $52.2 billion by 2033, expanding at a 14.8% CAGR.
However…
Most businesses have a wealth of customer data, yet a struggle to make sense of it. They can track website visits, app interactions, and purchase history. But why do their customers churn and abandon their sales funnels? Or what specific steps can bring them back?
In this article, we’ll discuss customer journey analytics in depth so you can take the next steps in ensuring your company’s performance. Here’s what we’ll cover:
- How to interpret customer journey data points
- The correlation between analytics and revenue
- The tools and resources for effective real-time analytics
- Strategies to build a better customer journey with analytics
Let’s jump in.
What Customer Journey Analytics Entails
Customer journey analytics refers to the process of tracking and measuring every single interaction between a customer and a brand. These interactions can range from website visits and mobile app usage to email opens, social media engagement, and customer service calls.
The point of customer journey analytics is to get an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of your customers’ entire journey. That includes how they move through your sales funnel, what stage they might be in, and where they get stuck.
It becomes even more important when you consider that 71% of consumers now expect personalized experiences from brands and companies. They expect your website to know their needs even before they tell you. Customer journey analytics gives you the capability to do exactly that by helping you track, discover, and measure patterns between all the different segments in your customer base.
The Various Data Sources For Journey Analytics
You can’t measure or optimize what you don’t know first. Thus, the first step to any customer journey analytics is tracking all the data sources and connecting them together. Your web analytics system can help you with tracking how visitors navigate on your website and at which stage do they end their journey. Your mobile app data can track in-app user actions and session lengths. Your CRM system will store all customer information and purchase history.
All these data sources have to be connected and related to each other to get the complete picture.
From Analytics to Optimized Decision-Making to Increased Revenue
Great data is one thing. But how to actually take decisions that can increase your revenue?
The real power of customer journey analytics is unlocking the ability to act on those insights and information. That’s the critical factor that separates successful companies from those who don’t optimize their customer journeys. Successful companies make better-informed, customer-focused decisions based on data and that helps them cut acquisition costs by up to 50% and increase revenue between 5-15%.
The first step to using customer journey analytics to grow revenue is identifying the key moments in your customer journey. You need to understand where are the moments of highest conversion, where is the most customer drop-off, and which touchpoints are the most important for satisfaction.
Once you know the high leverage points in your customer journey, you can start testing and optimizing different experiences at each touchpoint. With real-time customer journey analytics, you can make these optimizations on the go instead of waiting a month for a report.
Real-Time Customer Journey Analytics: The Key to Gaining Competitive Advantage
Real-time customer journey analytics completely changes the old model of monthly reports. With real-time data, you can track what is happening on your website or app right now.
You can see which marketing campaigns are sending traffic, which pages are converting, and where exactly people get stuck – as it happens.
Why does this matter? Because your customers’ expectations are higher than ever. They want near-instantaneous responses to their needs, personalized and relevant experiences, and zero friction.
With real-time analytics, companies can react to problems before they become disasters, pivot and take advantage of new trends as they emerge, and deliver hyper-personalized, real-time experiences.
The Importance of Building Cross-Channel Journey Maps
Most companies still think of their marketing in terms of channels. They separate their campaigns into individual silos: website, mobile app, email, social media, and so on.
But from a customer’s point of view, these channels don’t exist. They just want to interact with your brand whenever and however they want.
Cross-channel customer journey mapping allows you to connect the dots between all these different customer touchpoints and piece together the complete picture of a customer’s journey.
To create accurate cross-channel journey maps, you need to connect all data sources, identify the same customers across devices and channels, track all customer touchpoints no matter where they happen, and create visual representation of the customer journey that makes patterns and gaps easily visible.
How AI Can Help Us Understand Customer Journeys
Artificial intelligence is already revolutionizing the way we approach customer journey analytics.
AI systems can scan and process petabytes of data in seconds and find the patterns and anomalies that human analysts would never notice.
Machine learning algorithms can predict customer behavior with remarkable accuracy, dynamically segment customers based on behavioral changes, personalize experiences at an individual level, and identify previously unknown opportunities in your data.
And the best thing is that an AI system doesn’t get tired. It only gets better. The more data it processes, the more refined its predictions become.
Measuring the Right KPIs to Track Your Customer Journey
Here’s the secret – the vast majority of companies track the wrong things.
They are obsessing over vanity metrics like page views, sessions, and duration, while the metrics that actually impact the bottom line are ignored. In customer journey analytics, it is important to know which KPIs to track in order to make the best informed decisions about customer journeys.
Some examples of effective KPIs for tracking customer journeys are:
- Conversion rate by touchpoint: Conversion rates will show which parts of your customer journey actually bring in new customers.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): The KPI shows you what customer segments are worth investing in, and which are not.
- Time to conversion: The shorter your sales cycle, the more revenue you can potentially bring in with the same level of marketing and sales spend.
- Drop-off rates at different stages: Monitoring the points where your customer journey breaks down will help you prioritize fixing the biggest issues first.
You should track these KPIs on a regular basis and see how they improve as you optimize the customer journey.
Wrapping it up
Customer journey analytics is far from a new or novel idea. In fact, it’s how many successful companies have been operating for a while.
Customer journey analytics allows you to connect the dots between all the different parts of the customer lifecycle. With all these interactions tracked and connected to each other, you get a holistic view of your customer’s journey. One that can help you identify potential issues and problem areas before they turn your customers off.
The best companies in customer journey analytics don’t always have the most data. They’re just the ones that know how to use it most effectively. They track and measure the right things, act quickly on new insights, and always optimize their customer journey.
If you’re just getting started, don’t feel like you have to go overboard right away. Choose one touchpoint you’re most curious about and really dig deep into what’s going on there. As you get more comfortable, you can add more and more touchpoints to your analysis. Over time, you’ll build a comprehensive view that can transform how you do business.
