A practical guide to customer journey analytics

By mastering customer journey analytics, you’ll be able to gain a better understanding of your customers’ actual needs and behaviours. This will allow you to identify hidden patterns and trends in the way your customers interact with your brand. You can then use this information to create the ultimate customer experience. In this guide, we’ll discuss what customer journey analytics is and how you can use it to effectively improve the customer experience. Let’s get started!

What is customer journey analytics?

Customer journey analytics is the process of evaluating and understanding all interactions that customers have with your company or brand. The goal of customer journey analytics is simple: to improve the customer experience, marketing, and sales activities, and increase profitable revenue.

The analysis often begins with the creation of a customer journey map, which visualises each touchpoint that a customer has with your company in a graph or flowchart. However, customer journey analytics goes a step further than simply mapping the steps in the customer journey. Every decision-influencing interaction that a customer has with your brand is put under a microscope to identify any pain points or areas for improvement.

Customer journey analytics can include a wide range of metrics, such as:

  • Customer satisfaction scores (NPS)
  • Funnel conversion rates
  • Time on page
  • Percentage of returning visitors
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV)
  • And much more

Why is customer journey analytics important?

As discussed, the goal of customer journey analytics is to improve the customer experience and profitable revenue. Analysing a customer journey provides your business with significant benefits to improve the effectiveness of your (marketing) strategy. It shows which marketing activities and channels are most effective, which products or services are most popular, and where customers experience bottlenecks during the buying process. But there are more benefits:

By deeply analysing your customers’ behaviour, you can put the customer at the centre of your organization. This will give you a better understanding of your customers’ actual needs and behaviours, allowing you to create personalised customer journeys and campaigns that align seamlessly with them.

Real-time customer journey analytics allows you to quickly identify and address problems as soon as they arise. For example, if one of your email campaigns contains an invalid hyperlink, your analyses will quickly show that something is wrong and needs to be changed.

Customer journey analytics eliminates data silos and creates unity within your organization. Although the analysis of customer journeys through different channels requires large amounts of data, it also streamlines the processes of different departments. By having an organization-wide understanding of the customer experience, employees will have a better understanding of how the customer journey looks and can be optimized. This leads to a more consistent and high-quality experience for customers, as employees can anticipate what happens before or after interactions with customers.

Customer journey analytics in 5 steps

Measuring, analysing, and optimizing the customer journey can be broken down into the following steps:

The first step in customer journey analytics is to centralize data from different sources and marketing channels. If you use a CDP, this often happens automatically. Without the use of a CDO, the process will be more complex and time-consuming, but it is still worth doing.

Then you can start mapping out the different phases of the customer journey. Begin by identifying the most important touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, such as social media, email, service calls, and website touchpoints.

After collecting and centralizing customer data, it is important to gain insights into the actual customer behaviour and needs. This can be done using a variety of techniques, such as segmentation, user profiling, and predictive modelling. By linking specific touchpoint interactions to customer behaviour, external data, social media data, survey results, and more, you will gain insights into how a customer interacts with your business. However, a CDP goes one step further by generating a 360-degree customer profile for each individual customer, giving you a more complete picture of your target audiences’ preferences and behaviour.

The goal of customer journey analytics is to optimize the customer experience, so identifying any bottlenecks in both the buyer and customer journey is essential. Where does the customer journey not meet expectations? Where do they leave the buying process? Is there a way to improve this specific touchpoint?

Once all interactions and pain points have been fully mapped out, the next step is to optimize the customer journey. It is best to start by optimizing one interaction point at a time and measuring the effect of each change. This could include making changes to your website, marketing campaigns, or customer service. Once the optimizations have a positive effect, you can move on to the next area for improvement until the entire customer journey is optimized.

Optimizing the customer journey is a continuous process. Consumer behaviour and technology are constantly changing. Therefore, it is important to continue monitoring the effectiveness of your customer journey. If customer journey analytics shows that the bounce rate or other metrics are declining over time, it is important to repeat this process. And periodically repeat it.

A simple way to improve the customer experience with customer journey analytics

Due to the enormous growth of data and marketing channels, many marketing teams struggle to effectively implement data management and data analysis. Not surprising, as these processes are often complex and extremely time-consuming.

The benefits of customer journey analytics are clear, however. It provides more specific and in-depth insights into how you can create the ultimate customer experience. Which results in lower bounce rates and media costs in combination with higher conversion rates, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

Do you want to fully leverage the potential of customer journey analytics without the labour-intensive collection and analysis of data? The CDP from Spotler Activate automatically collects, centralises, and segments all your customer data. So that you can focus on the strategic and creative aspects of customer journey analytics: creating the ultimate customer experience.

Spotler Activate enables every marketer to easily centralize first-party data and create hyper-personalised customer journeys without the need for IT or programming knowledge.

Book a free demo directly

Are you curious what Spotler Activate can do for your organization? We’d love to show you in an online demo.

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