Customer Journey Tracking

Tracking customer journeys across various digital platforms is getting complex and becoming a challenge for marketers to draw a complete picture of their customer behavior. Nevertheless, tracking customer behavior is essential to gain ROI on marketing and sales efforts. Hence, customer journey analytics like Usermaven come into the picture for businesses to collect and understand customer data.

This article explores customer journey tracking, its stages, benefits, and importance for businesses, and how customer journey analytics help businesses increase conversions.

What is customer journey tracking?

Customer journey tracking is a process of monitoring and analyzing the various touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a business or brand throughout their buying journey. It is used to track and analyze customers' every interaction (actions, behaviors, and experiences) with a business starting from the first interaction in the initial awareness stage to the very last when they make a final purchase or beyond.

The primary purpose of customer journey tracking is to gain a deeper understanding of the customer's path, motivations, and pain points during their engagement with a brand. It allows them to identify what drives their engagement, optimize the customer experience, and make data-driven decisions to improve marketing, sales, and customer service strategies. Tracking customers throughout their buyer journey leads to an end goal of enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty, resulting in customer retention.

Why tracking customer journeys is important for your business?

By tracking customer journeys, businesses can become and stay customer-centric, market competitive and adapt their strategies to meet customers' evolving needs. Customer journey tracking is important for businesses because:

• Offers a better understanding of customer behavior - Customer journey tracking offers insights about customers' most used touchpoints, channels, devices, and their preferences, interests, and pain points. Businesses can better meet their customer's needs and expectations using this information.
• Helps improve customer experience - By analyzing customer interactions and feedback, businesses can identify pain points, bottlenecks, and areas of friction within the journey. These insights enable businesses to make data-driven decisions to enhance the customer experience, streamline processes, and provide seamless interactions across different touchpoints.
• Drives personalization and targeting - Tracking the customer journey provides businesses with a wealth of data that can be used to personalize marketing and sales efforts. Businesses can deliver targeted and relevant messages, offers, and recommendations by understanding customer preferences, behaviors, and interests at different stages of the journey.
• Optimizes marketing and sales strategies - Customer journey tracking is a great way to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts at each buyer journey stage. It allows businesses to allocate resources and optimize their strategies to maximize ROI and improve overall marketing and sales performance.
• Leads to nurturing customer relations and retention - Businesses can increase customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and drive customer advocacy by effectively implementing the insights obtained through customer journey tracking. They may use techniques such as targeted email campaigns, personalized offers, loyalty programs, or proactive customer support.

Stages of customer journey

Marketers face challenges in understanding customers' behavior across the various customer journey stages. And the customer journey tracking breaks down the complex interactions of customers across multiple digital touch points and maps out these interactions across each stage of the customer journey. This framework generally comprises the following stages. Let's explore what these are and why we need each.

Awareness

The awareness stage is the initial step where the customer gains awareness of a brand, product, or service. They may come across your brand while searching for a solution to their problem or meet their needs. They may come across the brand through various channels such as advertising, social media, word-of-mouth, or search engines. The goal in this stage is to capture the customer's attention and generate interest in the brand.

Customers cannot move to the next stages of the customer journey without awareness. Some practices businesses employ at this stage include advertising, content marketing, search engine optimization, and more.

Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers actively research and evaluate different options to meet their needs. They compare features, prices, reviews, and social proof. This stage aims to provide relevant information, educate the customer about the value and benefits of the product or service, and differentiate the brand from competitors.

The consideration stage influences the customers' purchase decisions and establishes credibility and trust. Businesses also nurture leads at this stage to engage with potential customers seeking information to stay top-of-mind. Content marketing, email marketing, remarketing campaigns, webinars, or interactive experiences like product demos and testimonials are the practices performed at this stage.

Purchase

This stage is when potential customers make the purchase decision after evaluating different options and choosing the one that best meets their needs. The goal of the purchase stage is to provide a seamless and convenient buying experience that encourages the customer to complete the purchase. At the purchase stage, businesses generate revenue and achieve their sales objectives. Customer acquisition at this stage expands a business's customer base. User-friendly checkout process, personalized offers, customer support, upselling & cross-selling, and collecting port-purchase feedback are some of the practices you can perform at this stage.

Post-Purchase (Retention and Advocacy)

Customer experience is the main focus of this stage. It emphasizes nurturing the customer relationship and ensuring customer satisfaction. The goal in this stage is to reinforce the customer's decision, provide exceptional support, and foster customer loyalty and advocacy. It includes activities such as product onboarding, customer support, post-purchase communication, loyalty programs, obtaining reviews, and community building.

How to use customer journey analytics for increased conversions

Below are several ways businesses can use customer journey analytics to increase conversions.

• It can identify specific stages or touchpoints where customers are dropping off or experiencing obstacles in their journey. By pinpointing these bottlenecks, businesses can take targeted actions to address the issues and optimize the customer experience, thus increasing conversions.
• It unlocks insights into which marketing channels, campaigns, or messaging resonate most effectively with customers at different journey stages. By analyzing this data, businesses can allocate their marketing resources more efficiently, refine their messaging, and optimize campaigns to drive higher conversions.
• Businesses can deliver personalized experiences, tailored recommendations, and targeted offers to increase engagement and conversions by leveraging individual customer data.
• Businesses can identify potential customers who have shown interest but have not yet converted. Through remarketing campaigns, businesses can retarget these customers with relevant ads or offers to encourage them to re-engage and complete their conversion.
• Customer journey analytics can be utilized to develop predictive models that forecast the likelihood of conversion for individual customers. Using machine learning algorithms and historical customer data, businesses can identify patterns and indicators that suggest a customer is likely to convert. This way, businesses can prioritize their efforts and resources towards customers with higher conversion potential, increasing overall conversion rates.

Benefits of tracking customer journey

Let's look at what benefits businesses enjoy by tracking customer journeys.

Customer-centric business

Customer journey tracking allows you to shift your focus from a product-centric mindset to a customer-centric one. Instead of pushing products or services, you can align your marketing efforts to the customer's journey, ensuring that you deliver the right message, through the right channel, at the right time. It enables you to anticipate customer needs, provide solutions, and address concerns at each journey stage. Ultimately, customer journey tracking puts the customer at the center of your marketing strategy, resulting in a more customer-centric approach that drives business growth.

Proactive problem-solving

Tracking the customer journey helps businesses identify pain points or issues customers may encounter during their interactions. By proactively addressing these problems, businesses can minimize customer frustrations and enhance the overall experience. This customer-centric approach demonstrates that the business cares about its customers and is committed to resolving their issues promptly.

Predicting and anticipating customer needs

Through customer journey tracking, businesses can analyze patterns and trends in customer behavior. This analysis helps in predicting and anticipating customer needs and preferences. By proactively addressing these needs, businesses can offer relevant solutions, recommendations, and support, creating a proactive and customer-centric approach.

Cultivating Long-term relationships

Customer journey tracking allows businesses to understand the entire lifecycle of a customer's interactions, including post-purchase stages. This knowledge enables businesses to nurture customer relationships beyond the initial purchase, focusing on retention, loyalty, and advocacy. Businesses can build long-term customer relationships by maintaining ongoing communication, offering post-purchase support, and providing valuable experiences.

Tracking customer journey with Usermaven

Usermaven is a privacy-friendly website and product analytics tool for marketers and product teams. Businesses can add Usermaven into their toolkit to track and analyze the customer journey, draw insights, and make data-driven decisions.

You can track customer behavior on your website and product with a quick 5-minute Usermaven analytics set-up. Its user-friendly and real-time dashboard lets you keep track of key metrics such as page views, bounce rates, time on page, conversion rate, and more, helping you to identify which pages customers visit, the paths they take, and where they drop off.



You can turn user behavior on your products into actionable insights with Usermaven's pre-built reports. You can easily identify onboarding obstacles, boost product engagement, and increase customer retention without relying on the developer's help to track features and key actions.

You can uncover user journeys and understand their interests while respecting their privacy. Usermaven's powerful funnel analysis lets you determine the drop-off rate and time- spent on each funnel stage. You can break down funnels based on different factors such as traffic source, device, locations, and more to compare funnel performance.

Moreover, Usermaven has introduced another feature, "Journey." This feature tracks the user's complete journey, which helps gain valuable insights.



Usermaven is a complete data analytics solution offering many features such as attribution, segmentation, event-tracking, contacts hub, and more, in addition to the ones mentioned above. You can eliminate the complex and expensive analytics and get simple yet meaningful insights with Usermaven. Get it for free and explore its features with the Starter plan.