The Digital Customer Journey

The steps to purchase can look different for different customers. Overall, however, everyone follows the same pattern, which allows us who want to sell online to manage it. Here’s how you should think about the customer’s online journey.

Many have described the phenomenon before this article and many will continue to do so after. To make it really clear for those who want to understand online marketing, we have created a simpler model that is still accurate. Here we go through the touchpoints a person who eventually becomes a customer usually has.

The image above describes a line from Awareness (Facebook and the like) to a Purchase (we called it Return on Investment here to emphasize the need to weigh costs against results). It doesn’t have to be that each “box” contains exactly the touchpoints we describe, and it’s worth remembering that customers can enter from the sidelines almost anywhere in the chain. Hence the extra arrows.

Awareness

Somehow, a person finds out that your product, or a similar one, exists and that it might be interesting to buy. This can happen, for example, through TV commercials, word of mouth, or almost any way information can spread. You might have read about an exotic country in school and later in life decide you want to visit it, or perhaps you saw your friends on Facebook using the latest gadget from Japan. Regardless of how, you’ve become aware of a product or service.

Sales Channels

The three channels that generate the most online sales are Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Advertising, and email marketing. There are other ways to funnel interested people to your site, but these three are the biggest. This is where you capture those who have decided to buy or at least want to see what options are available. The searcher may want to read about the service or product, or they may want to buy it outright.

Conversion

The next step in the chain is actually converting the visitor into a customer. We chose to call the box CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). This includes all the factors on the site that affect your sales. Have you set the right price? Does the buyer trust you? Is it easy to pay, etc.

Purchase

The last part of the chain is the actual purchase. We chose to emphasize ROI, Return On Investment here because you can calculate the customer’s value and measure costs very precisely in all digital marketing. Also remember that a returning customer has value, so there may be reason to consider future sales even in the initial purchase.

How should you handle the different steps?

There are a few different views on how to act on this knowledge. Where should you invest to get the most value?

Our view is that if you invest in the sales step, you almost always get the greatest value, with some exceptions. If the product or service you sell is already known—a trip, a car, a fidget spinner, or snow removal—then it’s usually more profitable to piggyback on your competitors when it comes to awareness. It doesn’t have to be your travel company that’s known, just the idea that people can travel somewhere.

The idea is to start building from the right side of the diagram above. First, you need to have a product that can be sold. Second, it needs to be easy to buy. Third, it must be possible to find you. And fourth, you need to create interest in the product.

There are good reasons to skip the conversion step initially because conversion optimization requires relatively large amounts of traffic to the site. Sure, you can apply some basic rules (like showing price, a buy button, and the product in an online store), but to fully optimize you need to test. For these tests (often A/B split tests) to work, you need enough data (visitors) to draw meaningful conclusions.

The exceptions to this are if you have an entirely new service or product that no one has heard of. In that case, the return on SEO, SEM, and (sometimes) email will be lower. If no one knows about the product, no one will search for it. It can also create problems if your site is very poor—it’s too complicated to make a purchase, or it’s not clear that people can actually buy the service from you.