From the moment your customer lays eyes on your ad in Google, to the time she is trying out your product at home spans your user journey. What is the User Journey exactly and why is it important to understand? How can you apply your understanding of this journey to your website and benefit from it?

User journey dictates your customer’s experience and overall feedback with your brand. It is important to know what your customers experience when they are interacting with your brand so you can identify pain points and areas for improvement. By doing so, you can encourage these customers to return and purchase from you again, or they can encourage others to purchase from you, thus, leading to more revenue.

It starts from the moment they start interacting with your brand, be it in a form of an ad on Facebook or they got a promotional email. As the saying goes, ‘first impressions last.” Marketers say that you only have less than 3 seconds to catch the attention of potential customers. It is crucial to understand how your customer perceives your ad or how your email promotion reads so that you can optimise it and attract more customers.It starts from the moment they start interacting with your brand, be it in a form of an ad on Facebook or they got a promotional email. As the saying goes, ‘first impressions last.” Marketers say that you only have less than 3 seconds to catch the attention of potential customers. It is crucial to understand how your customer perceives your ad or how your email promotion reads so that you can optimise it and attract more customers.

Next, you need to understand the usability of your website. Are your customers able to navigate the website without any problems? Is the experience seamless or are there missing links or pages that won’t load? Are the photos and descriptions of the products accurate and easy to understand? How is the checkout process? Does your customer feel secure enough to give their payment information? These are just some questions that are worth asking once you are evaluating the purchase and checkout experience of your customer so that there are no deterrents in closing the sale.

The customer’s journey doesn’t end after they make their purchase. In fact, it is far from over! It is important to understand the order fulfilment process and identify if your promised service levels are being met. There isn’t much transparency on this part of the user journey as the customer doesn’t have physical access to your product or warehouse. As such, you need to be as transparent as possible with them, providing them with dispatch and delivery updates regularly and proactively. By doing so, you foster trust and confidence with your customers and you can start building a reputation in the industry.

Lastly, you also need to understand your customer’s return experience. If ever they need to return the product, how easy or hard is the returns process? Are they getting their credits or refunds in a timely manner? It is also important to take note of these as this is often the part of the user journey wherein a lot of customer dissatisfaction occurs.

Indeed, understanding the user journey brings a lot of insights that you can use for you the development of your website. It is just a matter of putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and understanding their needs and their experience.