What is the buying journey?
The buying journey is the process that customers go through when they make a purchase. It encompasses all of the steps from the moment a customer becomes aware of the product or service to when they complete their purchase.
It includes activities such as research, comparison shopping, deciding which product or service to choose and finalizing the purchase. Understanding your customers’ buying journeys can help you create more effective marketing campaigns and provide them with a better user experience.
Four stages of the buying journey
The customer buying journey can be simplified into 4 key stages:
Awareness: This is the first step when customers become aware of a product or service and start researching it
Consideration: At this stage, customers are gathering more information about the product/service, such as features and benefits, and comparing it to similar products/services.
Conversion: Here, customers settle on a product and complete the purchase process.
Retention: At this stage, the brand the customer has bought from focuses on driving repeat purchases. Tools for this include post-purchase email campaigns and retargeting ads across social media platforms.
How to map out the buying journey
Mapping out the buying journey is a process of understanding and documenting the steps that customers go through when making a purchase. By studying each step in detail, you can gain insights into what drives customer behavior and how to optimize their experience. Here are some tips on how to map out the buying journey:
Identify key touchpoints
: Work out all of the points where customers interact with your brand or products, such as landing pages, websites, emails, in-store visits, etc.Understand customer needs
: Analyze what motivates customers at each stage of the buying journey and what problems they’re trying to solve. This will help you create content that provides the answers potential customers are looking for, and tackles any objections they might have.Measure results
: Use data analytics tools to keep tabs on key touchpoints across each stage of the buying journey. Set benchmarks for performance and use these to determine areas for improvement.Test & refine
: A/B split test various elements of your marketing campaigns and refine them based on results to continually improve your customer experience and remove friction from your buying journey.
Leading brands choose Emarsys to power their customer lifecycle marketing campaigns
Emarsys helps leading brands like PUMA, Pizza Hut, and Nike to harness the power of customer lifecycle marketing and make every customer interaction meaningful and impactful through personalized real-time engagements.
