Guide to Real-time User Journey Mapping

Consumers, in today’s time, are tough to please. Therefore, it can be quite a challenging task to get into the users’ minds when it comes to marketing your product or business. Besides, users look for the overall experience you provide before they buy from you now. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you can provide them with the kind of journey that is fulfilling for them.

The situation can be explained clearly if you consider a certain situation. Let’s say, your users can find you, and are willing to purchase from you. However, when they come to your website, they move around from one page to another and finally arrive on the checkout page, only to abandon their cart.

You might have seen these kinds of user behavior on your website too. However, did you find out the reason why your users might not be converting? Well, let me point it out to you. The reason your users are acting as you want them to might be caused by the lack of a complete grasp of a phenomenon known as the User Journey.

Understanding the user journey is the key to scaling up your conversion rates and your business in today’s time. The following sections explain everything you need to know about it, including a successful case study.

What is a User Journey? Why do you need it?

Briefly, a user journey is a process of converting a user right from the acquisition stage to the retention stage. The user journey is represented usually by a diagram or a flowchart. It shows all the touchpoints related to your users that associate them with your brand and provides solutions that they are looking for.

You might be wondering about the specialty of a user journey, and the need to have one. Well, having a user journey is crucial from a marketing point of view, as it provides you with the exact reasons that motivate your users to convert. In other words, the user journey answers the complete set of questions about why the users are visiting your websites, if they can navigate through it without any trouble, what are their needs and concerns, how much they want to associate with you, and more.

Having a user journey for your users helps you to know about your user personas, without continuing with the guessing game. Therefore, it allows you to create a smooth marketing and sales funnel, where the users find value in you before converting. This way, not only your conversion rates but your retention rates also increases.

The primary task for a user journey is to make the marketing process data-driven. You have to understand your users’ data to help them make a well-informed decision while converting them. Hence the analysis of the user demographics, behavioral patterns, and transactional data is key to catering to the users’ needs.

So, now you know the details, you must know how to create a meaningful user journey for your business. The following section explains six easy steps to develop a performance-oriented user journey.

How to create a user journey mapping

When you are creating the user journey map for your business, you must understand the whys and hows of each step. Unless you have a clear idea about this, creating an effective user journey might prove tougher than you think.

1. Build your users' personas

Know who your users are to create the user personas efficiently. Unless you know who your users are, creating a proper journey map is not of much use.

2. Understand your users’ end goal

Analyze and understand what your users want when they come to your website. Think about the process which brought your users to your page, and whether your products will be able to solve their end goal. Here, you must understand that each of your users is looking to get a different experience from you as they are often motivated in their own way when they opt to purchase from you.

3. Map and analyze the users’ touchpoints

Touchpoints are the events that allow your users to come in contact with your business while they are looking to buy something. There are several touchpoints and not all of them are online. For example, a user may have had a chance to interact with your business through some event, or they might have heard about you from someone she trusts. Understanding the path through which a user connects with you is crucial in mapping out a user journey.

4. Look for the pain points of your users

Once you have identified the path that brought each of the users to you, you need to look for the pain points of these users. You need to check if the website or the product can solve your users’ objectives. Further, you also need to look for the events and instances of the areas of friction and frustrations for the users, which might force your users to leave your website. As you identify the issue, try and solve them to make the user experience to the satisfaction of your users.

5. Be the user yourself

Unless you know how your user journey map works, you cannot expect to use them for your users. Thus, before using the journey builder to create a campaign, take the complete journey yourself to check if all the parameters are working properly. Auditing the user journey, and fine-tuning it is essential for making your user journey map a success.

6. Update and upgrade your user journey

Once adopted, your journey builder needs to be updated regularly to make it efficient.

User journey use case – Zalora

To understand the effective implementation of the user journey builder, let me show you an actual use case that worked wonders for one of our clients. The use case by Zalora is a prevalent example of making the user journey work for you.

Who is Zalora?

Zalora is Asia’s Online Fashion Destination and a world leader in online fashion in emerging markets. It provides products across apparel, shoes, accessories, and other beauty products for both men and women. The brand has a presence in almost all the major markets in southeast Asia.

The problem statement

Being an online fashion brand, Zalora was concerned about two major issues in terms of customer lifetime value. The objective of Zalora was to reach the users dropping off from the product and cart pages to drive revenue and increase the customer LTV. Zalora also wanted to re-engage and retain their old users by informing them of various events like reductions in prices, upcoming offers and deals, and more.

The Solution

To help Zalora to reach its objectives, Vizury came up with a customized solution. Using Vizury’s dynamic feed-based Browser Push Notifications, Zalora ran its End of Season Sale offers to drive users back to their app. This was done to help Zalora engage its users at multiple stages of the purchase cycle and drive their revenue up.

The dynamic push notifications used by Zalora were carried out to fulfill some unique proposition. Zalora used Vizury’s platform to send 1:1 hyper-personalized push notifications to trigger 30 days of inactive users. Also, a trigger was enabled to notify users of price-drop alerts for the users’ carted and viewed products. Another trigger was enabled to cater to the product and cart drop-offs with trigger times at 15 minutes, 24 hours, and 48 hours.

Result

The result achieved with this was phenomenal as the CTRs went up to 2X value and the conversion rate to 2.5X. Moreover, Zalora was able to drive 20X higher dynamic conversion in volume than what they achieved with static push notifications. This was achieved by creating highly-engaging notifications for users at every stage of the marketing funnel, and increasing customer LTV. The communication was designed to activate, convert, recommend, and retain the users with a series of marketing collaterals.

Conclusion

A user journey provides you with a comprehensive understanding of your users. Using the insights gathered from the journey builder, you can prioritize and optimize various aspects of your business to improve the overall user experience. Moreover, you can stop guessing about the user touchpoints and develop them to attract more customers, convert them and eventually retain them.

If you are not adopting a user journey for your business, the chances are high that your competitors might get ahead pretty soon. If you still have confusion about the efficiency of the user journey or want to start using one, we would be happy to help you out. Get in touch with us at marketing@vizury.com, and we will gladly answer any questions you have.