Leaving customers with a compelling brand story to share with others is a crucial element in building a successful business. But the key to turning a basic purchase transaction into a long-time loyal customer requires a dedicated strategy.

The challenge, however, is that not every customer is the same. In fact, most have their own unique needs or expectations of the brands they interact with. Still, to consistently deliver great customer experiences, it’s essential to implement various strategies for extracting insights from website visits and using them to create more personalized customer journeys moving forward.

Below are several strategies you can put in place to achieve this goal.

Look Through Past Customer Purchases

Your customer’s past purchases can tell you a lot about what they’re looking for from brands. Tapping into this data can help you continue shaping experiences around these needs, rather than letting guesswork drive your marketing directions.

For example, if you were marketing a restaurant business, it’s important to analyze your past visits over given time periods and analyze things like reservation time frames, average table sizes, and common dishes or drinks being served. This information can help you gauge the interests of your guests and make sure you continue offering options they’re likely to enjoy on future visits.

Analyze Website Metrics

When trying to improve your customer journey, you’ll want to take a close look at your website metrics. Try to look past page views or overall organic traffic volumes and try to discern the behaviors of your users.

Look into your site analytics and track how long visitors are staying on certain pages. See what type of content or site features get the most activity, and pay attention to which pages are often the ones that stop a session.

Knowing these elements can help you to shortlist improvements you should make to keep individuals on your site longer.

Understand Your Visitor Demographics

It’s hard to create great user experiences if you don’t really know who they are or what they’re interested in. Researching and understanding your visitor demographics is a very helpful way of achieving this.

Your audience demographics can include everything from the age groups you’re targeting, locations, household sizes, specific topics of interest, or any other information that helps to organize your audience into different segments.

By blending publicly available statistics with your own business data, you can gain a much more comprehensive picture of what’s required to gain more interest in your products or services with the right audience type. This ensures you’re directing your marketing efforts and resources into areas where they’re likely to yield better returns on investment.

Evaluate Customer Feedback

Although you may think you know what’s best for your customers, unless you’re willing to ask them directly, you’ll be basing all your decisions on mere speculation. The best path to take when trying to create more impactful customer experiences is to be open to allowing customers to give you helpful feedback.

It’s important, however, not just to collect feedback, but also to do something meaningful with the data. This data can be critical for helping you to make essential changes to your business model that can significantly improve your conversion rates and grow your revenue streams.

When combing through feedback data, look for recurring themes in the comments you receive and narrow down common friction points found on customer journeys. Then act on any relevant data where it makes sense. Showing that you’re not only willing to listen to customers but also take action to correct issues when possible will only help to improve customer relationships.

Monitor Social Signals

Knowing how individuals are interacting with your brand online is another important factor to consider when improving your customer journey. Social media, in particular, is an important public relations channel you can leverage to not only see how your brand is being perceived but also to interact directly with your current or potential customers.

When monitoring for social signals related to your brand, make sure you’re paying close attention to the type of posts and updates that have the most activity. This can often show you what types of topics are most important to your audience and helps you to design elements on your site that speak to these interests.

Recreate Historical Customer Interactions

Every interaction with your customers – whether phone calls, emails, or support chats – is a great opportunity for you to learn from past mistakes or address important product or service issues in the future. By having a quality CRM tool or customer data aggregation pool in place, you’ll be able to easily extract and leverage these insights regularly.

Tracking your historical customer interactions can give you the ability to address commonly asked questions directly and put in place valuable solutions that your customers look for most often.  

Leverage Predictive Analytics

Although there are a lot of valuable insights to be gained by evaluating past customer transactions, the real value comes from using those insights to create better forward-thinking decisions.

One way this can be done is by leveraging modern AI-powered tools that can analyze historical purchase trends and help the business create more accurate forecasts. This can be incredibly useful when used in businesses that sell physical goods and need to manage their inventory effectively without overcommitting their resources.

Create a More Seamless Customer Journey

Your company data can be a valuable asset when helping you to create a more seamless customer journey. By following the strategies discussed, you’ll gain helpful insights that can help your customers feel more connected to your brand, while creating memorable experiences they’ll be happy to share with others.

About the author