Connect With Buyers Along Their Amazon Customer Conversion Journey

Understanding a customer’s journey on Amazon and how to use a customer journey canvas is a must for eCommerce marketing professionals. Performing buyer journey mapping involves taking a close look at the path from product discovery, to purchase, and onward to continued buyer satisfaction.

You can effectively tailor your marketing strategy by knowing the steps along this path, and communicating effectively at each point. In order to speak to your customer, you need to focus on how they feel throughout the process, not just how to get their money. Understanding the reasons behind a customer’s behavior, actions, preferences, and sentiment before, during, and after the sale are the crucial insights behind successful customer targeting.

The constant factor in the customer conversion process is the psychological aspect of buying. A customer’s psychological journey can be outlined throughout five stages; awareness, consideration, motivation, conversion, loyalty. Buyers can move back and forth between these stages and can move quickly or slowly. Naturally, customer journey marketing involves an in-depth look at these stages.

In order to better understand your own brand or product’s unique feelings throughout their process, you can use a customer journey canvas. The benefits of customer journey mapping using a customer journey canvas allow you to map out a vision for the following:

• what you want to say to your buyers
• what your buyer’s needs are customer’s needs
• Offers insight into gaps that may exist
• Provides action points for where to make immediate improvements

Here’s a sample customer journey canvas you can use. Print out this template, or keep it open as you go through these stages. Try to relate your brand or product as you go along.

This source  found that 88% of successful and “high-performing” marketing teams agreed that a customer journey strategy is, “…critical to the success of their overall marketing.”

Your customer journey map or canvas will include all of the digital or physical touchpoints a buyer encounters along their journey to conversion.

The second stage in the customer journey is a consideration. As the buyer considers your product, they need all of the information they can get. They experience interest, excitement, and ambivalence.

It’s essential you keep your product descriptions accurate and detailed so the customer can get ALL of the information they need. This step is where you can begin to develop trust. Include accurate images, and be transparent about shipping costs and return policies.

Creating a well-optimized Amazon Storefront can also show customers in the consideration stage what your brand story is, what values your brand represents, who else uses your product, video content, and more. All of this content can propel buyers from consideration, and simply as window shoppers, into the next stage, motivation.

The motivation stage is the tipping point. Your buyer is not yet convinced to spend their money.

Within this stage, buyers experience a phenomenon called “loss aversion”. Psychologically, humans are wired to avoid loss and experience more psychological hesitance than when faced with a potential gain. This means that making a purchase will always cause a degree of psychological pain for a customer.

This is why the motivation stage often requires further incentive to help budge the buyer over the line. Offering free shipping, discounts, guarantees, or other incentives can soften the blow of the financial loss.

Marketing tactics using the theory of social proof can also help nudge buyers. Alerting customers when products are low in stock, or in another buyer’s basket, can help push buyers over the edge. When a buyer is ambivalent, they may want the item but are still weighing the pros and cons. But the fear of potentially losing the product to someone else (loss aversion) will often cause buyers to take action.

Retargeting ads and emails are most effective at this stage. You need to find out what the blocking point was for your customer, and continue then to remind customers of the items they had put in their cart. This helps keep your product and brand at the front of their mind and retains interest.

Yes, finally! The conversion stage. Your customer has decided to buy your product. But make sure that there aren’t any unwelcome surprises as they proceed through the checkout process. If a customer in this stage faces hidden fees, unreasonable shipping costs, or slow shipping time, they may no longer be convinced and move back into the motivation phase.

You can help your buyer out by offering many payment options, including buy now pay later financing. Recent studies have shown that buy now, pay later financing actually increases conversion rates and lowers cart abandonment.

Finally, you will want to avoid redirecting your customer to other sites or platforms. Also avoid asking them to navigate through tedious or confusing checkout processes, as this can cause cart abandonment.