Here's How to Analyze the Customer Journey and Gather Valuable Insight

Customer journey analytics may not seem like the most exciting part of your role as a marketing manager, but it shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s vital to collect data on user behavior across touchpoints over time and use it to create valuable and actionable insights to improve the user experience (UX) .

Despite its importance, many industries - including banking, telecom and health insurance organizations - find tracking customer journeys challenging. This is in part down to the vast amounts of data produced by millions of customers completing multiple actions. Harnessing this asset correctly unlocks its value and can put you ahead of your competitors.

How to analyze the customer journey

Keeping up with the evolving marketing funnel means considering all of the variables in the digital marketing space. That means analyzing data across multiple devices, channels and platforms to offer a seamless UX to your customers. While all of this may appear overwhelming, it can be easily broken down by keeping best practice principles in mind.

1. Collect relevant data

Every touchpoint in your marketing funnel represents an opportunity to collect a new dataset, so it’s vital you set up a process for this. Start out by ensuring you’re gathering information on the basics, like the channel type, device being used and geographical location of your customer. Go further to obtain even more useful insights, such as the time it takes to navigate the funnel and which interactions result in the most conversions.

2. Implement customer feedback

Finding out what customers think doesn’t have to be done entirely through data collection. Asking for direct feedback remains an essential part of modern day marketing and shouldn’t be overlooked. Implement solutions to the problems users say they have with your UX and build on the positive interactions they’ve had at certain touchpoints to ensure your journey is optimized to suit their needs.

3. Segment your audience

While it would be nice to think we can create a perfect universal customer journey, this simply isn’t true. The UX will be different for each person coming to your channels, with gender, generation and location among the most common factors affecting the way they interact with your business. That makes customer segmentation a key part of your marketing plan, so you can use this information to tailor the options to address the pain points of differing groups.

4. Analyze your touchpoints

With so many touchpoints available it only makes sense that some perform better than others. This will depend on a number of factors, including your aforementioned audience segment, as some groups will simply gravitate towards certain channels over others. Conducting a proper analysis of each of these touchpoints will show which ones perform well and where customers are leaving the funnel. Sometimes, weak points can be overcome, but there are other occasions when it’s worth refocusing your efforts elsewhere to get a better return on investment (ROI).