CJO is the new CRO.

As an e-commerce retailer, in order to keep competing and keep converting

in an increasingly competitive market, you need to know your customer journey like the back of
your hand – and be an expert at making it relevant and seamless. Because if you don’t, your
competitors will.

In this guide, you’ll get step-by-step pointers on how to map out your customer journey and then
optimise it, along with examples of brands who are excelling at this. By the end, you’ll see your
brand – and hopefully your customer – in a whole new light.

Table of contents

• Why care about CJO

CJO??

• What is Customer Journey Optimisation

Optimisation??

• What impact does CJO have on your business

business??

• How to map your customer journey

• How to optimise your customer journey

• Focus area: your visitor journey

• Which brands create successful customer journeys

journeys??

• Conclusions
 Why care about CJO?

In digital marketing, there are a lot of three-letter acronyms. SEO. CRO. CMS. ROI.

Today we’re here to talk about another one: CJO. Expanded, that’s customer journey
optimisation. But before you discard it as just another three letters, you should know why this
one is so important.

72% of businesses say that improving customer experience is their top priority

[Source: Forrester]

Making your customer experience personal, seamless and relevant is the new battleground. New
research shows that for the majority of your customers, this is now a table-stakes expectation and
over 50% of them will happily walk away to another brand if you fail to tailor their experience.

Any brand whose customers experience difficulty, confusion or frustration risks losing them to
other, slicker operations.

That’s across the entire customer journey – from awareness to purchase to advocacy.

In pre-digital days, a customer journey might start with a television or print ad, continue with a
phone call or a visit to the store and end at a purchase. Today, the proliferation of media
channels, the ease of comparison and the immediacy of digital research and online buying means
that that journey has become more complex and less linear.

That’s why smart brands operating across multiple channels are turning to customer journey
mapping and optimisation. At its simplest, this means seeing the brand-customer relationship
from the customer’s perspective, not the marketer’s.
 Right now, experience is the biggest challenge facing digital marketers, with
30% citing UX and CX as their main pain-point.

Flipping your funnel preconceptions on their head is fundamental to e-commerce success – in

order to successfully turn browsers into buyers, you need to start by understanding your
customer’s journey.

Getting to grips with the real story of how a customer interacts with your brand is going to mean:

• breaking the silos that divide marketing and customer service channels

• learning to re-evaluate how you measure your success

• successfully creating customer journeys that convert – time and time again
 What is Customer Journey
Optimisation?

CJO is sometimes called the new conversion rate optimisation – but it’s so much more than that.

Where conversion rate optimisation views the buying process as relatively linear in order to
nudge visitors towards a conversion goal, CJO accounts for all touchpoints of customer
interaction and works to optimise them across the entire lifecycle.

Let’
et’ss break that down.

We’re all familiar with the usual customer interactions: the ‘chat with us’ window, the checkout
experience, your email marketing and social media output, your search function, television
advertisements, blog posts and customer service call centres. They’re part of the brand
experience – but what good are they in isolation?

What actually counts for the consumer is the cumulative effect of the end-to-end experience of
dealing with the brand. There’s no point in having a great checkout experience if the rest of the
website is frustrating and obscurely laid out; great content can’t tell your brand story if it’s not
delivered in a way that makes sense for the consumer.

Your customers don

don’t
’t see your individual touchpoints in isolation. They see the total experience
you give them as a whole, which is an aggregation of multiple interactions across multiple
channels (and usually, multiple departments and P&Ls). That’s why CJO is so important.

The numbers speak for themselves – companies with strong omnichannel strategies retain an
average of 89% of their customers. The ones with weak omnichannel strategies retain only 33%.

Customer journey optimisation is the science of making every engagement

with your customer – from awareness to loyalty – relevant, seamless and the
best it can possibly be.
What impact does CJO have on
your business?

A real-world case study

A study by McKinsey & Co. perfectly illustrates the importance of optimising and measuring the
customer journey as a whole, rather than individual touchpoints.

A media company was losing customers at an alarming rate – but its customer satisfaction rates
at touchpoints like call centres, website services and field services rated consistently at 90%. Yet
when the team dug deeper, they found that customers were leaving because of poor customer
service.

The issue, they discovered, was that although each time a customer connected with a touchpoint
they came away with their issue resolved, the underlying problems creating the issues were left
unaddressed. For example, while one phonecall had a 90% chance of going well, it might have
taken three phonecalls to get the issue resolved.

The company’s processes were broken, and the cumulative experience of this customer journey
– rather than the individual touchpoint events – was what was driving customers away.

The lesson here is that failing to see your touchpoints as a journey – as your customers do –
has a real impact on the bottom line.
By providing a seamless and relevant customer journey, you’ll significantly increase your chances
of selling to a new customer (78% of customers in the US report having abandoned a transaction
due to a poor customer experience) – and also be more likely to sell again to an existing
customer (the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, compared with 5-20% for a
new customer).
 How to map your
customer journey

If you’re ready to tackle CJO, it’s time to create a map.

Your customer journey map will take in all your touchpoints, channels and personas. It’s a
visualisation of an individual’s journey to purchase and beyond.

It’s important at this stage to not be intimidated by the task at hand. While some large
organisation’s maps are extremely complicated, yours may well be simple.

There are two key things to remember as you map your customer journey:

• Think of it from the point of view of the customer, not the business

• Don’t assume that a customer journey will be linear and predictable

Get into the mindset of a consumer and consider all the possible ways they might interact with
your brand, and you how you might be able to make those interactions and everything in
between a pleasurable experience.

How to create a customer journey map

1. DEFINE YOUR OBJECTIVES

Know what you want out of this exercise before you start, because it’s going to take a fair bit of
work to scope. Do you want to build your customer journey from the ground up or are you
looking to optimise your existing pathways?
2. GET ALL THE RIGHT TEAMS INVOLVED

Your customer doesn’t know or care that one person in your business handles social media while
another team looks after post-purchase fulfillment – to them, you’re one brand and one
experience. You need every type of interaction represented on your map, so make sure that the
people responsible for them are all in the room. Overcoming the problems of internal silo is one of
the key issues at stake here, so it has to be on the agenda from the outset.

3. DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE TEMPLATES

There are many different ways to present a customer journey, so don’t spend time worrying about
which one to choose. Start with a simple flowchart – it may evolve as you start to see the picture
develop, but it will give you a grounding.

4. START WITH YOUR CUSTOMER PERSONAS

Different personas may have different journeys which reflect their varying needs, values,
expectations and pain points. How would a 50-year-old Christmas panic-buyer experience your
store differently to one of your loyal customers? You may need multiple journey maps, but as long
as you’re looking at this from your customer’s perspective, you’re doing the right thing.

5. GATHER YOUR DATASETS

We live in a data-rich world, so now’s the time to pull all your user data together. That’s web and
social analytics, demographic information, customer feedback and anything else you have that
provides intelligence on customer behaviour.

Of course, there’s often more to the story than what can be seen in an analytics dashboard.
Interview customer-facing staff, explore your bricks-and-mortar environments (if you have them)
and talk to any partners that might be sending customers your way.
6. START MAPPING YOUR TOUCHPOINTS

Start plotting out your customer interactions as a simple flowchart; you’ll see points of divergence
and convergence, multiple potential pathways and lots of crossovers. The important thing is to
start getting it all down on paper.

7. ADD THE INTERNAL ACTIONS

Part of what you’re doing here is overcoming internal silos between teams and channels, so you’ll
want to make it clear where potential breakdowns are taking place on your map by noting the
internal actions that take place following a customer interaction.

For example, if a customer raises a complaint via social media how is that then passed to the right
team for it to be handled?

8. TRACK TIMEFRAMES

As your customer progresses, note how long it often takes between one touchpoint and the next.
This, along with your view of ‘what happens next’ internally, will help you start to identify where
things can be improved.

9. NOTE CUSTOMER EMOTIONS

Consider the thoughts and emotions that your customer might be experiencing at any point
where they might be in contact with your brand. Curiosity, desire, frustration, having to satisfy a
physical need, surprise, uncertainty – understanding what they feel and when adds depth to the
customer journey map.
10. NOTE YOUR EVALUATION CRITERIA AND METRICS

You likely have a wealth of metrics, goals and benchmarks that your teams use to evaluate their
success in engaging with customers – survey scores, open rates, abandonment rates (the list
goes on). Note them down next to each of your touchpoints.

We’ve seen in the earlier case study that your individual touchpoint metrics don’t necessarily
represent the full picture; nonetheless, including your success metrics here will at least give you
an indication of where some potential problem areas are.
 How to optimise your
customer journey

Congratulations – you’ve passed the first major hurdle. By now you likely have a customer
journey map (or a number of maps) that’s detailed and extensive. It may look overwhelming at this
point, but don’t worry.

1. SCORE IT!

Just like we saw in the earlier case study where individual touchpoints scored highly only for the
overall customer journey to perform poorly, this is the real acid test. By now, you’ll be able to see
where long lag times might be in getting issues resolved, where internal communications aren’t
seamless or where certain channels perform poorly.

From where your customers start to how they get to their goal, grade how well that journey
performs
performs. In an ideal world, you’ll be able to validate this against customer surveys or your overall
success with that customer persona. Contrasting the performance of your multiple customer
journeys will start to help you identify the places where you need to optimise, which leads you
smoothly onto…

2. FIND YOUR ‘MOMENTS OF TRUTH’

Now that you have a clear view of your existing customer journey and how well it’s working, you’ll
now start taking steps into optimising.

The key here is focus

focus. In order to optimise effectively, you’ll start by identifying those touchpoints
you can change that are going to make the biggest impact
impact. These are also known as your
‘moments of truth
truth’’ – the touchpoints that are mak
make-or-break
e-or-break to your customer journey
journey:
 • The elements that are essential and can turn the whole experience sour if they
underperform – for example, failing to respond to a customer query promptly

• The elements that can take your customer journey to the next level – for example,
personalised incentives based on a customer’s product interest

This is what you’ll focus on changing first.

3. RE-SHAPE YOUR JOURNEYS

Now that you know what your moments of truth are, you can decide based on your research how
you’ll change them. To gauge whether you’re making the right choice, take your existing
customer journey map and draw up the changes to your moments of truth with the expected
consequences of doing so.

This is important for two reasons – it’ll help you in getting buy-in when it comes to execution (see
next step) and will also give you a measurement benchmark when it comes to evaluating the
success of your intervention.

4. GET THE BUSINESS ON BOARD

You’ll hopefully have involved stakeholders from across the business in your customer journey
mapping exercise, so getting buy-in for your optimisation plans should hopefully be easier.

Remember, a key part of this exercise is overcoming issues with internal silos and process to
make your organisation operate efficiently around the customer – this step is essential to
achieving a better customer journey. Don’t worry if it’s tough – 41% of marketers have exactly the
same problem, citing organisational alignment as the biggest hurdle standing between them and
their goals.
5. IMPLEMENT

Time to execute.

6. MEASURE AND OPTIMISE

So you’ve implemented your ‘moment of truth’ optimisations, knowing what your objective is; now
it’s time to evaluate whether or not you’ve been successful.

Remember that CJO – like CRO – is a marathon, not a sprint and the goal is as much about
finding out what doesn’t work as much as what does. Be patient and be persistent.

If you don’t get the result that you hoped for, analyse what did happen in an attempt to find out
why that was the case – that will help you decide what to try instead.
Focus area: your visitor journey

Probably the most interesting – and most important – part of the e-commerce customer journey is
on your website. It’s here that you either make the sale – or don’t. This is where the rest of the
work that you put into your customer journey succeeds or fails.

Crucially, it’s also where the most valuable data can be found. It’s here that you see everything
about your customer – from their product interest (or lack thereof ) to their regularity of
engagement, the devices that they use to do so and what channels they arrive through.

The combination of a data goldmine and a wealth of ‘moments of truth’ means that the onsite
experience is the key part of your customer journey.

So how do you ensure that your journey is going to work?

1. Track progression through your funnel

You know where your traffic has come from – whether it’s search, social, display or email – so
your first task is to map out where it might go next.

Mapping out your website into different phases – from search, to category, to product, to
checkout – and then tracking your traffic across them will show where you’re facing
abandonment.

This is your first indicator as to what points of your visitor journey need optimisation and
investment – your ‘moments of truth’ for your visitor journey.
2. Get context

The challenge when you’ve mapped your funnel is knowing what ‘good’ looks like – for your
category, what should a ‘normal’ bounce rate look like? This is where it’s invaluable to benchmark
your customer journey against other comparable ones in your category – the data can be hard to
come by, so this is where you may want to enlist some extra help.

3. Revive your key selling points

Now you know the points of your visitor journey at which you need to make interventions, it’s time
to consider what they should be – and for whom.

For example, you might have free delivery as standard above a certain spend threshold, but you
might also offer a 10% discount to first-time customers. Think about who you want to target at that
point in your journey to understand what kind of message will make the difference at your
‘moment of truth’.

For example, Virgin Trains used three key messages to revive the interest of disengaged visitors
on its booking pages, emphasising the speed of checkout, no booking fees and no credit card
charges. This led to a conversion rate increase of over 7% on this journey.
Which brands create successful
customer journeys?

There are countless features of the customer journey, but you can break them down into five
broad categories:

• Awareness

• Discovery

• Purchase

• Use of the product or service

• Bonding with the product

While this is just one way of defining the different phases, in a well-thought out customer journey,
each of these aspects will be seamlessly interconnected and made relevant to the individual
customer.

Here are some examples where brands have put resources into understanding their customers
and creating an experience to suit them:

AWARENESS

Smashbox is a cosmetics brand that has brick-and-mortar stores and concessions – but a clever
piece of digital activity allows customers to interact with the brand’s products by uploading their
own selfies and experimenting with colour and style in a virtual try-on studio.
The benefit of this for Smashbox is twofold: firstly, this useful, personalised and innovative
experience helps draw visitors in at the awareness phase of the customer journey.

Secondly, it delivers a relevant and interactive experience for e-commerce customers at the
consideration stage of the process – a difficult challenge to overcome for a cosmetics brand
where purchase consideration usually has to involve getting hands-on with a product.

Importantly, the studio works seamlessly on mobile devices as well, and Smashbox’s Chat with an
Artist function delivers a specialist experience that creates a strong overall customer journey.
-
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DISCOVERY

John Greed Jewellery has considered its product from the customer point of view; realising that
jewellery is frequently given as a gift, its online store is arranged to easily guide the customer to
the kind of gift they might want to buy, doing the job of a sales assistant in a physical store:

PURCHASE

As an insurer that specialises in coverage for the over-50s, Staysure provides a one-stop-shop for
consumers to explore holiday ideas, book holidays, and arrange insurance. When you click on
‘holidays’, it leads you to the Staysure Travel site, an extension of the Staysure brand.

Whereas a typical insurance site may offer levels of cover and pricing (once your holiday is
already arranged), Staysure has identified the appeal of an all-in-one experience for their target
audience, who might otherwise find the online booking process daunting or overwhelming.

Importantly, the website places a contact number prominently, again recognising that older
browsers may be more likely to prefer to speak to someone than using an online checkout. It’s a
good example of looking beyond channels and internal silos to see the experience from the
customer’s point of view.
USE OF PRODUCT OR SERVICE

Petcircle.com.au optimises the customer’s ease of using the product – pet food – by offering an
option of a recurring delivery. This simple option makes it easy to continue using the product –
which the customer would need to re-purchase regularly – saving time and effort for the online
shopper.

It also shows that the customer doesn’t have to be continually re-visiting a website, for example,
in order to continue to interact with a brand. For a brand such as Pet Circle, the execution of
those repeat re-orders, from email reminders to prompt delivery and easy cancellation, are just
crucial to ensure the continuity of the experience.
BONDING WITH THE PRODUCT

Creating positive associations with the product after it’s been bought is an important first step to
turning conversion into loyalty. After all, the customer journey is really only just beginning at this
point.

Many brands use the ‘surprise and delight’ tactic – executed at the right ‘moment of truth’ – of
putting in just that little bit extra in terms of thought and care. A pair of socks like in this Laura
Ashley example doesn’t cost much to produce and send, but its value is potentially immeasurable
– it turns customers into advocates.
Tip: A great customer journey isn’t just for those who purchase. LinkedIn blogger Scott Barbour
recounts several interesting examples of great customer journeys (and one terrible one) that
includes an experience where he decided to return the product – but where the customer
services representative offered free shipping on a heavy item.
 Conclusions

To keep acquiring and retaining customers, e-commerce businesses need to put customer
journey optimisation front and centre. After all, over half of customers are willing to pay more for a
good experience.

If you want to keep up, you’ll need to get started fast – this is a marathon, not a sprint – and keep
in mind the following learnings from this book:

• Most of the CJO work is in the exercise of mapping the journey – this is the
opportunity for your business to put aside how you view yourselves and really come
to understand how your customers view you

• Collaboration is crucial – make sure that all of your internal stakeholders are on
board; this is important not just to ensure that your mapping exercise is complete, but
that you’ll be ready to execute seamlessly on your optimisation strategy across all
your channels and touchpoints

• Work from as much data as you can. Including data that’s not your own – being able
to benchmark your activity against comparable businesses will help you understand
where to focus your efforts for maximum return.

• Be ready to be surprised. What you’ll learn in the process of mapping and optimising
your customer journey will show the variety of experiences your different customers
can have. Be prepared to re-think your personas and even your positioning if your
data points in that direction.

Book a Demo
 About Yieldify

Yieldify makes it easy for e-commerce businesses deliver customer journeys that convert,
through a combination of smart and simple multichannel technology and expert strategy.

Trusted by over 500 brands on more than 1,000 websites globally, Yieldify helps some of the
world’s innovative companies drive incremental revenue, including Marks and Spencer, French
Connection, Steiner Sports, Omni Hotels and Anthropologie.

Some of our clients