Due to the influence of COVID-19 pandemic, virtual Shopify meetup was held online, brought meaningful insights to merchants, app authors, Shopify development company, and more.
I’m pretty impressed with the presentation by Scott Cunningham from Social Lite on Customer Value Journey.
The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened the livelihood of millions of people and businesses. Brick and mortar sales will be affected severely. It’s time to go online!
This post will summarize his explanation and suggestions to help you out during this crazy time. Leveraging on the Customer value journey can bring value to both your business and your customers!
Let’s move on!
Table of Contents
Understand the Customer Value Journey
In his talk, Scott admits that if you are about to build a Shopify store, it’s not just building the website and expect the customers to shop on it. When you build it, the customers will likely don’t know about it. You need a framework, a roadmap to attract visitors to your business, convert them to your customers, ascend them to loyalty.
Admit it. You can’t deny the importance of creating value for your customers.
And there is a tool that will help you do that: The Customer Value Journey. What can you do with it? Mapping your customers into the journey.
It costs from the start
Scott highlights that to build an online store, you need to invest your budget for the first 3 stages: Awareness, Engage, and Subscribe.
The first 3 stages have negative red $ signs. It means you have to spend money on advertising: Facebook, Google, Youtube, Pinterest, Tiktok, Snapchat… It’s about paid media channels. It’s up to you as the store owners to leverage these tools to send traffic to your online store.
At the Convert stage, you want to present the undeniable value. Pop an engaging offer on your homepage to initiate the first time transaction. Think about what’s the first thing they will buy from you when visiting your online store? Think about something low-risk but high value, then bring it in front of your customers!
After that, everything you do with those new customers you acquired is pure profit.
You paid for ads, you convert them to the first-time buyer, now you upsell that customer.
At this stage, there’s no longer customer acquisition cost. They already know who you are, they already bought your product, they’re already excited about the product they bought.
So now, it’s up to us to expand the product catalog. Come up with new offers, come up with new exciting things they can buy over their lifetime.
The whole idea of the customer journey is the way people take advantage of it. Both you and your customers receive the value at every touchpoint. You get more engagement, more subscribers, more sales… while your customers get what they need.
If you know what product that your customers love, you can absolutely sell it to them before you can manufacture.
Another view of Customer Value Journey
That’s the overview of the Customer value journey, there is another way to look at it.
The image below includes the suggested strategies, tactics and tools that might help you build your online presence.
With this suggestion, you would know which stage you and your customers are landing. It would be easier for you to decide which strategies or tactics to deploy. Right now the Internet is loaded with improving conversion rate services, but is it the right time to pick them up?
Take a walk around the Shopify app store, you will see dozens of apps on loyalty, repeat purchases, reviews, and testimonials… Is it the right time to install those things to your brand new Shopify store? You decide.
Let’s go with a real-time headache of all eCommerce merchants: high traffic but no sales. Look at this Customer value journey, maybe you’ve passed the first 3 stages, you’re in the Convert stage now. However, you can’t recognize it, then you do nothing to offer your visitors, your subscribers an undenied value. That said, how can they become your customers?
Well, I bet you have your own answer right now.
Conclusion
That’s it!
Everything is slowing down doesn’t mean you have to stop also. Define your customer, position which stages they are in, decide to pick up the suitable approaching tactics. Don’t let your business go “dark” this time. Take this opportunity to make your brand go online!
