While they may follow similar paths, the journeys and experiences they have are entirely unique for each of them.

This makes it all the more difficult for businesses to build a website experience that not only caters to the unique needs and wants of their target audience but also helps them seamlessly achieve the desired goal. 

Although the challenge is difficult to overcome, it is not impossible, especially with the help of customer journey maps.

A customer journey map is basically a graph or map that provides a visual representation of the experience that a customer or buyer persona has with your business.   

The purpose of creating this map is to understand the various stages of a customer’s journey and also to gain insights into their interactions with your brand at each of these stages.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at how you can create a customer journey map, and also understand how you can use behavioral analytics to enhance this process and optimize visitor experiences. 

Why is it important to map the customer journey of your website?

Mapping the customer journey offers a wide range of benefits, especially when it comes to improving the overall customer experience.

However, the most important reason why you should map the customer journey is that it gives you a clear representation of how a typical visitor or buyer persona navigates through your website.

Marketers and business owners are often unaware of how the actual visitor interacts with a website. While we all want the visitor to reach the final stage of conversion as easily as possible, the journey is often more complex and layered. 

For example, when new visitors land on your website, they would typically want to know more about your brand, offerings, strengths, and benefits. 

However, whether or not visitors will take the desired action depends on various other factors such as their intent, motivation, awareness level, and the stage of their buying process.

With the customer journey map, you can segregate your visitors into different stages and address their specific challenges and motivations at each level.

This not only allows you to optimize each stage, but it also allows you to identify potential roadblocks that prevent them from moving ahead in the buying journey.          

How to make a customer journey map?

Creating a customer journey map involves a lot of research, analysis, and iterations. 

The goal of this process is to visualize how visitors or customers experience your website, allowing you to optimize and improve every stage of their journey.

While there are a lot of different ways to go about it, here is a simple process that will help you get started and create a comprehensive customer journey map.

1. Establish clear goals for your customer journey map

Just like any other business strategy, mapping a customer journey requires a certain level of research and collaboration between different teams in the organization.   

With the amount of effort that goes into creating a customer journey map, you must be clear about what you want to accomplish with it.

Do you want visitors to sign up for a free demo? 

Are you trying to optimize a conversion funnel? 

Do you want to target a specific buyer persona? 

Setting clear goals will help you build a solid customer journey map that is effective, and reliable and also gives you an accurate representation of a customer’s journey.

2. Identify the most important buyer personas

Once you’ve established clear goals for the customer journey map, the next step is to create buyer personas and identify the most important ones.

Most businesses define their buyer personas based on demographics or specific market segments. 

However, an ideal buyer persona should also be based on qualitative factors like motivation, mindset, and challenges faced by a segment of visitors or customers. 

With this approach, you get a deeper understanding of what drives visitor behavior, how they like to make decisions, and also what prevents them from converting into customers.    

To create effective buyer personas, you need to talk to your potential and existing customers through methods like surveys, or questionnaires. 

Implementing A/B testing is also a great way to understand how your audience reacts to changes on the website, giving you insights into their behaviors and preferences.

By defining the buyer personas, you can identify the most common or important ones and start tracking their journey on your website. This will help you to focus on a limited number of personas at a time and track their experience more accurately on the map.

3. List down the touchpoints for each persona

Visitors and customers interact with your business at different points during their entire buying journey and even after that. 

These points of interaction are known as touchpoints, and it is crucial to identify every touchpoint so that you don’t miss out on any aspect of a customer’s experience.

Also, by listing down the touchpoints of your key buyer personas, you can optimize every interaction and build an experience that matches their goals, challenges, and needs.

4. Map the journey of the selected buyer personas

As soon as you’ve identified the key touchpoints, you can list them down on a graph or timeline to visualize their journey from the first point of contact till they become paying customers.

On this customer journey map, you should also define their motivations and emotions at every touchpoint. This gives you a clear overview of how these buyer personas proceed through a conversion funnel and allows you to optimize them with a data-driven approach.

Also, once you’ve prepared the customer journey map, your next action should be to take this journey yourself and analyze whether the customer’s needs and requirements are being satisfied at each touchpoint.

This approach will also help you identify previously unknown roadblocks or challenges that visitors face on your website, giving you a chance to optimize these areas and build a seamless experience.

5. Refine and optimize the customer journey map

Once you’ve created the map, you can start optimizing the customer experience to make it more seamless and effective. 

Since this is an ongoing process, you will have to refine and optimize the customer journey map according to the evolving behavior and preferences of your visitors and customers.

This will not only help you stay on top of the customer journey, but it will also help you discover new ways to optimize their experience and improve customer satisfaction.

Using behavioral analysis to improve customer journey mapping

The customer journey map provides a visual representation of how visitors interact with your website, however, you still need to analyze every touchpoint to identify the common trends and patterns that drive user behavior. 

Although quantitative data like time spent on the page, bounce rate and session duration do give you an indication of how users are interacting with a page, they fail to provide deeper insights about the ‘why’ behind each visitor action.

This is where visitor behavior analysis comes into the picture.

At its core, behavioral analysis is the practice of tracking visitor interactions on your website to gain valuable insights into the behaviors, challenges, roadblocks, and preferences of every visitor.

With the use of powerful analytics tools like website heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and form analytics, you can closely observe how users interact with different elements of your website and use these insights to optimize their experience. 

Let’s take a look at how your business can leverage the power of behavior analytics to optimize the customer journey map.

Identify roadblocks and pain points at various touchpoints

One of the major benefits of behavior analytics tools like heatmaps and session recordings is that they allow you to pinpoint specific areas where visitors encounter difficulties or frustrations. 

For instance, let’s say that a user arrives on your website after clicking on a Google Ad. Now, the next touchpoint for this visitor is the landing page of your website where the primary CTA is the “Start a free trial” button. 

However, you notice that the bounce rate of the landing page is quite high even though data shows that visitors are spending a considerable amount of time on it.

This indicates that users engage with the page but do not feel confident enough to click on the CTA. Here, the quantitative data shows you that a potential friction point exists within the landing page, but it does not reveal the cause behind it.

In this scenario, you can opt for behavior analysis and analyze the heatmap of this landing page. During this analysis, you notice a lot of activity in the pricing section, which is located at the bottom of the page.

The heatmap also shows that the features & capabilities section does not receive high interaction. 

These insights show that visitors are interested in knowing more about the pricing details, and it also indicates that they might be facing some issues with the features section.

Based on these insights gathered from heatmaps, you can make certain changes like improving accessibility to the pricing section and also optimizing the other important sections.

With behavior analytics, you can gain in-depth insights into visitor behavior at every touchpoint on the customer journey map, allowing you to guide visitors more effectively through their journey.

Understand customer intent at different stages of the journey

A customer journey map shows you the different stages that a customer goes through during the buying process. 

Understanding the user intent at each of these stages can help you deliver optimized experiences that match their motivations and goals. 

With behavior analytics tools, you can not only track visitor interactions but also identify common engagement patterns to understand user intent better.

For example, let’s consider that you are creating a customer journey map for a fashion eCommerce website. During one of these stages, visitors browse through different products and categories as they try to find the perfect item.

However, data shows that a lot of visitors are dropping off after browsing through various product pages. This is a major concern as it indicates that visitors are interested in your offerings, but are not proceeding to the next stage for some reason.

Here, you can opt for behavior analysis to further understand this issue. A good way to do this is to run on-page surveys and to learn more about their hesitation to proceed further.

One of the questions that you can ask in this survey is “What additional information would you need to purchase this product?” 

Moreover, with VWO’s on-page surveys, you can use the power of AI to generate relevant, engaging questions that align with the goals of each survey. 

With this approach, you can discover the challenges your visitors are facing, and more importantly, you can also build a strong connection with them by showing a willingness to understand their problems and improve their experience.

Discover trends and patterns in customer behavior

The goals, motivations, and preferences of your visitors and customers change at every stage of the buying journey. 

Understanding these changing behaviors and trends is key to building a seamless, optimized experience. 

Here, the best strategy you can follow is to analyze visitor behavior at every touchpoint and identify recurring trends, patterns, or shifts in their interactions.

For example, a banking website can use session recordings to analyze visitor behavior on key conversion points such as the loan application form or the investment calculator page.

Here, they can watch recordings of how visitors interact with these pages and look for common drop-off or abandonment patterns. 

Based on this behavioral analysis, the banking website can make the necessary changes to align the website experience with emerging behavioral trends.

With this approach, you can analyze every customer touchpoint, gain deeper insights into their behavior, and optimize the entire buying journey.

Boost retention and customer loyalty

The customer journey doesn’t end after a purchase. 

It continues to grow and evolve as the customer interacts with the business, makes more purchases, and expects the business to know everything about their preferences and buying behaviors.

The post-purchase experience is equally important as it determines whether the customer will remain loyal to your brand or switch to your competitor.

At this stage, you need to leverage all the data and insights you’ve gathered so far to further improve their experience and provide a personalized touch to every interaction. 

This phase is crucial for fostering customer satisfaction, building loyalty, and encouraging repeat purchases. 

To do so, you can opt for on-page surveys or feedback forms to understand how you can continuously improve the overall customer experience.

This is crucial as it helps you build a strong connection with existing customers and it also encourages them to speak positively about your business. 

For example, let’s say you wish to improve the cross-selling aspect of your eCommerce business. To do so, you analyze the buying behaviors of existing customers and use the data to recommend similar products when they reach the checkout page. 

Here, you observe the heatmap of this page to understand how customers interact with the recommended products section. During this analysis, you notice that the section does not receive enough engagement as compared to the other sections.   

To further understand this problem, you watch the session recordings of these customers and realize that the images in the recommended products section are not loading quickly.

This is probably why customers are skipping this section entirely and just going ahead with their regular purchases. Based on this crucial insight, you can now optimize this section and ensure that customers can easily view the recommendations.

By continuously monitoring customer behavior and gathering feedback, you can identify areas for improvement and implement iterative changes to streamline the customer journey. 

This ensures that the customer experience remains aligned with evolving customer needs, resulting in long-term loyalty and customer retention.

Types and examples of customer journey maps

As you prepare to build a customer journey map, it is important to choose a map type that matches your business requirements and customer goals. Here are a few of the commonly used customer journey maps.

1. Experience maps

This is the simplest form of a customer journey map as it visualizes the experience, emotions, and needs of different buyer personas and predicts the actions they might take at each stage.

Using an experience map is a great way to start the customer journey mapping process as it gives you a general overview of how typical visitors or buyer personas interact with your website at different stages.

2. Day in the Life

One of the most popular customer journey maps is the ‘Day in the Life’ map. This map visualizes a broader set of actions that a person performs in his daily life, even if it does not involve your brand. 

The goal is to discover the thoughts, feelings, and pain points that potential customers experience and identify the touchpoints where they might interact with your brand. 

3. Current state

Unlike the previous type, the ‘Current state’ map deals with the journey that visitors and customers currently have on your website. 

It helps you to identify the varying levels of awareness and emotions that your customers experience while interacting with your brand. 

4. Future state

As the name suggests, the ‘Future state’ map visualizes how customers will interact with your brand in the future. This is done by analyzing their current behaviors and understanding where they might need your business later on.

5. Service blueprint

This type of customer journey map provides a layered and detailed view of every interaction that a customer has with your business. Moreover, the map also highlights the teams or functions that are responsible for each interaction, giving you more clarity on how you can align the customer journey with your business goals.

Final thoughts – How to use VWO Insights – Web to optimize customer experiences

Building a customer journey map is only half the battle. The other half begins when you try to analyze visitor interactions, observe their behaviors, and identify potential friction points at each stage of their journey.

VWO Insights – Web should be your ideal companion when it comes to boosting the customer journey maps with qualitative data and analyzing the behaviors and patterns of every visitor. 

With powerful behavioral analytics features like website heatmaps and session recordings, you can analyze visitor behavior at every stage and discover previously unknown roadblocks that impact their experience.

Moreover, the platform also helps you conduct AI-powered surveys to gather feedback and insights from your visitors and customers at crucial touchpoints. 

The form analytics feature allows you to perform a field-level analysis of key conversion forms, giving you a clear picture of where your visitors are struggling and helping you identify the reason behind abandonment.

By using these behavioral analytics features, you can enhance the quality of your customer journey maps and also make informed decisions to improve the overall experience of visitors on your website.

Take a free trial of VWO Insights – Web to try out these crucial features and discover in-depth insights about your customers at every stage of their journey.

That’s probably the mission statement of every single streaming platform we have today. 

Whether it is Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, Peacock, or any other OTT player, each of them is involved in a never-ending race to attract more viewers and retain existing subscribers. 

However, what started as a unique form of content consumption has now turned into a highly competitive market as these platforms struggle to keep their viewers hooked while also dealing with problems like user churn, lack of customer engagement, and loss of revenue. 

While there might be different reasons for each of these problems, a large part of it can be attributed to the quality of experience that users are offered on these platforms.

Improving the user experience at every stage of interaction is the best way to counter these challenges and stay ahead of the competition.

But, how do you go about it? 

Understanding the importance of behavioral analysis

Be it award-winning documentaries, viral TV shows, or the latest star-studded action flick, viewers are bombarded with every possible content right from the moment they arrive on a platform.

On the other hand, Netflix, which is currently the largest streaming platform, lost close to one million subscribers in a single quarter of 2022.   

This shows how platforms are struggling to retain subscribers, which makes it all the more important for them to continuously improve user experiences.

Understanding how these users interact with your platform, observing the kind of actions they take, and identifying friction points in their journey are key to building an optimized experience.

This is what behavioral analysis is all about. 

For example, let’s consider that an OTT platform displays a section called ‘Watch More Like This’ whenever a user has finished watching any content. However, data from their analytics tool shows that the section is not receiving enough clicks.

This is quite concerning as it indicates that users are probably not interested in the recommendations being shown and as a result, they are just leaving the website immediately after finishing an episode or movie. 

While this may not seem like a major issue, getting a viewer to binge-watch as much content as possible is something that OTT platforms thrive upon. 

To overcome this challenge, the platform can adopt behavioral analysis to track how these users are interacting with the ‘Watch More Like This’ section. 

For starters, they can observe the heatmap of this page to identify the areas that receive the most attention, while they can also watch the session recordings to see what actions users take after they’ve finished watching something. 

Based on these insights, the platform can then discover different ways to engage users at this stage and optimize this particular section. 

Leveraging customer behavior insights at every step of a user’s journey

While the primary goal of users on an OTT platform is to stream content, not all of them have the same preferences, challenges, and mindset. 

Some are new to the platform and are just trying to figure out how it works, while others might be regular users who know exactly what they want to watch. 

Building an optimized experience for every type of user is a challenge that every business has to deal with consistently. This is why you must have a robust strategy in place to leverage behavioral analysis and get deeper insights into user behavior. 

One of the key strategies is to define the important stages of the user journey on an OTT platform and implement behavioral analysis according to the specific goals and challenges of users at these stages.

1. Discovering the platform

In the initial stage of the user journey users arrive on your website to not only explore the platform but also to get an idea about the content you are offering. Based on what they see and experience, these new users will decide whether or not they want to become paying customers.

Here, businesses can closely analyze the behavior of new users to understand their perception of the platform and discover important patterns or trends in their decision-making process.

For example, new visitors who arrive on an OTT platform are often trying to find one specific movie or show, and they just want to know whether the platform has it or not. 

Suppose Gary, a new visitor, arrives on a streaming platform looking for a popular crime-thriller show called ‘Mindhunter’. 

If the show is available, Gary will most likely convert and become a paid subscriber. However, if he cannot find this show, he will just leave the page and move on to another platform. 

This is a lost opportunity for the business and can lead to even more drop-offs in similar cases. 

To prevent this from happening, the streaming platform can opt for behavioral analytics tools like session recordings to see how visitors like Gary interact with the platform once they realize that it does not have their preferred show or movie.

Do visitors immediately leave the page? 

Do they stop and explore the other shows or movie recommendations? 

How far do they scroll on this page?

Through session recordings, the platform can find answers to all of these questions and can also discover interesting insights about visitor interactions at this stage of their journey.

Based on these insights and observations, the platform can then improve its content recommendation algorithm and also make sure that its best content is displayed within the area that receives the most attention on this page.     

By fine-tuning these crucial aspects based on visitor behavior, you can significantly impact the decision-making process, enticing users to move from consideration to subscription.

2. The consideration stage

Another crucial aspect of a visitor’s journey is the consideration stage. Here, the visitors are convinced of the platform’s offering but are still trying to learn more about it before they become customers. 

When it comes to streaming services, visitors want to experience the platform before they even convert into paid subscribers. This is why most streaming platforms offer a free trial period where users can access most of the available content for a limited period.

For instance, let’s assume that a streaming platform offers a 14-day free trial to new visitors. However, there has been no growth in this number and it has remained within the same range for the past 6-8 months. 

The platform then decides to conduct a thorough analysis using website heatmaps and starts to observe visitor behavior on its home page. 

During this analysis, they realized that even though the home page displays a wide range of shows, movies, and documentaries, new visitors hardly interacted. 

Also, since there was no clear CTA on the home page, a lot of visitors were clicking on the navigation bar to probably get more information about the platform. 

So, based on these crucial website heatmap observations, the company can now either optimize its home page to guide new visitors or display relevant information about the pricing, benefits, and other important FAQs. 

Also, instead of displaying all the available content at once, the platform can instead promote only its most popular shows and movies to new visitors. 

This is how businesses can leverage website heatmaps to gather actionable insights and use these observations to guide changes and improvements on important pages.

3. Onboarding new visitors

Now that the visitor has finally become a paid subscriber, the onboarding process sets the tone for the entire relationship. 

Crafting a user-friendly interface and recommending relevant content that aligns with their preferences is a great way to improve the onboarding journey. 

Additionally, analyzing customer behavior becomes all the more important as the business now has the opportunity to learn more about the user’s preferences, likes, dislikes, interests, and so on.

For example, let’s say that a user has just become a paid subscriber and is ready to explore the platform and watch all their favorite content. 

However, as we saw in the previous example, users often feel overwhelmed when there are many options to choose from. To avoid this problem you can opt for a crucial part of behavior analytics – on-page surveys. 

When a new customer is about to explore the platform, you can prompt a survey with questions about their favorite genres, categories, formats, or preferences.

As soon as the user shares their answers, you can recommend content that aligns with the preferences they just shared. Also, based on these survey responses, you can predict content formats or genres that they might like and optimize their recommendations accordingly. 

By doing so, you create a continuous cycle of content recommendations that perfectly match the user’s taste and liking.

Moreover, you can also use these on-page surveys at different stages to understand whether or not the users are enjoying their experience and also ask for feedback and suggestions to make further improvements.  

4. Engagement and content consumption

As users continue to watch content and interact even more with your platform, you need to focus on improving user engagement and ensuring they remain satisfied with the available offerings. 

Again, behavioral analysis is a great way to achieve this and learn more about important aspects such as watch patterns, consumption trends, and viewer preferences.

Ever wondered why certain shows or movies become binge-worthy favorites? 

Apart from a lot of social media promotions, streaming platforms heavily recommend these shows to their existing customers based on their watch patterns and viewing trends. 

Also, they analyze various behaviors such as whether users prefer shorter episodes over lengthy ones, or whether they prefer movies over TV shows. 

All of this research and behavioral analysis gives them valuable insights into viewer preferences, based on which these streaming platforms try to promote relevant content. 

One of the best ways to do this is by analyzing heatmaps of different pages and understanding how users interact with important sections. 

For example, a streaming platform can use website heatmaps to observe the ‘What Others Are Watching’ section and identify the areas that receive the highest clicks and interaction. 

Based on these insights, the platform can then strategically place popular shows or new releases in these areas, ensuring that users are drawn to their best content effortlessly.

As we saw in one of the previous examples, streaming platforms can opt for session recordings to observe user behavior and identify potential friction points in the recommendations section. 

These insights can help refine their algorithms, and can also enable businesses to offer more accurate and appealing content suggestions, ensuring that users stay engaged throughout their time on the platform.

5. Burnout and retention

Be it eCommerce, B2B, or even on-demand streaming, retaining customers is the key to the success and growth of any business.

Using a combination of different behavior analytics tools, you can develop a strategy to avoid customer burnout and find effective ways to retain outgoing customers.

For example, you can look at your analytics tool to identify users who have been using the platform less frequently. These users might be potential churners who are no longer interested in the streaming platform for some reason. 

To make sure that they continue to use the platform, the business can prompt pop-up surveys whenever these users interact with the website and either offer plan extensions or try to understand why they are not as active anymore.

Moreover, some streaming platforms also offer breaks to customers where they can stop their subscription temporarily and join back after a few months for no extra cost.

By understanding the intention of your customers through on-page surveys, you can implement either of these strategies to show empathy and offer assistance at different points to your customers. 

Another key strategy is to analyze user behavior on account exit pages.

For example, if users wish to deactivate their account, streaming platforms usually prompt personalized offers or benefits to prevent them from taking this action. 

You can take this a step further by watching the session recordings on this page and understanding how users are interacting with these offerings. Also, you can analyze the heatmaps to identify click patterns on this page.

This should be an ongoing activity where you gather actionable insights from these pages and use them to optimize the content and placement of your offerings. 

By monitoring watch history, survey responses, heatmaps, and session recordings, streaming services can optimize their content libraries, introduce loyalty programs, and offer exclusive previews to keep viewers hooked and invested in the platform.

Discover the ‘why’ behind every user action with VWO Insights – Web

User expectations are at an all-time high. 

No matter what industry you belong to, users expect you to provide an optimized experience that not only matches their needs, and preferences but also offers innovative solutions to their problems. 

This is where VWO Insights – Web comes into the picture. 

Unlike the traditional analytics tools that only offer data about what actions a user is taking, VWO Insights – Web provides the tools that are necessary to discover the reason behind these actions.

Be it AI-powered surveys that help you understand the customer’s voice better or advanced form analytics that help you identify friction points in crucial lead generation forms, VWO Insights – Web offers everything you need to optimize roadblocks and improve the overall website experience.

Moreover, VWO’s website heatmaps and session recordings help you to see exactly how visitors interact with every page on your platform, enabling you to uncover actionable insights and optimize every stage of a user’s journey. 

Take a free trial of VWO Insights – Web to experience all of these features in action and discover in-depth insights to boost your website’s performance.

This is quite concerning, given the time, effort, and budget required to acquire new users. While there are quite a few reasons behind why a user uninstalls an app, bad UX sits right at the top of the list.

Most apps today struggle with retention issues mainly because users cannot accomplish their goals. From high loading times and constant crashes to unresponsive elements and confusing layouts, users continue to face UX problems while using apps. 

This is extremely challenging for product managers as these UX issues impact crucial product KPIs like user engagement, retention, conversions, referrals, and so on.

But, a major cause for concern is that most of the time businesses are unaware of these problems. This is why you need a strategy that not only helps you discover crucial UX issues but also enables you to optimize mobile app UX. 

In this blog, you’ll learn exactly how to do that with a specially curated 5-step framework that covers the entire cycle of mobile app UX optimization. 

Step 1: Identify where users are facing problems in your app

Before you go about optimizing your app and fixing UX issues, you first need to find out where exactly your users are facing these problems.

Are they leaving your app during the signup flow, or is an unknown crash occurring on another screen? 

While there are quite a few ways to identify problem areas, let’s look at some strategies commonly used.

App store reviews

The most obvious way to get feedback about your app is through reviews left by users on platforms like Apple’s App Store or Google Play Store.

By tracking these reviews consistently, you can identify common issues in your app or even discover problem areas that were previously unknown. 

However, since writing a review requires additional effort, a lot of users tend to skip it entirely. Also, most of these reviews are shared by users who either had an amazing or terrible experience. 

This could prevent you from gaining any honest, nuanced feedback from these reviews. 

Support emails

Another commonly used method brands rely on to discover issues within their apps is support emails. 

Users generally send these messages to your customer support team when they require some kind of help or encounter a problem in the app.

However, users only opt for this option when they encounter a problem. Also, not every user would take the time or effort to raise an issue or write an email about it. This again limits your visibility of user experience. 

In-app surveys

Using surveys is a great way to establish two-way communication with your customers. It also allows you to collect crucial feedback that can be leveraged to optimize user experience.

For example, when users complete a purchase, you can prompt a survey to know more about their experience or you can use it to get feedback about new updates or features. 

However, a common issue with this method is the number of people who fill up a survey. Since surveys tend to interrupt the user journey, people might either not take them or rush through their responses. In this case, the data might not capture the pulse of visitors. 

Also, there could be a gap in the data collected about user behavior as surveys fail to capture the voice of the silent audience. 

Quantitative analysis

In addition to previous methods, you can use analytics tools like Google Analytics, CleverTap, Moengage, or Mixpanel for deeper insights into user interactions with your app. 

These tools offer data on user demographics, actions, and engagement. They provide user data like time spent on a screen, number of user sign-ups, location of users, etc.

However, these tools primarily answer the ‘where’ of user behavior. For example, Google Analytics tracks user drop-offs from the sign-up screen of your app. But this information still does not tell you why this happened. 

This limitation leaves you making assumptions about user actions, rather than having concrete reasons for decision-making.

Qualitative analysis

Why do you need mobile app session recordings?

The best way to overcome the app optimization challenge is to opt for tools that enable you to conduct qualitative analysis. Through this analysis, you notice certain patterns or nuances in user behavior that are not clearly evident with quantitative metrics like session duration or bounce rate.

For example, let’s say you manage an e-commerce app. A user is exploring your collection of t-shirts and tries to choose a different size. However, the button to change the size is non-responsive. After a couple of attempts, the user quits the app. 

In this scenario, a tool like Google Analytics or CleverTap will show an increase in the number of people who left this screen and quit the app. However, this information does not reveal the reason behind this action. 

On the other hand, using mobile app session recordings, you will be able to watch this user event in real-time.

This means you no longer have to wait for users to report an issue within your app. You can review these recordings to discover these issues and fix them proactively before they cause major damage.

Tools like VWO Insights for Mobile Apps help you do this by offering deeper insights into customer behavior with powerful features like mobile session recordings and mobile heatmaps.

Secondly, when you release a new app version, you may want to know how new users interact with it compared to returning users. Or, maybe you want to study specific scenarios where the app crashed and failed to respond.     

This type of analysis provides some much-needed context to user behavior and allows you to make data-driven decisions to optimize the app. Depending on your tool, segmentation of recordings can be done in different ways.

For example, with VWO Insights for Mobile Apps, you can filter all recordings based on various factors like device type, location, android version, iOS version, screen viewed, app crashed, app not responding, etc. 

Why do you need mobile app heatmaps?

A heatmap is a visual representation of data that shows how users interact with your app. 

Color overlay is used to visualize where exactly users are tapping on a particular screen within your app. This is a crucial feature as it gives you a clear idea of how users are interacting with important sections of your app.

Let’s say you added a new section called ‘What’s Trending’ on the home screen of your news app. Since it’s an important section, you can use heatmaps to study the taps it receives and guide improvements based on this data.    

As another example, say your gaming app has a section where users can buy new gear and accessories. When you check the heatmap of this section, you notice that a very small number of users are clicking on the ‘View More’ button even though the product screen is receiving a lot of clicks.

Based on these insights, you can either change the placement of the ‘View More’ button or you can add a new ‘Infinite scroll’ feature that allows users to see more products without clicking anywhere.

How can your business benefit from qualitative analysis?

No matter what industry you belong to, qualitative analysis will give you deeper insights into user behavior and help you understand the factors that influence their actions. 

Let’s look closely at how businesses across industries can benefit from this qualitative analysis.

1. Shopping apps

Qualitative analysis is extremely crucial for e-commerce apps. It can help you to understand why users abandon the purchase journey. 

E-commerce apps often run flash sales or special offers to attract more customers. Since the traffic is relatively higher during this period, you may want to study user behavior and identify key areas that should be improved.

For example, your checkout screen has a section called ‘You Might Also Like’ just before the ‘Buy Now’ CTA button. The section recommends relevant products to the users based on what they are purchasing, making it an important part of your cross-sell or up-sell campaign.

However, during one of the flash sales, you observe the heatmap of this screen and notice that the ‘You Might Also Like’ section is receiving much fewer clicks. To understand this issue better, you watch session recordings of users who reach the checkout screen.

Surprisingly, you see that the product images in this section are taking almost 8-10 seconds to load, which is why users are skipping it altogether. 

Based on these observations, you can optimize the product images in this section and ensure that they load along with other elements on the screen.

This will result in faster loading times and will also increase cross-sell purchases from the checkout screen.

2. Finance apps

Industries from the financial sector can also use session recordings to analyze critical screens such as a loan application form or new account opening form. 

For example, consider you have an ’Insurance’ section in your app where users can buy a health insurance plan. 

Here, when users want to compare different plans, they can select their desired options and click on ‘Compare’, which takes them to a new screen where an in-depth comparison table is displayed.    

To optimize this comparison section, you want to study user behavior and identify possible friction points. Let’s say, you use the session recordings feature to know how users interact with the screen. 

Here, you see that users have no issues while comparing the two insurance plans. However, since there is no option to add another plan, users have to go back to the ‘Insurance’ screen. This action resets their choices and they are again asked to select their previous options along with the new plan.  

This issue complicates the entire comparison process and causes users to abandon the screen altogether. 

Now that you’ve identified a critical pain point, you can improve the flow of this process by adding a new button that allows users to choose a new plan directly from the comparison screen.

Also, you can use these insights to further optimize the ‘Insurance ’ section and guide improvements to the design or layout of the screen.

3. Food & drink apps

Apps that deliver food and groceries deal with a large number of users on a daily basis, which is why it is critical to observe behavioral patterns.   

For example, let’s you want to simplify the checkout process in your app. To know what changes are required and get a better understanding of user behavior, you analyze the heatmap of the checkout screen. 

Here, you notice that even though users are interacting with important elements like adding an address or choosing the payment method, the ‘Apply Promo Code’ section is not receiving a lot of clicks. 

To further understand this behavior, you looked at session recordings of this screen and saw that users are scrolling down without noticing the ‘Apply Promo Code’ section, hence you got a hypothesis that it might not be really visible.

Based on these key insights, you can make certain changes to ensure that the section receives good visibility so that users can easily benefit from it.  

4. Travel & local apps

Another industry that can greatly benefit from qualitative analysis is travel or hotel booking. Let’s say, your app allows users to book tickets for inter-city buses. 

You notice that users are spending a lot of time on the ‘Bus Listings’ screen, but very few are proceeding to the ‘Booking Confirmation’ screen. To understand why this is happening, you watch recordings and analyze user behavior.

Here, you observe that users are scrolling through a long list of buses and they are even struggling to find the right one. While analyzing the heatmap for this section, you also notice that the ‘Sort & Filter’ option is receiving very few clicks. 

This suggests that users are not using this feature effectively to narrow down their choices. 

To overcome this issue, you can improve the visibility of the ‘Sort & Filter’ feature or you can also recommend commonly used filters at the top of search results. 

5. Gaming apps

When dealing with gaming apps, session recordings can reveal glitches or bugs during gameplay and can also show how new versions or updates are affecting user engagement. 

For example, you want to know how users play through a challenging level in the game and whether they encounter any difficulties. To do so, you analyze the session recordings and notice that a lot of users are quitting the app after repeatedly failing at a series of tricky jumps.

You observe that users are struggling with the timing of these jumps. A possible reason might be the lack of pop-up tutorials at this particular level, which means users are unaware of the advanced controls required to clear the jump.

To solve this problem, you can introduce a couple of tutorials or demos just before users start this level. By doing so, you can help them understand the controls and also avoid interrupting their experience. 

Step 2: Decide which issues should be tackled first

Identifying user issues in your app is crucial, but what you do next matters most.

For example, let’s say you have a travel booking app where users can search and book flights, hotels, trains, etc. Since a major source of your revenue comes from users who book international flights, you want to optimize their experience. 

To achieve this goal, you check the recordings of users who dropped off while booking an international flight. Here, you notice that when users try to add coupon codes on the final checkout screen, the app stops responding and crashes.

On the other hand, a few users have also reported issues with the filter option on the screen that displays all available international flights.

While both these issues are affecting user experience, the one on the checkout screen should be high priority as it directly results in abandoned bookings and loss of revenue. 

An optimization framework thrives when you prioritize critical app sections, allowing efficient resource allocation and addressing key user experience issues.

Step 3: Share data-backed insights with your stakeholders

To create optimized experiences, avoid relying solely on intuition. Instead, continually track and share data-driven insights with all stakeholders involved in the optimization process.

For example, suppose you are studying the heatmap for an e-commerce home screen and notice a lot of clicks on one of the image banners. But, since the banner is non-interactive, it results in dead clicks and creates frustration among users. 

Use a tool like Insights for Mobile Apps to share findings. Backed by data, these observations facilitate discussions with stakeholders to find efficient solutions and enhance user experience.

This approach ensures everyone is informed about user interactions, streamlining decision-making for future changes.

Step 4: Turn insights into hypotheses for your tests

After identifying critical issues, gathering data, and sharing insights, it’s time to optimize your app. However, implementing changes directly from observations might involve risk and create new problems.

To avoid this, convert your insights into hypotheses and conduct A/B tests. A/B testing involves showing different app screen versions to user groups and analyzing data to determine which performs better in terms of app UX and engagement.

Follow these key A/B testing best practices for optimal results.

1. Define your hypothesis and identify a goal

Before you start with mobile app A/B testing, it is important to have a well-defined hypothesis. 

For example, while analyzing the heatmap of your home screen, you notice that the CTA button is not getting enough clicks. You also observe that the button is placed a little lower on the screen which is why users are probably unaware of it.

Based on this, you create a hypothesis that bringing the CTA button to the top of the home screen will result in more clicks. Using this hypothesis, you create a variant of the screen where the button is placed higher on the screen. The metric you are tracking for this A/B test here is now clear: The number of clicks on the CTA. Your goal is to increase the same.

2. Test small before you go big

Making any kind of change to your app is bound to impact performance and UX. 

However, if you start your optimization journey by testing big changes like a complete app redesign, you face a higher risk of impact on revenue and sales.

To avoid this challenge, you should start testing small, incremental changes and focus on building a culture of experimentation within your organization. 

With this approach, you not only prevent any large-scale impact on the app or business, but you also gain the trust of other stakeholders by sharing consistent results and insights. 

So, when you do come around to run complex tests, it would be easier to get approval and support from the rest of the organization.   

3. Choose the right A/B testing tool for your mobile app

Once you are prepared to begin your optimization journey, you will need an A/B testing tool to get started. 

While there are a lot of mobile app A/B testing tools available today, you should choose one that matches your requirements and business goals. 

You must also ensure that the A/B testing tool has minimal impact on your app’s performance.

VWO empowers you to launch your experiments effortlessly and allows you to test a wide range of features such as in-app messaging, app layout, UI copy, and much more.

Step 5: Monitor behavior after the UX is modified

Once you start running experiments and implement certain changes to the app, it will gradually have some kind of impact on the overall UX and user engagement.

This is where you double down on your efforts and closely analyze how users are interacting with all the changes and tweaks.

Again, you can use the mobile heatmaps or session recordings feature with Insights for Mobile Apps to study user behavior after the changes have been implemented. 

Track the impact of your optimization efforts and look for ideas or opportunities to further improve app UX. 

By combining your testing efforts with advanced behavior analysis, you create an optimization cycle that will not only improve in-app user engagement but will also drive business growth in the long run.   

Register now for a product tour of VWO Insights for Mobile Apps and enjoy free 90-day access to discover real-time insights and drive app conversions. 

At least not in the current times.

Customer engagement, in its truest sense, is more about anticipating the needs of your customers and encouraging two-way interactions throughout their journey with you.

This is what people expect, especially in the B2B world. Today, companies are not looking for one-time transactions but are more interested in building long-lasting relationships that are not just healthy but also mutually beneficial.   

Why is customer engagement important to B2B companies?

Over the years, we’ve witnessed a tremendous shift in the way companies, especially the B2B ones, communicate with their audience. 

But, despite all the changes and trends, customer engagement remains a crucial factor that can make or break a company’s success. 

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at why customer engagement is important and why B2B companies need to focus on creating better customer engagement strategies.

Establish a stronger connection

Unlike most B2C transactions, where customer relationships are relatively short-lived, B2B relationships tend to be long-term and multi-dimensional. 

Here, the idea of customer engagement is more about building strong, deeper connections with the customers.

Having a robust customer engagement process is key if you wish to build trust, loyalty, and a long-lasting relationship with the customer.

Boost customer retention

It’s more cost-effective to keep existing clients than to acquire new customers. 

Therefore, a B2B enterprise is always focused on customer retention. And one of the best ways to do this is through effective engagement and communication.

When you continue to engage and build meaningful interactions with customers, you make it easier for them to choose your brand over any competitor. 

Understand customer needs

Active customer engagement gives you a chance to gain deeper insights into your customers’ needs, pain points, and preferences. 

Having this kind of information gives you a better understanding of your customers, thus enabling you to tailor your products or services to meet their specific requirements. 

Moreover, implementing this approach also allows you to deliver value to your customers consistently. 

Increase cross-sell or upsell opportunities

While long-term relationships and brand loyalty are key benefits of effective customer engagement, some B2B brands often ignore another crucial benefit of this marketing strategy – cross-selling and upselling their products.  

When your customers feel engaged, they are more receptive to upselling and cross-selling efforts. This strengthens customer relationships and also improves overall customer retention. 

By cross-selling or upselling, you not only increase revenue but also get an opportunity to demonstrate the true value of your offerings. 

Maximize customer lifetime value (CLV)

A large majority of your customers are probably not looking for a single transaction. Instead, they want smart solutions that can help them and offer multiple benefits for a long time.

So, to ensure that their lifetime value to your organization increases steadily, you need to build engagement and interactions across multiple touchpoints. 

Additionally, these customer engagement strategies also mean that your customers will most likely refer new customers and provide genuine feedback for your overall improvement. 

Top 5 B2B customer engagement ideas

Now that we’ve understood the importance of B2B customer engagement, let’s have a look at some innovative strategies that can set your business apart from the competition and help you create lasting relationships with your clients. 

1. Personalized content and communication

Personalization is king in the B2B world. Tailoring your content and messaging to match the specific needs and preferences of your users is the best way to grab their attention and build stronger connections. 

2. Interactive webinars and workshops

One of the most widely practiced customer engagement strategies is webinars and workshops. These events are a great way for brands to build a community and establish their presence among their target audience. 

While webinars provide valuable insights, they also allow brands to interact with users and build strong customer relationships. 

3. Seamless omnichannel experiences

Your B2B customers don’t engage with your brand in isolation. They interact with you across various touchpoints—website, social media, email, and more. 

Therefore, you need to build a seamless customer engagement plan that covers multiple channels without compromising on customer experience. Content mapping is an excellent way to do this as it involves building experiences for different stages of the customer’s journey.

This helps you to create personalized experiences that are meaningful and relevant for the visitor at every touchpoint. 

4. Proactive customer support

The cornerstone of any B2B customer engagement strategy is having a robust customer support team. This does not just mean that you solve queries or problems, but it is more about offering constant support at every stage of the user’s journey. 

For example, with a behavior analytics tool like VWO Insights, you can track and analyze visitor behavior across multiple touchpoints. This gives you a deeper understanding of your users and helps you understand their preferences, pain points, and suggestions. 

Based on these insights and reports, you can then fine-tune your engagement strategy and focus on solving problems before your customers even point them out. 

5. Thought leadership and educational content

Using educational content is a great way to position your brand as a thought leader. This is a powerful engagement strategy as users are always on the lookout for solutions to their specific challenges. 

By creating a section on your website for educational and thought leadership content, you can attract potential customers and start providing value even before they turn into customers. 

Some examples of educational content are whitepapers, ebooks, case studies, and articles that give the user a deeper understanding of industry trends, best practices, and innovative solutions.

While there are many more B2B customer engagement ideas, these five ideas will help you prepare a roadmap according to your overall business goals. 

6. Use a customer engagement model

A customer engagement model provides a structured framework and strategy for consistently and effectively interacting with customers.

These engagement models are mainly designed with the customer in mind. They prioritize understanding customer needs, preferences, and pain points, which allows for more personalized and customer-focused interactions.

Moreover, engagement models help you to provide a seamless and positive customer experience, leading to high customer satisfaction.

As the needs of customers evolve, you must choose the right engagement model to adapt and remain relevant. This flexibility helps businesses stay responsive to evolving customer expectations.

B2B customer engagement best practices

Once you implement these B2B customer engagement ideas, you will notice a shift in how customers interact with your brand. However, to truly, take your customer engagement strategies to the next level, there are some effective best practices that you must follow. 

Understand your audience inside out

To engage effectively with your customers, you must first try and understand their preferences, challenges, pain points, behaviors, etc. 

Creating buyer personas for different segments of your visitors is crucial. These personas should outline the key attributes, challenges, and motivations of your target audience. 

This allows you to tailor your customer engagement strategies to match each persona’s specific needs, giving you a better chance of connecting with them and creating memorable experiences.  

Also, regularly collect customer feedback through surveys, forms, and data analysis. You can use these valuable insights to shape your products, services, and engagement strategies to better align with customer expectations.

Deliver value at every touchpoint

Every interaction that a customer has with your brand should provide value. Whether it’s a blog post, email, landing page, or webinar, your customers should walk away with valuable insights or solutions. Effective content marketing is a great way to do this, especially for B2B brands, as it gives you a chance to address your audience’s challenges and interests.

Moreover, it also helps you to establish your expertise and position your brand as a leader in the industry. Ebooks, webinars, detailed guides, and in-depth blogs can empower your customers to overcome unique challenges.

Establish trust and credibility

Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship, including the one you share with your customers. Building and maintaining this trust requires consistent and transparent communication.

No matter what customer engagement strategy you implement, ensure that you are building trust and maintaining transparency about your products and services. 

A great way to build trust among your customers is through testimonials and case studies. These real-life examples go a long way in building confidence and showing how you helped customers achieve their goals.

Implement a multichannel approach

As mentioned before, a multichannel approach is important for any customer success strategy. 

Instead of relying on a single channel, you can diversify your approach across email, social media, website, and even offline channels, without compromising on the messaging and experience.

Additionally, you should also focus on personalizing your content and messages according to the channel. Tools like VWO Personalize collect customer data from various sources to help you understand and deliver personalized experiences at each stage of the buyer’s journey. 

Choose the right customer engagement model

Having an effective customer engagement model is a great idea as it provides a strategic approach to engaging with customers. But, choosing the right customer engagement model is key to delivering consistent, personalized interactions.

There are several types of engagement models such as retention models, high-touch models, low-touch engagement models, etc. You can either pick one or choose a combination of different models based on your customers and business goals.

Foster customer loyalty

Customer retention is the backbone of any business. There’s nothing better than customers who provide repeat business and also refer you to others. 

Prioritizing customer loyalty is key to the long-term growth and success of any brand. You can do this by implementing different programs that focus on the ongoing value you provide, not just the initial sale. 

These programs ensure your customers are satisfied and help in building a loyal customer base. You should also work on creating a customer feedback loop to actively seek input from your customers and use it to enhance your services regularly.

B2B customer engagement examples

Let’s take a look at some interesting examples of B2B companies successfully implementing different customer engagement strategies.

Human Interest improves conversions on lead forms

Human Interest is a San Francisco-based company that aims to solve America’s retirement crisis. The company helps small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) offer affordable and high-quality 401(k) plans to their employees.

The company had a few landing pages where visitors were asked to fill out forms to contact the sales team. They wanted to increase the number of calls scheduled via the contact form. 

The team at Human Interest wanted to run server-side experiments to test changes to their landing pages. For this, they chose VWO since it is known for its server-side capabilities, native integrations, and low latency experience.

The original landing page (control) had a simple headline, a short description of the product, and a CTA button. The team created another version of the page (variation) where the description was replaced with a contact form. 

The test results showed that the variation had an expected conversion rate of 3.77%, a huge jump of 75.84% from the control’s conversion rate.

Thus, Human Interest was able to increase conversions by engaging with its customers at the right place and at the right time.

EZ Texting boosts sign-ups with a chat widget

EZ Texting is a B2B brand that helps businesses execute marketing campaigns, promote events, and provide customer service. 

The company wanted to introduce a new chat widget on their sign-up page. The idea was that the widget would offer instant support and guidance to users who were about to make a successful sign-up.

EZ Texting ran an A/B test with VWO to test the impact of the new chat widget. You can see the original page (control) below. 

The new version of the page (variation) had the same form and layout along with the new addition of a live chat widget.

After the conclusion of this test, EZ Texting saw a 31% increase in sign-ups. The chat widget was placed strategically on the page so that users could get instant solutions to their queries.

Hubstaff increased visitor-to-trial conversions with a homepage redesign

Hubstaff is a popular workforce management platform that provides time tracking and project management software for different companies. 

They wanted to redesign their homepage to showcase the company’s growth and drive attention towards their relevant features. The team spent a considerable amount of time creating and redesigning the new homepage.

Once the designs were ready, Hubstaff launched a Split URL test. One section of visitors was shown the original homepage (control), while the other section was shown the new version (variation).

After running the test for three months, the variation launched by Hubstaff witnessed a 49% increase in visitor-to-trial conversions along with a 34% increase in visitors sharing their emails. 

Hubstaff was able to effectively engage with their customers and even optimized their website experience with the help of experimentation.

Conclusion

As we saw in the B2B customer engagement examples above, brands need to focus on the preferences, challenges, and behaviors of their customers. By doing so, they can improve their strategies and build long-term relationships with their customers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

In a world where competition is intense and customers have it all figured out, it’s easy to focus on what’s trending and achieve short-term success through it.

But, if you look at the bigger picture, gaining trust and building a long-term relationship with your customers is what really matters. 

It’s the most basic aspect of any business, yet a lot of brands are struggling to achieve it. 

Why?

Because, they fail to focus on the three key pillars of long-term success: customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction. 

Without proper strategies for each of these pillars, you will find it tough to grow your business and build brand loyalty. So, let’s take a closer look at what these aspects entail and how you can ensure long-term growth and success by implementing them.

What is customer engagement? Why is it important?

Just like the name suggests, the concept of customer engagement is all about building a relationship with your customers. It refers to the interactions and experiences a customer has with a brand across various touchpoints. 

Customer engagement is a measure of how well your business can capture and maintain a customer’s interest, attention, and involvement over time. 

For example, let’s say you manage an e-commerce brand and want to improve customer engagement. 

One of the things that you can do is send a personalized email to the customer as soon as they purchase a product. Apart from thanking them for making a purchase, your email can also include helpful information about the product like how it can be used, tips for maintenance, instructions for claiming a warranty, and so on. 

Post the purchase, you can follow up with the customer regularly to share updates, exclusive offers, and customer feedback requests while also sharing relevant, helpful content on your social media pages. 

By doing so, you are creating a positive customer experience that involves personalized interactions, continuous support, and a sense of community, ensuring that your customer feels valued and supported. 

As a result, customers are more likely to stay loyal to your brand, share positive experiences with others, and they will also consider you for their future needs. Moreover, they will also be willing to provide valuable customer feedback and suggestions to improve the business.

In other words, an effective customer engagement strategy involves nurturing relationships, showing genuine care, and providing value beyond the initial sale. 

It’s a two-way street that benefits the customer and the business too.

What is customer experience? Why is it important?

Customer experience refers to the overall journey and interaction that a customer has with a brand, product, or service. It covers every touchpoint and interaction a customer has, right from awareness to post-purchase.

While customer engagement & customer experience are similar concepts, they focus on different aspects of the relationship between brands & customers. 

Let’s consider the previous example of managing an e-commerce brand. 

To increase customer engagement, you sent personalized emails, shared helpful content on social media, and ensured healthy interactions with the customer.

Now, to improve customer experience, you can start by building a user-friendly website experience. Every product on your website will include high-quality images, detailed descriptions, customer reviews, etc.

Additionally, you can ensure that the entire checkout process is simple and hassle-free. Post the purchase, you can also provide prompt customer support, timely order fulfillment, and an easy return/refund process. 

By doing so, you are building a holistic experience for the customer that includes improved website usability, high-quality customer support, a smooth checkout process, and post-purchase assistance as well.

In short, customer experience is all about how you make your customers feel across their entire journey with you. A positive customer experience will help you to build a strong, loyal customer base and can improve your brand reputation too.

What is customer satisfaction? Why is it important?

Customer satisfaction refers to the extent to which customers are happy and content with their interactions and experiences, with a product, service, or brand.

It reflects how well a company meets or exceeds customer expectations. 

High customer satisfaction indicates that customers are happy with their overall experience, while low customer satisfaction suggests areas of improvement.

Let’s understand customer satisfaction with the same e-commerce brand example. Your customers will feel happy and satisfied when the products they receive match the images and descriptions available on your website.

Another way to improve customer satisfaction is to ensure that the products are delivered on time and the quality of the products also match their expectations. 

You can build on this by offering prompt assistance and asking for customer feedback. By doing so, you can focus on meeting and exceeding the expectations of your customers, which is what customer satisfaction is all about. 

How are customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction related?

As we saw before, regular interactions with your customers along with strategies to improve experience, will eventually contribute to high levels of customer satisfaction.

These three pillars – customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction – complement each other while also helping you build customer loyalty and achieve long-term success.

While these three concepts are quite distinct, they are also interconnected and often influence one another. Let’s have a closer look at how each pillar is related to each other. 

Customer engagement vs. customer experience:

As we know, customer engagement is all about having healthy and personalized interactions at every touchpoint. By doing so, you build a connection with the customer which again contributes to building a positive customer experience.

When customers are actively engaged through personalized interactions, relevant content, and meaningful connections, their overall ‘experience’ with the brand becomes more positive and memorable.

Thus, engaged customers will more likely have a better experience because they are actively involved in their interactions with the brand. 

When you engage in these interactions across various touch points such as email recommendations, helpful content, and social media interactions, it enhances the customer experience, making it more dynamic and layered. 

Customer experience vs. customer satisfaction:

As we noticed in our previous examples of managing an e-commerce brand, creating a positive customer experience plays a huge role in improving customer satisfaction. 

When you provide a seamless experience throughout the customer journey with a brand, it eventually leads to higher satisfaction levels, as customers feel their needs and expectations have been met or exceeded.

This creates a positive perception of the brand in the minds of the customers, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction vs. customer engagement:

Customer satisfaction is known to be the foundation for customer engagement.

When customers feel satisfied with your brand, they are more likely to engage with you further, either through more purchases, referrals, or even participating in activities that you organize.

High customer satisfaction also means that customers are more likely to stick with your brand since their positive experiences have laid the groundwork for trust and loyalty.

So, when you successfully engage customers, provide memorable experiences, and ensure their satisfaction, you create a positive cycle that results in increased loyalty, repeat business, positive word-of-mouth, and sustainable long-term growth.

In other words, customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction are all connected elements that hold the key to the relationship you have with your customers.

Which is more important: customer engagement, customer experience, or customer satisfaction?

If your goal is to build a successful, customer-centric business while also achieving loyalty and long-term growth, you need all three – customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction.  

This is because these three pillars are interconnected. They can only deliver results when you implement them together to create a positive and lasting relationship with your customers. 

As we know, customer engagement is a crucial component for building a relationship and promoting brand loyalty. When customers feel engaged, they are more likely to interact with you, share their experiences, and provide valuable feedback.

Customer experience, on the other hand, is a ‘must-have’ at every touchpoint. It ensures that every aspect of the customer journey is designed to provide a positive experience.

Without this, you will find it challenging to engage customers effectively. 

Thus, customer experience is considered to be the foundation upon which both customer engagement and customer satisfaction are built. 

Customer satisfaction reflects how well your brand meets or exceeds customer expectations. High customer satisfaction leads to customer loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and repeat business. 

So, rather than trying to figure out what’s more important, you should develop a culture where these elements work together to provide customers with high levels of satisfaction, memorable experiences, and genuine engagement.

Examples of good customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction

Having a balanced approach toward each of these ideas is crucial for the long-term growth and success of any company. Let’s have a look at some real-life examples of brands that have successfully incorporated each of them.

Customer engagement example

UK Tool Centre, an e-commerce platform that offers a huge range of over 42,000 products, wanted to improve engagement on one of its product pages. 

The page offered a brand of woodcare products called Cuprinol and had a filter menu right at the top. It was theorized that this filter menu was distracting users from exploring the products. 

So, the company ran a test where they compared the original product page (control) with another version of the page (variation). 

In the original version of the page, the filter menu was placed just above the Cuprinol listing.

In the variation, the filter menu was completely removed from the page, making it easier for the users to explore all the products. 

Once the test was conducted, the variation saw a 27% increase in engagement on the product page. 

This was possible because the company identified the needs of its customers and removed distractions from the page. Users were now able to have a better look at the products, which again increased engagement on the page.  

Through this simple customer engagement strategy, UK Tool Centre was able to encourage healthy interactions with its audience. 

Customer experience example

Buyakilt.com, an online Kilt and Scottish Highland Dress retailer, had multiple category pages along with many more subcategory pages.

The company wanted to test whether a new product filter would make it easier for customers to find what they were looking for. 

With the help of VWO, they ran a test to confirm whether this change would improve customer experience, and in turn, increase conversions. 

The new variation included a product filter, which allowed users to shop by kilt type, kilt pattern, and so on.

After the test was completed, Buyakilt.com registered a whopping 76.1% increase in revenue. Moreover, they also saw a 26% increase in conversions along with a 19.76% increase in shopping cart visits. 

One of the main reasons for this success was that a simple feature offered an easier way to take action, thus improving the overall customer experience. 

Customer satisfaction example

Archive Social is a US-based brand that helps organizations fulfill their legal requirements and avoid lawsuits on social media. 

The company wanted to improve lead generation through its pricing page and also increase conversions from a banner form on its home page.

Working with the VWO team, Archive Social made some observations about areas that needed improvement. These areas were affecting conversions and were also preventing the company from satisfying customer expectations. 

To begin with, they noticed that the email form field was shown at the very button of their home page banner. This made it difficult for users to differentiate the field from the rest of the page.

They ran a test with a new variation where the email field had better placement and visibility. After running the campaign for 27 days, the variation saw a massive increase of 101.68% in terms of clicks on the email field. 

Next, Archive Social ran a test on their pricing page. Here, the variation included a completely revamped page where the primary CTA button was highlighted and the pricing options & features displayed were extremely simple.

After running the test for seven weeks, the variation saw a huge jump of 64.76% in conversions and visits to the ‘Thank you’ page.

In their final campaign, the company wanted to increase traffic to the gated content on their ‘Resources’ page. To do so, they created a new variation by adding the ‘Resources’ category to the top navigation bar.

They ran this campaign for 10 days and registered a 73.30% uplift in traffic for the new variation. Thus, Archive Social understood the needs of their audience and the results clearly show that they also satisfied customer expectations. 

The above examples prove that no matter the industry, you can always achieve long-term growth by focusing on three basic aspects of any successful business – customer engagement, customer experience, and customer satisfaction.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

Think about it. 

Ideally, when we are in the process of choosing a gift for someone, we consider various factors like the person’s age, what they like, things they love to do, their hobbies, and so on. 

Even if it’s a last-minute purchase, we try to ensure that our gift is something that the other person will find useful and hope that it will also benefit them for a long time.

Similarly, when a consumer lands on your website, it’s almost like they have opened a gift box. 

Inside this box, they are hoping to find something useful, valuable, and more importantly, something that can solve a specific problem of theirs. Moreover, every potential visitor who lands on your website is expecting you to deliver a gift that matches their requirements.

So, how do you ensure that your website offers the perfect gift to your consumers? 

The answer is… via personalization, implemented the right way.

CRO and Personalization

When we talk about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), we look at it as a way of increasing the number of visitors that perform the desired action. 

At first glance, this might seem like a fairly simple task, however, as we dive deeper into the world of conversion optimization, we realize that it is a tricky one but also has the potential to offer a whole lot of benefits in the long run. So, not only should you keep up your CRO efforts, but you should also focus on amplifying the same.

And personalization is something that helps you to upgrade your CRO strategies and boost your CRO performance. 

‘Presuasion’ and its impact on the conversion mindset

The best way to implement personalization is to use what you know about your customers and ‘presuade’ them to arrive at a ‘conversion mindset’. 

The idea here is to take your customers on a journey through your conversion funnel without them even realizing it. 

For example, IMB Bank noticed that a large number of visitors were dropping off the first page of their personal loan application form. With the help of VWO Insights, they realized that the instructions mentioned on the form were unclear and people were finding it difficult to navigate through the steps. 

In order to rectify this issue, IMB Bank introduced various elements to optimize the application page such as 

• Time taken to complete the steps
• Awards won by the bank
• Improved design
• Clear instructions for each step  

They tested these changes and a few other modifications on the loan application page and were able to increase their conversion rate by 36%. Here, IMB Bank ‘presuaded’ or helped users to be in a mindset where they were willing to take the required actions. 

Grab your free trial of VWO and discover hidden opportunities for customer engagement today.   

Having this type of ‘conversion mindset’ is what tilts users in favor of your ‘gift’ and prompts them to take the action you want them to take. 

With that being said, let’s have a look at the three common challenges that you must address in order to successfully ‘presuade’ your visitors to arrive at a conversion mindset.  

1. Understanding your first-time visitors

The problem: Having the same landing page for first-time visitors arriving from different campaigns.

Let’s say you are running multiple ad campaigns on Google Search. Whenever someone clicks on any of these campaigns, you take them to a specific landing page in the hope of converting them.

The problem here is that there is no continuity between the messaging of the ad campaigns and the content they see on the landing page. You see, all these campaigns have varying headlines that have been designed to target different audience personas. 

However, the traffic from all of these campaigns is sent to the same landing page. 

So, when someone finds a particular campaign interesting, they are most probably going to see a page where the communication is somewhat different from the ad that they just clicked on. 

Moreover, this issue is also carried forward to the various elements being displayed on the page such as the call-to-action button or the user reviews section. 

This is quite worrying as your visitors will experience a disconnect during their first interaction and might just drop off due to it. 

The solution: Optimize the post-click experience for your visitors.

How? By using data to your advantage. 

And, this is where personalization can come to your aid. You need to build your website in a way where you can modify a landing page to display content based on the research that you’ve done and the ad groups that you currently have.

In simpler terms, you need to have multiple versions of the main landing page. 

By doing so, you will ensure that each group of visitors is shown a unique, personalized landing page, based on the campaign that brought them there.

One of the ways through which you can easily implement this idea of personalization is by using UTMs. These are special codes that are added at the end of any URL to track the performance of a particular campaign or activity.

By using UTMs, you can identify the platform through which a particular visitor is coming from. Based on this information, a variation of your original landing page, with a different headline & more personalized content, can be shown to the visitor.

This means that all of the traffic that is coming from various platforms is sent to a single page, however, based on the UTMs being used, they all are shown different versions of your landing page. 

For example, in the image below, the text on the landing page is modified according to the search term entered by the user. This method is known as dynamic text insertion and is used by brands to build relevancy and trust with potential visitors. 

Once you are able to implement these ideas successfully, you can easily target various audience personas by just making minor changes to the headline or other elements on the landing page. 

So, when someone lands on your website for the very first time, they will enjoy a seamless, high-quality, personalized experience, without even sharing any kind of information beforehand. 

2. Personalize for the returning visitor

The problem: Important data about the returning visitor is lying scattered.

When people visit your sites, they leave behind important data points such as the device they were on, the browser they were using, whether they were first-time or returning visitors, and so on. 

These data points are like notes or messages that customers have left for you to study and understand. However, most brands fail to understand the importance of these messages and almost 73% of this customer data goes unused for analytics. 

Therefore, leveraging this data to your advantage is a must if you wish to take your personalization campaign to the next level and achieve business growth.  

The solution: Optimize the on-page experience for returning visitors.

How? Build ICPs and opt for location-based targeting.

Building various ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) or customer segments is a great way to personalize your website for all visitors. This is done by gathering information from various data points and then creating a customer segment or profile based on it.

With tools like VWO Personalize, you can gather all of this data to create specific customer segments and offer personalized experiences for each of them. 

As people explore your website, you can use this tool to trigger certain offers, messages, or pop-ups based on their profile. Also, you can track how people engage with these personalized elements and then improve their performance accordingly. 

Take a free trial of VWO today and create personalized experiences for each visitor. 

This will help you to build unique customer-focused journeys while also allowing you to target important audience segments at the right time. Gradually, you will be able to create a large number of personalized experiences for all types of visitors which, in turn, will help you to boost your conversion rate as well. 

Location-based targeting is another way to amp up your personalization campaigns. 

Instead of having a generic landing page, you can tweak the communication to personalize it for specific users according to their location. This simple method will help you to connect with your potential customers on a very personal level.

For example, when Hype Digital implemented location-based targeting for one of their clients, they were able to substantially increase the conversion rate for one of their landing pages. 

The change was simple – instead of a generic headline that said “Reach of millions of buyers”, they replaced it with “Reach millions of Australian buyers” – and the conversion rate grew from 4.5 % to an impressive 7.2%.

Image source: Hype Digital

This also brings into focus the importance of having a good conversion optimization strategy that acts as a solid base for these personalization campaigns that you are running.

So, even when there are small, incremental changes like the one mentioned above, you will see some amazing results just due to the number of visitors that you are converting.  

3. Cross-sell or upsell to existing customers

The problem: Unable to build customer loyalty after conversion.

By the time a visitor decides to become a customer, you have already created a tailor-made, personalized experience for this person based on their behavior, ad group, ICP, etc. 

However, your personalization campaign should not end here. Instead, you must ensure that the customer stays with your brand for as long as possible and, more importantly, has an amazing experience during this period.

The solution: Optimize the post-conversion experience by upselling or cross-selling to loyal customers.

How? Use the available data to recommend relevant products and services.

It is easier to upsell or cross-sell to loyal customers as they have already gone through the journey and are aware of the type of quality and experience that you have to offer. 

So, by using the data that is available in your system, you can easily target these customers again and slowly turn your existing pipeline into your secret upsell weapon. 

For example, with the help of a site search tool, you can get a clear idea of the exact terms that people are searching for on your website. By using this data, you can then promote or recommend relevant products for different customer segments.   

Also, you can use tools like VWO Data 360 to monitor how various customer profiles are engaging with your site along with the type of actions they are performing. 

Start your free trial of VWO now and get a 360-degree view of your customers on a single platform.   

Once you study this data and gain a better understanding of all your customer profiles, you will discover some new, exciting ways of targeting your customers and building brand loyalty.    

Take a deep dive into personalization

Miles Hoogwerf, Head of CRO at Hype Digital, recently hosted a VWO webinar where he spoke about the future of personalization and explained how brands can drive business performance by using the right tools for CRO. 

We’ve curated actionable insights from the webinar and combined them with VWO’s unique perspective to write this blog. You can watch the webinar to gain a more in-depth understanding of personalization.

Conclusion

When you successfully implement all of these personalization strategies, you will notice the leads that were earlier coming in through your campaigns have now automatically turned into higher-qualified leads. 

This is because you have personalized their experiences to a greater extent and have also smartly ‘presuaded’ them to arrive at this conversion mindset. 

Gradually, with the right tools & strategies, you will be able to increase their lifetime value and arrive at a position where these customers will then speak fondly of your business for a long time.

So, kickstart your personalization journey today and get ready to explore the unlimited opportunities for growth that come along the way.