Are you looking to improve the customer experience in your online store?
When you take time to understand your customers’ needs, you can improve their journey from first discovering your site to making a purchase. By optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey, you can increase conversion rates, improve customer satisfaction, and boost profits.
In this article, we will show you how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store, from beginning to end.
‘Customer journey’ refers to a customer’s entire experience when they visit your WooCommerce store, including all of their interactions with your brand.
Optimizing the customer journey involves understanding each stage and ensuring that the customer has a seamless and enjoyable experience throughout.
These are the five stages of the WooCommerce customer journey:
Awareness stage: Make it easier for potential customers to find your online store and learn more about your business.
Consideration stage: Make it easier for your customers to find and learn about the products they need.
Decision stage: Optimize your checkout to encourage your customers to make a purchase.
Service stage: Improve your after-sales communications, express your appreciation for the sale, and better support your customers.
Loyalty stage: Build long-term relationships with customers through excellent customer service, personalized recommendations, and loyalty rewards.
In short, you should simply look at your online store from your customer’s point of view and then make it awesome.
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store.
We will share actionable tips on how you can improve the customer journey at each stage. You can use the quick links below to jump to the different parts of our tutorial:
Here are some tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the awareness stage.
1. Understand How Your Customers Find You
The first thing you need is to see the journeys your users take before they make a purchase in your online store. This is where customer tracking can help.
The best way to set up WooCommerce customer tracking in Google Analytics is using MonsterInsights. It is the best analytics solution for WordPress and has a User Journey addon that can help you plan how to improve the user journey in your online store.
You can learn how to install the MonsterInsights plugin and addon in our guide on how to track user journeys in WooCommerce.
After that, you can see the path each customer took before buying your product. You get to view the pages they visited, where they clicked, and how much time they spent on a page.
This is really useful information to better understand your customers. You can see which product categories are performing the best and where customers are leaving your store during the purchase process.
Using the data, you can then fix these issues and optimize your site for more conversions. For example, you can use the tips in our guides on how to convert WooCommerce visitors into customers and how to make a high-converting sales funnel.
2. Make Your Store More Visible Online
It’s important to do search engine optimization (SEO) for your online store so that it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This will make it easier for potential customers to find you when searching for products and solutions that you offer.
Improving SEO involves writing SEO-friendly product titles and descriptions, using product categories and tags, adding alt text to product images, and much more.
We recommend using All in One SEO because it’s the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and is used by over 3 million websites. It will help you to optimize your entire store for SEO and get found by more customers.
You will find step-by-step instructions in our guide to WooCommerce SEO made easy.
Here are some tips for optimizing the customer journey in your WooCommerce store during the awareness stage.
3. Design an Eye-Catching Product Page
When a visitor clicks on a link to your website on Google or Facebook, you want to give a good first impression. You can do that by creating product pages and landing pages that are optimized for sales.
This is where SeedProd comes in. It is the best WordPress page builder on the market that allows you to easily create landing pages, sales pages, product pages, and even completely custom WordPress themes.
SeedProd comes with dozens of ready-made templates that are already optimized for higher conversions. Plus, it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that you can use to customize your landing pages.
SeedProd also includes a WooCommerce integration that allows you to add eCommerce elements to any page.
For example, you can display featured products that you want to upsell, product grids, add-to-cart buttons, and more.
You can see how easy it is to use SeedProd in our guide on how to customize WooCommerce product pages.
4. Make It Easier for Customers to Find Products
You can also customize your WooCommerce product search results to help your customers find what they are looking for quickly and easily.
By default, WordPress and WooCommerce have a limited search function. That’s a problem because if your customers can’t find what they are looking for, then they may not come back to your online store.
We recommend using the SearchWP plugin. It’s the best custom search plugin for WordPress and is used by over 30,000 websites.
We show you how to use this plugin to give your customers the best product search in our guide on how to customize the WooCommerce product search results page.
You may also want to learn how to enable search by product SKU in WooCommerce.
5. Keep Your Visitors Coming Back With Push Notifications
Push notifications are automated messages that show up in your customers’ browsers even after they have left your WooCommerce store.
You can use drip campaigns with multiple push notifications over time to promote products, build a relationship with your customers, increase sales, and get visitors to return to your store.
The easiest way to set up automated push notifications is with PushEngage. It’s the best web push notification software, and it is used to send over 15 billion push messages every month.
We take you through the whole setup process in our guide on how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress.
6. Show Off Your Positive Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are a powerful form of social proof that can make your business seem more trustworthy and encourage people to buy from your online store.
But collecting, managing, and formatting customer reviews takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why we recommend using a customer review plugin to add different types of reviews to WordPress.
Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro allows you to show reviews from Yelp, Facebook, Google, and TripAdvisor. That way, you don’t need to install any extra plugins.
For more details, see our guide on how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress.
Next, you will want to help customers get through your checkout and buy your products. Here are our tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the decision stage.
7. Improve Your Checkout
You can easily personalize the purchase experience in your WooCommerce store using FunnelKit, a WordPress sales funnel builder and optimization plugin.
For example, it comes with a One-click Upsells feature, which allows users to add products to their carts on their way to the checkout.
You can also add one-click order bumps to your checkout for increased conversions.
FunnelKit lets you customize the user journey with pre-checkout offers, custom checkout form layouts, beautiful templates, and more.
We have written a detailed guide on how to create a custom WooCommerce cart page that’s full of ideas for how to personalize your shopping cart for more conversions.
8. Show Custom Offers to Your Customers
On average, 60 to 80% of people who add items to their cart don’t actually buy the products. This means that if you have an online store, then you are losing out on a lot of sales.
Often when a customer has added a product to their shopping cart, they will need some reassurance that they are making the right decision. This often leads to cart abandonment.
That’s why we recommend using OptinMonster. It is the best WordPress lead-generation software and has an Onsite Retargeting feature that can help reduce cart abandonment.
It allows you to create beautiful popups, countdown timers, slide-in forms, and more to nudge users in the right direction.
For example, OptinMonster can tell when a customer is about to leave your website and display a popup offering free shipping or a discount before they do.
You can learn how to grab your customers’ attention with targeted messages at just the right time in our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup.
After customers have bought items from your WooCommerce store, you will want to give them great customer service to keep them coming back. Here are some tips for optimizing the service stage of the customer journey.
9. Follow Up With Your Customers
When running a WooCommerce store, your customers will receive different transactional emails. These emails help them get order confirmations, track their order statuses, get invoices, learn about how to return a product, and find more information about your online store.
By default, the design and layout of emails sent by WooCommerce are plain and generic. When you customize these emails, it helps to build trust with your customers, boost brand awareness, and get them to return to your store.
You can set up smart, automated follow-up emails and workflows using FunnelKit Automations, which is a popular WooCommerce plugin for marketing automation.
It includes a growing library of pre-built WooCommerce email templates that are proven to get results. And you can use the visual email automation builder to make any changes that you need.
What makes FunnelKit Automations really powerful is the custom goals-driven email automation builder. It shows you in-line analytics for each email.
For example, here is a screenshot of a workflow for sending out a thank you email after a customer’s first order.
For more details, you can see our guide on how to customize your WooCommerce emails.
10. Engage With Customers in Real Time
As your online store grows, it’s important to provide good customer service. This leads to repeat sales, which means more profits for your business in the long run.
One way to do that is to add live chat to your website. This will let you interact with the people who visit your website, answer their questions, and solve their problems in real time. This can get you more sales and encourage existing customers to stay loyal to your brand.
The easiest way to add a live chat feature to your website is by using LiveChat Inc. It is one of the best live chat solutions for WordPress, and we use it on our own OptinMonster site.
The LiveChat WordPress plugin is free, although you will need to buy a paid subscription to the LiveChat service.
Another option is to automate live chat by using Chatbot.com, the best AI chatbot software for WordPress. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills to use it.
For more details, you can see our guide on how to add live chat to your WooCommerce store.
Finally, it’s important to turn your users into long-term and happy customers. Here are a few ways to optimize the WooCommerce customer journey for the loyalty stage.
11. Reward Loyal Customers
Creating a loyalty program can keep customers coming back to your online store and keep them away from your competitors. It can also be a great way to reward your best customers and make them feel valued.
You can give customers points for buying products and services, but also for creating an account, placing their first order, signing up for your email newsletter, and spending over a certain account.
It’s super easy to create a WooCommerce loyalty program using the Loyalty Program for WooCommerce plugin. It allows you to set up a loyalty program in just minutes and reward customers for buying products, leaving customer reviews, and more.
You can also inspire loyalty to your brand by:
12. Automate Your Store and Focus on Your Customers
There’s a lot to keep track of when running an online store. Luckily, you can automate tasks to save time and money so you can focus on your customers while growing your business.
For example, you can use automation tools and plugins to send SMS messages to your customers, automate your payment processes, use social proof to increase conversions, automatically display your best product reviews, and much more.
You can see our complete list of tips by visiting our guide on the best WooCommerce automations to increase sales.
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to optimize the WooCommerce customer journey for your online store. You may also want to see our guide on how to add wholesale pricing to WooCommerce, or our expert picks for the best WooCommerce WordPress themes.
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