How to Boost User Engagement Using Customer Journey Analytics

Engagement is a tricky thing. People use different products for specific personal reasons—and “66% of customers expect companies to understand those unique needs,“ according to a 2019 Salesforce study. That level of insight is possible only when you have a way to capture and use customer journey analytics.

The customer journey is one of the best ways to learn about these personal preferences at critical points of your relationship. Whether you’re engaging with new users, building loyalty with established customers, or trying to win back someone who’s unhappy, understanding their unique wants and needs is the first step. Without that context, you’ll never be able to build the kind of user experience that customers engage with long term.

Customer journey analytics also provide valuable insight into how people engage with your product as they move through awareness, purchase, and experience. Understanding this progression and how different touchpoints build on each other to increase product engagement is the key to creating a user experience that cements your customer relationships.

Identify Existing Pain Points in the Customer Journey

When you can easily track how different people move through their journey from discovery to purchase and experience to loyalty, that helps your team identify key points in the process where there is friction. Identifying these existing pain points makes it easier to remove barriers and boost engagement at crucial steps of the customer lifecycle.

At the end of the day, customer analytics is all about visibility. They help you get a better sense of where users need guidance—and where they don’t. Let’s say you have tracking set up to see how new users move through the onboarding process. After weeks of gathering data, you notice that there’s a significant drop-off in engagement three days into new-user onboarding, just about the point people start actively using your product. There are a number of potential reasons for that decrease, including

• a lack of education on how to use certain features,
• the user’s fear of making mistakes, and
• taking action may not be the user’s primary objective right now.

Customer journey analytics help you identify the root cause of the reduced engagement, which you can turn around and use to alleviate the problem.

Let’s say you dig into the data and find that users who’ve reached that point of the onboarding process aren’t comfortable enough with your tool to take action. That means you need to help them gain more proficiency faster, which has a few possible solutions:

• Increase the amount of educational material you provide during onboarding.
• Make in-app suggestions on what actions to take next.
• Delay introducing that feature till later in the process.

A subtle change to your user-onboarding campaigns will give new customers more time to gain proficiency with your tool and feel comfortable moving forward.

Customer journey analytics will also tell you whether the change you made was the right choice. After a few weeks of testing, you’ll be able to see whether the new campaign works. If it does, you can move on to the next pain point in the process. If not, you can reevaluate the onboarding process and try something else.

When you have a concrete understanding of each step new users take throughout their experience with your product, it helps you make decisions about important user experiences confidently. The more data you collect, the more knowledge you have available, and the more insight you’ll have into their issues. This confidence translates directly to your ability to make changes that boost user engagement.

Build More Robust User Personas

Tracking how different users engage with your product also helps you create more realistic user personas. You’ll be able to document how different types of people move through the customer journey and tailor the experience to their unique needs. A better overall experience helps boost engagement with your current customers as well as refine your target audience.

Let’s go back to our onboarding example from the previous section. When you reference the customer journey—from when they first discovered your product to when they made a purchase—you see that users coming through your newsletter campaigns don’t experience as much friction at day three as those who come in through a product landing page. You can use this knowledge to build marketing automation that provides the same information as your newsletters earlier in the onboarding experience.

By analyzing the different kinds of users that subscribe to your newsletter, you’ll also gain insight into their shared characteristics. Maybe they all come from the same industry or share other similar demographics—that insight to create a better profile of the types of people who perform best in onboarding.

Understanding these differences helps you create a target audience of people who are more likely to engage with your product or service on a deeper level. That means you can bring them in and help them gain proficiency with your product faster by offering a similar onboarding experience.

Refine the Metrics You Track

Customer journey analytics help you gain a better understanding of which metrics provide the most insight into the user experience. This knowledge enables you to create a better tracking and analysis process for your team and provides valuable insight into how various changes in the process impact your business.

With new users, you’ll want to track customer acquisition costs (CAC) to see how much it took to bring them on board. As customers spend more time with your product, you’ll transition to more retention-based metrics, like lifetime value (LTV) or churn rate.

When you track the right metrics, it gives your team a better sense of how their work contributes to high-level company goals. That keeps the connection between users’ wants and needs to business goals top of mind and helps you communicate successes and failures effectively. And it builds empathy throughout your team.

The more empathy your team has for users, the easier it is to provide solutions that solve those users’ problems. Whenever someone purchases your product, they’re doing so because it provides a solution. When you solve that problem in the best way possible, that builds stronger relationships and more of them.

Build Better Experiments

Accurate metrics are at the core of every great experiment. Customer journey analytics help you conceptualize the user and product experience and make it easier to create A/B tests and product experiments that have a real-world impact on your customers as well as your team.

Regular experimentation is at the core of the user experience. When you gather data throughout the customer journey, you gain more insight into where your team has the biggest opportunity for change. And that insight leads to more valuable and engaging experiments.

A strong focus on analytics also helps you build out more specific target audiences. When combined with realistic user personas and a clear sense of different users’ paths from discovery to purchase and experience, this data helps build out customer journey maps for all the critical touchpoints in your customer relationships.

That knowledge is a crucial aspect of how you refine the user experience for your entire customer base. So many customers have different wants, needs, and desired outcomes, so your ability to build specific experiences to fit those needs is the key to a more engaging relationship.

Let’s say you have two new customers: one who’s trying out your service as the first choice to solve their problem, and another who’s switching from one of your competitors. Your ability to refine your product or service based on their previous experience is what will keep those people around longer, boosting retention and building loyalty throughout the relationship.

Customer Journey Analytics Help You Build Engaging Products

Understanding how your core audience moves through the user experience is the key to creating products that solve their problems. Customer journey analytics are what help you solidify that understanding. When you’re able to track how different types of users move through their journey of discovery, usability, and loyalty, you’re setting your team up to create experiences that are not only valuable but also continually engaging.