How To Track The Customer Journey: A Complete Guide to Increase Customer Retention

Are you seeking ways to improve customer engagement and ensure long-term customer loyalty? The key lies in understanding your customer’s behavior, preferences, and pain points.

Our comprehensive guide will show you how to track the customer journey effectively, enabling you to optimize your offerings, services, and overall customer experience.

You will discover the benefits of keeping tabs on the customer journey, learn about various tools and techniques for gathering and analyzing customer data, and gain insight into optimizing each stage of this journey.

Moreover, we’ll explore the power of UTM parameters’ power to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and improve your marketing efforts across multiple channels. So join us as we delve into these secrets and unlock the key to enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What does Customer Journey Tracking mean?

Before knowing how to track the customer journey, you need to know what customer journey tracking is.

Customer Journey Tracking is used better to understand a business’s customer interactions. This involves monitoring the different stages of the customer journey using a visual tool called a journey map.

The map outlines customers’ needs, concerns, and overall engagement with a particular brand.

There are four different stages in a customer’s journey. When you track each step, you gain valuable insights into your customer’s behavior and needs. The information gathered can then help you optimize the customer experience and increase retention rates.

By collecting and analyzing data at each stage of the journey, you can make educated decisions. But what are these different stages?

Different Stages in a Customer’s Journey

Stages of a branding project Customers who interact with your business go through different stages of the journey. Understanding these stages is vital to improving customer experience and driving long-term growth. Let’s take a closer look at the four customer journey stages:

Awareness

This stage involves creating brand awareness and introducing your business to potential customers. It’s essential to make a worthy first impression and catch their attention.

At this stage, your marketing efforts should focus on building brand recognition and making your business visible to your target audience.

Consideration

Customers start to consider your business a potential solution to their needs. They evaluate your product or service and compare it against other options available in the market.

This is where you want to inform customers about your products/ services and help them make an informed decision.

Decision

The customer has decided to make a purchase or take a specific action. Now you want to make the experience as smooth as possible, ensuring customers have a positive one.

You want to ensure that the entire process is simple and easy and that any questions or concerns are promptly addressed.

Loyalty

After the purchase, staying in touch with your customers is crucial to ensure that they remain loyal to your business. In addition, you should ensure that they are satisfied with their purchase and encouraged to return in the future.

Providing excellent customer service, personalized communication, and incentives can help build customer loyalty.

Benefits of Tracking the Customer Journey

Understanding how customers interact with your brand can improve their overall experience. Here are the benefits of tracking the customer journey-

Customer Retention

Identifying pain points and making necessary changes to improve the customer experience increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Personalized Experience for Customers

Understanding the customer journey allows you to personalize the experience for each customer. By tailoring your services to meet their specific needs and preferences, you can ensure that customers will return for your product.

Quality Products and Services

Analyzing customer feedback and behavior can identify areas where your products or services need improvement. Then, the feedback can be used to make necessary changes and improvements to address customers’ needs better.

Marketing Campaigns

Tracking the customer journey lets you identify the most effective marketing campaigns for each touchpoint. Analyzing the data lets you optimize your marketing campaigns to improve their effectiveness and reach.

Increased ROI

When customers are satisfied and happy, it leads to increased sales and revenue for your business, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI).

How to Track the Customer Journey?

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to track the customer journey. By following these steps, you can better understand your customers’ needs, problems, and engagement with your brand and create the best possible experience for every customer.

Setting up the journey

To better understand how customers interact with your brand, it’s essential to identify and define the stages of their journey. These stages may differ depending on your industry and business but typically include Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention and Advocacy.

By doing so, you can create targeted strategies and experiences for each stage, guiding customers toward purchasing and fostering long-term loyalty.

Defining the customer journey stages also helps align your goals and metrics accordingly, allowing you to track progress and success. With this understanding, you can develop strategies that address specific customer needs and enhance their journey.

The customer journey is unique to each business and industry. Therefore, it’s important to analyze your target audience, their behaviors, and their needs to define the stages in your customer journey accurately.

Find the touchpoints

To effectively set up the customer journey, it’s crucial to understand how they interact with your brand through different touchpoints.

Customer touchpoints refer to any interaction between customers and your brand, such as visiting your website, engaging with your social media posts, reading reviews about your products or services, or receiving recommendations from friends and family.

Every touchpoint offers an opportunity to make a positive impression and build a relationship with the customer. By tracking customer interactions across touchpoints, you can identify potential areas of customer loss and improve their experience.

You can also determine which marketing channels are most effective in driving engagement and conversions. UTM parameters can help you monitor the traffic and analyze which touchpoints drive the most traffic, where it comes from, and how engaged visitors are.

Gather Data from different sources

Collecting data after identifying customer touchpoints is crucial to track the customer journey effectively. Mapping out the touchpoints where customers interact with your business is the first step, followed by gathering insights into their behavior and preferences at each touchpoint.

Analyzing this data can help you understand the effectiveness of each touchpoint and make data-driven decisions to optimize the customer journey.

Several platforms can be used to collect and analyze this data, such as website analytics platforms, CRM systems, customer surveys, and UTM tracking.

These tools provide valuable information about customer interactions, demographics, browsing patterns, and purchasing behavior.

By combining data from different sources, you can gain a holistic view of the customer journey and identify key touchpoints that significantly impact the customer experience.

In the following sections of this article, we will dive into these tools’ details, discussing how they can be utilized to track and analyze the customer journey.

Map Your Customer Journeys

By analyzing the data you collect, you can pinpoint the touchpoints where customers interact with your website, products, or business across various channels.

This information can help you identify the different stages in the customer journey for your business, allowing you to create a comprehensive customer journey map.

Customer journey mapping (CJM) is a strategy businesses use to visualize customers’ different stages when interacting with their brand. At its core, CJM is about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and understanding their perspective.

You can use customer journey mapping tools like Canvanizer and Smaply to map customer journeys.

But where do you begin?

  1. The first step to creating an effective customer journey map is determining what aspects you want to measure and setting clear goals to guide your process.
  2. Once you have established your goals, developing a customer persona is next. This means understanding your target buyer and their general needs and desires.
  3. From there, you can define your customers’ different phases, from identifying their problem to making a purchase and any post-purchase stages. This will help you get a clear picture of the entire customer journey.
  4. Next, it’s essential to identify the touchpoints where your customers interact with your brand within each phase. This could include visiting your website, speaking with customer service, or receiving marketing emails.
  5. As you map out each touchpoint, capture the thoughts, actions, and emotions of your customer’s experience by pulling data from all relevant sources. This will help you gain a deeper understanding of their overall experience.
  6. Take note of opportunities for improvement based on your goals and the insights gained from your customer journey map.

Remember, there is no one right way to design your map. However, with these steps, you can enhance the overall customer journey and identify areas for improvement.

Monitor and Optimize

After collecting data and mapping out your customers’ journeys, you must continuously monitor and optimize their experience. This involves regularly tracking and analyzing customer interactions and feedback to gain valuable insights at each touchpoint.

By monitoring interactions, you can identify pain points where customers may face difficulties or frustrations, which could be through website analytics, customer support tickets, or feedback surveys.

Addressing these pain points can involve streamlining the checkout process, improving website navigation, or enhancing the customer support experience.

To enhance the customer experience even more, you can utilize Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These quantifiable metrics assist in measuring the effectiveness of your customer journey endeavors.

Common KPIs include customer satisfaction scores, retention rates, conversion rates, average order value, and customer lifetime value.

By setting specific KPIs and consistently monitoring them, you can pinpoint areas that require improvement and use data-driven insights to enhance the customer experience.

Remember, the customer journey is not static; customer expectations evolve. Therefore, ongoing monitoring and optimization are essential to ensure your customer journey remains relevant and aligned with your customer’s needs and expectations.

How different tools help track the customer journey

But how to track the customer journey using these tools? We’ll explain how different tools can help you gather and analyze customer data to track customer journeys.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

CRM tools like Zoho and Hubspot help track customer interactions and store customer data.

You can better comprehend the customer journey leading up to a purchase through that data analysis.

This process allows you to pinpoint interaction points with your brand, such as newsletter signups, demo requests, and inquiries, and monitor their progress throughout the sales funnel.

Heatmapping Tools

Heatmapping tools like Hotjar provide insights into how customers interact with your website. For example, you can use heatmaps to track where customers click, how far they scroll, and where they drop off. These insights can help you identify areas of improvement in the customer journey.

Email marketing software

Email marketing software like Mailchimp helps track customer interactions with email campaigns. You can use them to see which emails were opened, click rates, and which emails bounced.

The reports can help you personalize email campaigns and improve the customer journey.

Analytics tools

Analytics tools like Google Analytics provide insights into customer behavior on your website. You can use these platforms to track website traffic, identify customer demographics, and monitor customer engagement.

The reports then generated can help you understand and optimize the customer journey.

TerminusApp

TerminusApp is an all-in-one UTM builder and link management platform that helps create and track UTM parameters. UTM parameters are tags added to a URL that help track the source, medium, and campaign of website traffic.

With TerminusApp, you can create custom UTM parameters that can be added to links in email campaigns, social media posts, paid ads, and other marketing channels.

When a customer clicks on a link with UTM parameters, you can track which sources drive the most traffic, which campaigns perform best, and which channels deliver the most leads or sales.

You can also generate reports that provide insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns and channels, helping you to optimize and improve the customer journey.

How to track the Customer Journey using TerminusApp

Using TerminusApp to track UTM parameters and manage your links, you can gain valuable insights into the customer journey and optimize your campaigns for better results.

UTM builder

With TerminusApp’s UTM builder, you can easily create custom UTM parameters for your campaigns. This lets you track each customer interaction’s source, medium, and campaign name, giving you a clear picture of the customer journey.

Easy UTM tagging and link tracking

TerminusApp makes adding UTM tags to your links easy, ensuring that all customer interactions are tracked. You can then use the link tracking feature to see which links get the most clicked and analyze customer behavior.

Link management

With TerminusApp, you can manage all your links in one place, making tracking and analyzing customer interactions across multiple campaigns easy.

Multi-tag URL builder

TerminusApp’s multi-tag URL builder allows you to create custom URLs with multiple tags, making tracking customer interactions across different campaigns and channels easier.

Easy UTM tracking of Email Campaigns

With TerminusApp, you can create custom UTM parameters for your email campaigns, which allows you to track the effectiveness of each email and its impact on the customer journey.

This enables you to identify the touchpoints your customers may be dropping off and take corrective action to improve their experience.

TerminusApp Pricing

Professional

Business

Enterprise

Custom

$79/ month or

$66/ month (billed annually)

3 Users

5 Projects

2 Custom Domains

UTM Rules

Presets

Labels

Notes

Custom Parameters

Multi-tag UTM Builder

Auto-shortening

Click-reports

Fine-grained user permissions

Auditing tools

Chrome Extension

Custom domain SSL

URL Monitoring

Redirect codes/ Link retargeting

Bulk operations

$199/ month or

$166/ month (billed annually)

5 Users

10 Projects

3 Custom Domains

Everything in Professional, plus:

Bulk URL Cloning

QR Codes

Conventions

Grid Mode URL Builder

Email Builder

Auto-generated Tracking IDs

Adobe/GA Classifications

API Access

$499/ month or

$466/ month (billed annually)

15 Users

30 Projects

5 Custom Domains

Everything in Business, plus:

Single Sign-on

Invoice Billing

Signed Agreement

Get in touch

Users, Projects, Custom Domains- Custom

Everything in Enterprise.

What’s more? You get two months free if you choose to pay annually. Contact us if you have customized requirements.

Conclusion

You now have a complete guide on how to track the customer journey. By understanding various touchpoints and pain points of your customers, you can optimize your customer journey to provide a personalized experience for your customers.

What is the best way to achieve this? TerminusApp!

It makes monitoring all your campaigns and website touchpoints easy, providing a consistent, reliable way to track customer interactions.

With features like UTM builder and link tracking, you can accurately attribute customer interactions to specific campaigns and touchpoints, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions.

So why wait? Start tracking your customer journey today and see the difference it can make in your business’s success. Watch a demo video to learn more!