Importantly, avoid having multiple outcomes on a single page. It adds noise and confusion.
Take it a step further and recognize where visitors start their journey. Are most coming from social media? Organic search? Perhaps it’s from email campaigns, affiliate referrals, or even advertising.
This type of exercise helps evaluate your overall site, purpose, and thus its design.
Customer Stages
Consider where visitors first land on your website and focus on steering them to the next desired action.
Even a contact page can have a call-to-action beyond your company info. Social media and newsletter invitations are examples.
Ditto for a newsletter confirmation page. If she is willing to provide her email address, what else would a visitor say yes to after subscribing? Perhaps a product discount?
Focus on what you want a page to achieve — its call to action or next step. Some pages, such as products and categories, have similar outcomes.
Understanding customer journeys is a critical component of web design. It’s vital for ecommerce sites attempting to guide visitors to a sale.
But purchasing a product is not the end of the journey.
Page Outcomes
Recognizing where visitors start their journey is key for decisions on design and content. This Instagram ad from retailer Love Fitness Apparel links to that company’s ecommerce site.
At a minimum, confirmation pages are excellent opportunities to invite those visitors to follow you on social media, join your loyalty program, or submit a rating and review.
Knowing where your website sits in the journey (and mindset) of target consumers will help decide its design and content. Approach every page as a mini-journey — a chapter in a book — guiding visitors to the ultimate outcome.
A customer journey can be straightforward or complex. Remember that every page counts, and every page should have a goal.
Regardless, what are the landing pages for each of those sources?
Even post-purchase pages should lead visitors to the next yes. Merchants frequently overlook confirmation pages resulting in dead-ends for visitors.
In this post, I’ll address how customer journeys and desired outcomes impact the design of an ecommerce site.
List the Goals
List the goals of your website beyond making a sale, such as:
- Increase subscribers to email or SMS communications,
- Boost social media followers,
- Prompt live chats,
- Gather testimonials or reviews,
- Refer a friend,
- Ask a question,
- Request info.
Next, list all your public pages and define a goal for each. Make sure the outcome aligns with where visitors are in their journey. For example, asking a first-time visitor to leave a review makes little sense. Similarly, a visitor from an email newsletter doesn’t need an invite to subscribe.
