How to Choose the Best Approach for Modeling Your Customers’ Path to Purchase

In today’s omni-channel environment, where there are so many ways a customer can learn about products, there are nearly as many journeys as there are customers.

When everybody is doing something different, how does a company build a comprehensive marketing strategy that reaches customers at critical points in their journeys? Do different paths to purchase each require unique marketing strategies? In an ideal world, the answer would be yes – so that the right message would more often reach the right person at the right moment.

But in the real world, marketers face constraints around resources, data and, especially, analytic methods that separate them from a nuanced understanding of their customers’ journeys.

The Resource-Constrained Method of Modeling the Customer Journey Path to Purchase

To work around these constraints, we need to build models and maps, both of which require simplification. The goal, though, is to avoid over-simplification, which masks key differences between customer groups.

In an ideal world, the model we build would integrate qualitative understanding of customers’ emotional states and motivations with a quantitative analysis of individual touchpoints and the resulting journeys. That blend of nuance and hard data allows marketers to capitalize on “moments of truth” to create opportunities for customer engagement and growth.

Resource-constrained teams may opt to utilize only internal stakeholders to build a customer journey map. Though that’s definitely better than nothing, there’s no substitute for actual customer feedback about the steps they take and the emotions they feel as they make informed purchases.

Qualitative Approaches to Customer Journey Mapping

Qualitative approaches generally transform a small set of interviews around purchase practices into a flowchart – a journey map – that summarizes the sequence of actions that compose the “typical” customer journey in the marketplace.

What journey maps do so well is illustrate an individual customer’s needs, the series of interactions that are necessary to fulfill those needs and the resulting emotional states a customer experiences throughout the process. Maps help tell a story with compelling visuals, highlighting information around the timing of actions. They reveal a narrative of how customers navigate a marketplace. These maps are useful to marketers who want to strategically place marketing materials along the paths traveled by customers.

However, a journey map that emerges from qualitative research is also somewhat misleading, as it’s often taken to be representative of a market, concealing the variety of journeys across a sample. It can also mask key differences between shoppers that marketers would find useful.

The “Snakes and Ladders” approach, for example, endeavors to have individual customers describe their experiences leading up to purchase. Rather than providing a standard questionnaire, this methodology uses interviews to create a neural engram, enabling the customer to relive their nuanced pre- and post-purchase experiences. This kind of research provides a great jumping-off point for follow-up quantitative studies, particularly touchpoint analysis.

Quantitative Approaches to Modeling the Customer Journey Path to Purchase

Quantitative approaches tend to probe a large sample of respondents to measure the prevalence of certain touchpoints. And while a simplified quantitative approach provides a market-level read on touchpoints, it may only probe into pieces of journeys, not into how those pieces come together to form different types of journeys.

Another quantitative approach – one that provides a better perspective on how journeys differ – borrows from the field of genetics. In a method called sequencing, we can segment groups of customers who differ on the composition, frequency and ordering of their journey points to gain insights on how customers engage in a marketplace to learn about a product. Sequencing groups of people who have similar patterns of behavior separates them from consumers with different patterns of behavior.

Once we have groups, we can size them to estimate market composition and assess the opportunity that comes along with winning over that group. Rich profiling of these groups helps prioritize resource deployment and tune communications. And, crucially, the visualization of each journey – the mapping of the temporal unfolding of a journey – can place your messaging along key points in their path to purchase, helping customers make better purchase decisions.

Combining Approaches to Get the Best Understanding of Your Customers’ Purchase Journeys

To be clear, any of these approaches on its own will bring you a better, more nuanced understanding of your customers’ purchase journey. But combining a strong qualitative approach with one rooted in advanced analytics provides the art and the science required to best meet your customers’ needs.

Customers can openly express their motivations and emotions when going through their purchase journey through qualitative approaches, and you’ll get insight into the diversity of journeys through quantitative techniques. This combination provides marketing and insights teams with the information necessary to effectively prioritize marketing resources and appropriately tune their messaging to strike just the right notes.

Our team of experts at Material can help you leverage both qualitative and quantitative approaches to deepen your understanding of your customers’ journeys.