Mapping the Digital Path to Purchase using Diary Studies and Mobile Screen Recording
The path to purchase is becoming more fragmented and more complex than ever before. The days of shoppers being influenced by TV commercials from big-budget brands are over. Smartphones and social media have exploded the number of channels and touchpoints that today’s mobile-first shoppers are exposed to. With a well-considered, shopper-centric strategy, brands finally have the potential to convert triggers into transactions in a few simple taps.
From organic and sponsored content in social feeds, to calls to action within messaging apps, to shopping buttons and product tags, the mobile-first, digital path to purchase is completely transforming commerce.
A Covid-19 fuelled shift towards digital saw US Retail online revenues increase 68% YoY ( Source: Forbes ). Online conversion rates increased 8.8% in February, reflecting a level of shopping urgency typically seen during Cyber Mondays, according to QuantumMetric.
This data confirms that understanding and optimizing your digital path to purchase must be a core priority for retailers everywhere. This post quickly illustrates how researchers and brands can evolve their methodologies to support this digital transformation.
The Challenge
Understanding what influences consumers in an omnichannel shopping customer journey is difficult for brands.
With social distancing and the increasingly digitized nature of purchase journeys, it is becoming impossible to research this using traditional approaches. From influence and consideration, to the online shopping process, a customer-centric, mobile-first approach should be at the center of your research strategy.
To improve their marketing and e-commerce experience, retailers need real-life insights into the shoppers' social media activities and online purchasing habits. While tools like Mixpanel or Google Analytics will show you what pages shoppers visit (or abandon) on your e-commerce website, they won’t explain why?
Furthermore, they cannot tell you anything about the journey shoppers go on before they land on your website. To understand the entire purchase journey from trigger to a transaction, you need to adopt a longitudinal, omnichannel approach, and to do this, you need a diary study platform with mobile screen recording capabilities.
Follow the Purchase Journey with a Mobile Diary Study
Indeemo’s Mobile Diary Study platform is an online qualitative research tool that allows you, the researcher, to remotely walk in the shoes of your shoppers and experience their in-the-moment, in-context behaviors at every milestone and touchpoint of their purchase journey.
Its social media style app encourages users to record and diary everyday shopping behaviors in a rich and contextual manner.
With photos, screenshots, videos, and mobile screen recordings, shoppers can share their shopping moments wherever they are whenever they want. A longitudinal diary study with Indeemo will allow you to gather authentic, intimate, and context-rich data that can significantly augment your existing logs and analytics.
Capture Online Shopping Moments with Mobile Screen Recording
Mobile Screen Recording is an especially powerful tool that is pioneering research into online shopping and e-commerce.
Unlike traditional approaches that rely on recall and post rationalized feedback, this methodology offers a real-life insight into actual, in-the-moment online shopping behaviors.
Never before has there been a tool that allowed researchers to capture every milestone of a purchase journey in such context-rich detail.
The screen recording captures the entire shopper journey and, thanks to the voiceover capabilities, the respondent can narrate their in-the-moment thoughts, feelings, and decisions allowing you to experience their purchase in an authentic and insightful way.
Furthermore, as this is a completely remote capability, the behaviors that are captured are in no way influenced by the presence of a researcher looking over the shopper’s shoulder.
Experience A Purchase Journey In Real Time
With up to 10 minutes per screen recording, a Mobile Diary Study on Indeemo enables participants to capture every step of their online shopping journey. This gives you, the researcher, the ability to understand everything from their social media interactions, to their purchase considerations, to their user experience on your e-commerce site.
You can even extend the scope of your study to get shoppers to record their out of the box experience when the shipment arrives.
This shopper’s experience highlights the criticality of a great User Experience and just how quickly a shopper can abandon your site if the information provided is not clear.
This sample Screen Recording demonstrates just how powerful Indeemo’s Mobile Screen Recording capability is for researching the digital path to purchase.
By following the shoppers' journey through every step of their consideration process, it captures rich contextual insights, shows you exactly how they browse your e-commerce site and, when augmented with the shopper’s voiceover, you get to experience exactly what influences the shopper’s decision making process as they shop.
To learn more about how Indeemo can help you better understand your shopper’s, omnichannel journey, please get in touch.
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