Mapping your Shopper Journey with a remote path-to-purchase research tool
Understanding a customer’s shopping journey is essential to providing them with an omni-channel shopping experience that exceeds their needs and expectations.
Apart from the brick and mortar stores, with 4G and smartphones, it has become increasingly more difficult to understand all the touchpoints between a customer and a brand and mapping their path to purchase using traditional research approaches is next to impossible.
Remote mobile ethnography is an agile research method that allows researchers to understand shoppers on a more intimate level, allowing them to map their purchase journey through in-the-moment and in context observations.
Find out how you can improve your customer’s journey with remote path-to-purchase studies.
What is Path-to-Purchase research?
Path-to-Purchase (P2P) research gives researchers an insight into a consumer journey from initial triggers right up to the point-of-purchase and beyond, with the benefit of enabling researchers to see the various channels that consumers use as part of that journey.
This agile research approach also allows researchers to see and understand the experiences of consumers and shoppers in a real-life way, helping to shed light on the rational and irrational thoughts throughout the buyer journey. It ultimately provides a clear Customer Journey map of a shoppers entire, omni-channel Path-to-Purchase generating insights that can help improve the buyer journey for future customers and shoppers.
Key drivers for Path-to-Purchase research
1. Little current understanding of the Path-to-Purchase or shopperJourney
Understanding the journey of your customers (or potential customers) is essential to providing an experience that both meets and exceeds their needs. It is these experiences that keep consumers coming back and builds lasting relationships with your brand. If you haven’t ‘walked in their shoes’ or ‘viewed the world through the eyes of your customer’, you can’t truly say that you really understand their P2P.
2. Identify Pain Points and Drop-off Points in the Path-to-Purchase Journey
The unseen journey customers take before ultimately making a purchase is often a long and winding one. By gaining an insight into the pain-points and drop- off points in the journey, you can identify exactly what areas need your immediate attention and rectify unsatisfactory experiences. This can be an instant game-changer for any business, leading to the generation of immediate actionable insights.
3. Optimizing Sales Channels
The Path-to-Purchase is all about the channels and how customers experience them. Understanding your customer’s Path-to-Purchase allows you to offer them a quick, easy and suitable way to make a purchase. For example, a plumber who needs a fitting to mend a leaking sink will require a quick, physical in-store purchase at a hardware store, whilst someone buying an outfit for next year’s Christmas party will have more flexibility to browse online, check the size in-store and ultimately make an order on the stores’ online shop or mobile app.
Knowing the journey - and by default the customer - allows you to provide the sales channel they need at a particular time, and the experience to match.
4. Optimizing for Omnichannel purchase Journeys
The internet has enabled ecommerce companies to have access to a global audience, generating enormous opportunities for businesses all over the world. Unfortunately, it has also brought challenges with it.
Pre-internet, consumers often relied primarily on their immediate social circle when seeking advice on a specific product or service. After taking their advice on-board, they might have viewed a catalog and depending on the ticket price may have checked a few stores for prices, when making a purchase decision. Those days are largely gone for most demographics.
Increasingly, how people buy happens across multiple channels and platforms over various durations of time, often involving multiple actors (or websites in some instances). Mobile is also playing an increasingly influential role in many decisions be that an initial search or a message to a friend or confidant looking for a recommendation.
This meandering, multi-phased, iterative, multi-touchpoint journey is known as the “omnichannel purchase journey” and refers to the journey buyers go on before they finally buy. It is also referred to as the ‘omnichannel P2P’.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the physical retail store and the digital sales channels that is increasingly important for businesses to understand. For example, ‘click-and-collect’ satisfies the desire of consumers to have an abundance of products at their fingertips at home and to collect them from the store within space of mere hours. This convergence of digital and physical touchpoints creates a rapid customer journey with much to understand for researchers and businesses. To gain an insight into the convergent journey, you thus need to take your research mobile.
How has Path-to-Purchase research been done historically?
Path-to-Purchase research has historically been done by combining multiple traditional methodologies. This combination would typically have varied from project-to-project depending on the type of product or service in question. Unfortunately, this meant that studies would require some level of prior insight into their Path-to-Purchase before undertaking their research.
At this point, Path-to-Purchase studies would become somewhat of a guessing game. Store intercepts, interviews, focus groups, and observations could all play a role but utilizing each methodology at the right point in the journey was difficult. It also meant that planning a Path-to-Purchase study could take months or even years, with the result that the methodology mix wasn’t even correct by the time the project went live.
The emergence of online and omnichannel purchase journeys made this traditional way of doing Path-to-Purchase research obsolete. Without any insight into the online journey, data collected became fragmented and combination methods were no longer fit for purpose. The back and forth between multiple digital and physical channels simply created more questions than answers.
The benefits of a Path-to-Purchase research tool
Insights into the typical Path-to-Purchase for a product or service allows full optimization of every touchpoint in the journey.
By optimizing every channel in your customer journey you maximize conversion rates and limit drop-off rates.
In doing Path-to-Purchase studies the traditional way, the cost and resource implications were significant. With multiple touch-points across long periods, resourcing these studies was intensive. You would need multiple researchers, in multiple locations at any one time to gain an insight into the channels consumers used as part of their journey.
Solutions like Indeemo transformed this dynamic by enabling researchers to constantly monitor the Path-to-Purchase of any number of consumers at any one time. These studies have the benefit of being quick to activate, open-ended and require only one researcher to analyze multiple journeys in real-time from any remote location.
Another benefit of doing a remote, mobile ethnography Path-to-Purchase project is the elimination of actor/observer/researcher bias. With traditional methods, there was no escaping the need to have a researcher or observer undertake in- field. Our mobile apps removed this requirement and placed the power back in the hands of the consumer. By reversing this power-shift back to the research subject, it helps to ensure that respondents give honest, authentic insights into their journey and their experiences with the various channels within.
With Indeemo, you can easily tailor your specific requirements. Whether it’s a long or a short Path-to-Purchase - for example a Car Buying Journey vs. a Food Delivery Ordering/Delivery Journey, we can work with you to create a suitable task list for the specific needs of your Path-to- Purchase project.
What are the outputs of a Path-to-Purchase research study?
The primary outputs are In-depth, visually-rich, authentic and representative datasets and interactive purchase journey maps.
Indeemo’s Mobile Ethnography app lets you see what shoppers are doing in offline contexts using videos, photos or text. At-shelf, in-store videos show you exactly how shoppers behave at a physical point of purchase.
Using Indeemo you see countless videos of shoppers struggling to see your client’s brand in a shelf filled with other brands. Video, in particular, enables you to experience how buyers feel about their shopping experience and understand what influences their decision making and why.
Indeemo’s mobile screen recording capability enables you to record the interactions and voice of your buyer while they browse any website or app on their smartphone. We help you record the entire purchase journey including the shopper’s voice as they narrate their experience.
As shoppers journal their purchase journey, all of their offline and online posts are seamlessly organized into a single, shopper-centric timeline on our ‘Pinterest style’ insights dashboard for researchers and designers to observe, moderate and analyze as they see fit.
It’s even more powerful if you are covering several markets or multiple countries. You will be able to research buyers in any location without the need for expensive and time-consuming travel.
How does Indeemo help you do Path-to-Purchase research?
Everything shoppers do on Indeemo is task-based. In the Indeemo mobile application, respondents can post videos, photos, mobile screen- recordings, screenshots, and text notes in response to their tasks.
There is also an in-built ‘Experiential Journey Mapping’ capability, which allows respondents to rate their experience on a Likert scale, at every touchpoint throughout their journey.
The apps are available on both Android and iOS, and can also be used on tablets and iPads.
The agility of mobile means that your respondents can record the most all the moments that matter, be it at home, in the workplace or sitting on their sofa after a long day.
The apps are navigation is akin to other social media apps that people are already accustomed to. Internal research has shown that 98% of respondents use the apps without ever asking for support.
Indeemo Researcher Dashboard
As respondents map their Path-to- Purchase, you can see everything in real- time on the Indeemo Researcher Dashboard. Desktop notifications ensure that you never miss a post and stay connected, making sure you see every trigger, drop-off, and purchase.
Our mobile-optimized dashboard offers a simplified, paired-back version of the desktop version. This ensures that you never miss a moment and can easily stay on top of respondents’ activities. Moderating on the move and speedy responses help to maximize engagement.
In-The-Moment Probing and Moderation
As the respondents’ map their Path-to- Purchase journey on an ongoing basis, you can probe their entries using our reminder functionality, which sends push-notifications directly to the home screen of respondents mobiles. Should a respondent post something of interest, you can comment on their post to get a contextual insight while they are still ‘in- the-moment’ of making purchase decisions.
The dashboard also has several key features to help with your analysis.
Our desktop-based, researcher dashboard has a host of filters that will allow you to easily drill down on data and find exactly what your respondents experienced at each point in their journey. For example, you can filter by target group/segment, respondent and/or individual task. Each filter works in tandem with the other to allow you full flexibility in your analysis.
Other functions within the dashboard include:
Automated Video-Transcription
Experiential Journey Mapping
Tagging
Keyword Analysis
Task Completion Tracking
Summary
The Path-to-Purchase journey of any product or service is no longer a linear, single-channel journey. In an age where there are more channels to shop through and more choice and competition for businesses than ever before, understanding the journey of your customer is critical.
Indeemo’s mobile apps provide an agile and comprehensive way of mapping this omnichannel Path-to-Purchase. Our Android and iOS apps can pace you at the heart of consumers’ journey and show you each and every channel they engage with influences their purchasing decisions. By seeing their journey in real- time, you literally get to walk in their shoes and see their most intimate thoughts, motivations, and decisions.
The Indeemo Researcher Dashboard makes moderating and analyzing your data easier, quicker and more insightful than ever before. By visualizing consumers’ every touchpoint with various channels in the Path-to- Purchase, you can quickly collate your data to see what the customer journey is like. Having one comprehensive, familiar tool to complete your analysis will save your team time and money and remove the guessing from P2P studies. Nothing will tell you the real story of a Path-to- Purchase like seeing it mapped out with real-life videos, photos, screenshots, and screen-recordings attached to each touchpoint.
Learn more about the study with our Definitive Guide to Path to Purchase White Paper or get in touch with our team of experienced strategists ready to help you with your next project.
About Indeemo
Indeemo's mobile ethnography app and qualitative research platform helps researchers, designers, Insights teams, and brands capture authentic, in-context, in-the-moment behaviors and feelings that help them better understand what really matters to their customers. By merging mobile, video, and private social networking technologies, Indeemo's agile, mobile ethnography solution delivers rich, contextual insights at scale and in real-time.
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