Why your customer's journey on your website matters & how to influence it
Your ideal digital visitor journey should reflect the one the ground
Why your customer's journey on your website matters & how to influence it
Holy Trinity Cambridge church: a website case study
How we helped a church think about the flow of people from visitors to engaged participants; and why it is important that the online and offline experience integrate with one another
Your visitor journey is an invitation to understand you, be informed and ultimately engage
In a nutshell…
Holy Trinity Cambridge (popularly known as HT) is a large, vibrant city-centre church in Cambridge with a big student contingent.
HT was experiencing growing pains with its previous Wordpress site, struggling with content management and maintenance, so approached us (as Squarespace specialists) for some help after seeing some of our previous work with the Community Church Derby website (now redesigned and rebranded as Reach Derby).
We worked closely with Saisha Dee, Operations Manager (although sadly moved on now!) and Katie Turnbull, Media & Comms Coordinator (also no longer at HT) to relook at the website in terms of how it impacts visitors (front-end) and staff (back-end) and introduce a robust customer journey that helps the church meet its objectives - plus make for a pleasant user experience!
Judging by the lovely testimonial from Katie, it was a success, but we lay out why customer journey is important below and how to incorporate it on your website.
“Simon and Rachael have been so great to work with! Right from the start we were so impressed by their thorough and professional approach to our website redesign. It was refreshing to work with people who really cared about what we were broadcasting online, our brand integrity and how we wanted to come across; so much more than just a nice new design! The difference between our old and new website is vast - we have gone from something outdated, over complicated and non-intuitive, to a beautifully clean and simple website with all of the features we hoped for! Our final product is a much truer representation of who we are and is something we are excited to show to the world.”
Why does your customer website journey matter?
1. People engage through emotional and psychological clues
In terms of an engagement - whether it is buying an item, sending an enquiry or finding the desired piece of information - people go on a journey, hence the term customer journey.
Generally speaking, it is unusual for someone to recognise a need they might have and move immediately to make a firm decision.
This is why customer journey is so important on a website, because the average person is going through a process personally of recognising a need they might have and exploring how it can best be met by a particular supplier.
There is lots of research and analysis on this, represented by various funnels and pipelines, in which people generally go from their felt need to finally make a decision. At each stage there are things that can be done to help the process, or make it flop.
The principle at play here is that people engage best and most readily when they are aware, informed and motivated.
Also, in case you were wondering, that doesn’t all happen at once - underlining again the concept of a customer journey.
Aware, informed and motivated is a good rule of thumb.
Aware
If you are able to help your audience realise that it has a need, that is great, and you have a solid, existing connection. However, most websites come in at the point someone recognises a problem and wants to do something about it.
This is the point where your website can provide an initial basis for your audience to engage, introducing concepts, options and information
Informed
Too much information, too quickly turns people off, so once your website has provided an introduction, further, appropriate and relevant information will help inform your audience.
As you may have guessed, this then sets you up for the next stage - information is power, and when someone is empowered, they are better able to make a decision
Motivated
Overload, too many options and too much information leads to indecision and paralysis.
Having ensured that you have informed your audience you are now in a place to guide it to a decision point. Clear action points here help, or the option to think and come back.
2. A take it or leave it approach is offputting
A take it or leave it approach or hard sell on a website is like a cold call.
Done well, the odds are still against you, done badly, it is a waste of everyone’s time.
Did you get married after meeting someone for the first time? Did you buy a car five minutes after arriving at a showroom with no prior research? Did you put a finger on the map and buy the nearest house?
Instinctively, people resent cold calls because they tend to come at inconvenient times and they know there is a sell at the end of it.
They may not feel that they know enough to make an informed decision; they may just be looking or not necessarily have a desire to purchase or engage at that particular point.
Ultimately, It doesn’t allow them to engage on their own terms.
Equally, laying out every last detail on a webpage - all the options, all the factors, top to bottom - is just as off-putting, as there is no easing into things on the visitor’s terms.
A visitor has to ease into your world on an even footing and you have to make that process easy and pleasant through words, images, layout and clues.
3. People arrive from all over
People arrive from all sorts of area and channels, so needs to be able to plug in easily to what you are up to on your site and what you offer.
With lots of different social networks out there and the fact that friends and families are much more interconnected digitally, people can end up on a variety of pages of your site from different locations.
You can’t guarantee that every visitor arrives on your homepage in the same frame of mind, asking the same set of questions, looking for the same answers.
If you are an active blogger and have got a robust content marketing plan in place for your business, you may find that an historic blog article has risen up the Google search rank position and is attracting a significant segment of your audience to your site - but not to the homepage; instead to that blog post.
As such, your visitors need to be able to flow backwards and forwards through the key areas of your site, such as your services, testimonials, FAQs or key supporting articles that you have selected from your blog.
(N.B. This is something that you can do very neatly, powerfully and efficiently with the ‘Summary Block’ on Squarespace).
As people move around from these various pages, you should be taking the chance to educate them about your offerings; inform them about the features and how they add value; plus - and this one often gets missed - delight them about who you are and how you are distinctive as a brand.
The ultimate goal here is to handhold your visitors without them realising and without adding too many obvious handrails, that can make things clunky. Obviously, this is easier said than done, as you are talking about changing behaviour and influencing attitudes.
“Simon was really proactive in dedicating time to understanding us as a church in order to accurately reflect our personality in our new site. We felt very listened to along the way and no request was too much work for Simon and Rachael to investigate for us. Throughout the whole process we felt confident in Wildings Studio’s knowledge and expertise and have a final outcome we are really proud of.”
You can influence your visitor journey - it just needs a bit of thought and coordination
What you can do to create a strong customer journey
1. Start with strategy
This is one of those ‘it sounds obvious’, but perhaps that’s why it gets missed or not given proper consideration
If you want your site to play a strong role in guiding your visitors to where you want them, you have to know who your audience is, its motivations and what you want your flow to look like
This will be a key time in which you gather all your thoughts, materials and assets together, and if an area needs more work, this is the time to highlight it for attention
A bit of time shoring up an aspect of your brand at this point is well spent, rather than retrospectively patching things up
That said, this does happen and may be unavoidable or you may decide to prioritise a ‘minimum viable product’ approach in certain circumstances in order to gain fraction and get critical feedback
The strategy step will also allow you to consider key actions and objectives
2. Consider the visitor perspective
As you have probably gathered, if you approach this process solely from your perspective or needs, it will not work
On a fundamental level, a visitor is asking two key questions:
What will it be like?
Is it for me?
These were the questions that were ultimately at play with the HT audience, as people looking to find a church are in a way looking for a home for themselves or their family - belonging is a massive factor
This may seem a bit deep, but people are driven at a deep level - which may not always be noticeable - influenced by things like fear of rejection, fear of the unknown, finding connections
When it comes to more transactional activities, these emotions will be less pronounced, and so come down to trust, so that’s what you need to be building up
Just in case you were getting worried, this does not need to be an arduous step, it just requires spending a bit of time to get at the key things that matter to your audience
You may have come across exercises like customer personas; this will help you pause to consider the motivations and make-up of your audience without making blunders
3. Consider the staff perspective
Your customer journey is predominantly about your visitors, but it has internal impact, which is why we looked closely at how the HT staff team interacted with the website
Staff or web-managers will be the ones interacting with visitors as they engage with the website, so factors such as ease of updating; managing content; and dealing with enquiries come into play
When we conducted the initial audie with HT, we drew out that there were a number of challenges that were having a felt impact on the team:
A prevailing sense of passivity stemming from trouble interacting with the content management system (CMS)
A lack of control over the CMS to get it to do what the team wanted
A resulting feeling of self-inflicted pain from duplication of content, wasted staff time and losing control of the direction of the website
Your website has to work for your business internally, not just your external visitors, as you have to be able to deliver your promises effectively
Being intentional and working with insights is at the heart of optimising your visitor journey
What to do about it
1. Map out your customer journey visually
A sketch, post-it note collage or setting up boxes in Excel are all valid ways to approach this
By doing this you take the journey from being a concept or idea to becoming a reality, so you can do something about it
Often people assume they know what the journey is, but by putting it down on paper you are confronted whether reality matches up
2. Compare the journey with your objectives
Once you’ve got this process on paper you can look at how it interacts with your business
In other words, what do you need to do, provide, say or offer at each point of the customer journey
It may be:
Written content on the website, so you need to tighten up your copy
Calls to action, so sorting out your forms or the layout of pages
Staff processes regarding enquiries, so clarifying expectations and flows internally
Metrics and results, so setting realistic goals that you can measure to ensure time and effort expended is paying off
3. Review!
This is a dynamic process and we are talking about human interactions, so you need to leave room to review and reflect on the process
No one stays the same or stays still, so your business needs to be able to adapt according to what is working or not
This is why we offer exclusive follow up reviews and creative sessions with previous clients to help them be accountable and agile as things develop
“Our final product is a much truer representation of who we are and is something we are excited to show to the world. Simon has made the whole process easy and straightforward - from content gathering to final design he has kept us informed along the way and been a pleasure to work with. We would highly recommend!”
A good visitor journey results in smiles all round - including yours!
Surprises
Overall, we were happy with this project. In terms of surprises or things we have taken away:
Integrating the welcome strategy
Churches often have a similar welcome strategy on the ground, but what was fun about the project with HT was that we were able to work with the staff team to integrate their welcome strategy with the website.
We were able to replicate the desired welcome of people on the ground with their ‘digital welcome’ online.
In terms of brand integration, this was a really great result, as HT is now reinforcing the key things it wants to impress upon people, including vision, values and belonging.
The site is also playing its part in underling the visual identity of the church in terms of its branding.
And you?
If you’d like to find out more about our website work as a church leader or operations manager, click below…
