Using Mobile Ethnography to Understand The Online Customer Shopping Journey
Category : Mobile Ethnography
With the growth of online and social media shopping combined with the current challenging climate facing all traditional brick and mortar stores, designing competitive customer experiences is becoming increasingly more important. Understanding the customer journey and optimizing it is of significant value to major brands, online, brick and mortar retailers, and direct to consumer brands alike.
With social distancing measures in place, many of us are now spending evenings and weekends browsing online stores for essential purchases and gifts for friends and family. Increased time on social media exposes us to more advertising and promotions and in result encourages more brand touchpoints.
Understanding this journey and the ecosystem of apps and tools shoppers use can be a huge benefit for retailers in informing their media strategy to maximize revenues and ensuring business continuity.
In this post, we’ll explain how you can leverage the power of remote Mobile Ethnography to understand your customers’ online shopping journey and better optimize their experience.
The Rise of Online Retail
The continuous rise of online shopping over the past decade combined with a dramatic shift to digital fueled by Covid-19 has opened a world of opportunity for retailers. With everything now available at the touch of a button, on-demand delivery means consumers can now have what they want in a few days at most. But as with any opportunity, there are also significant challenges in understanding how to effectively take advantage of this new, always-on mobile economy.
From the initial Google search to the delivery or collection, consumers will have made endless, unseen choices and decisions along their journey. In failing to understand these decisions, retailers are missing the opportunity to maximize their revenues. The omnichannel shopping journey can span weeks and even months.
At Indeemo, we see this as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. We’re passionate about using technology to get you closer to the real-life context of your shoppers. Mobile Ethnography gives you a periscope into both the digital and real-world shopper experience and brings to life how both channels intertwine and complement each other. The agility of Digital Ethnography will allow you to witness every decision and touchpoint (be it online or offline) of the consumer. Truly understanding your customers’ shopping habits and rituals will allow you to plan for this challenging climate and years ahead.
How Indeemo Can Help?
With Indeemos’s ‘always-on’ capability, and with our mobile screen-recording functionality, we can help you understand every milestone and touchpoint the omnichannel shopper journey.
From the initial Google search to the countless site and price comparison visits to the buying UX, and ultimately the purchase, Digital Ethnography coupled with Screen Recording lets you experience the full journey from beginning to end with the addition of having the consumer tell you exactly:
What are they doing?
How are they feeling?
What they are experiencing every step of the way?
Quantitative data is powerful at telling researchers about the number of abandoned carts, the number of products saved in wish lists and detailed web traffic, but without an understanding of the human behavior behind these numbers, it is impossible to understand the ‘why’ required to help you optimize the online experience to full advantage.
Digital Ethnography is a powerful methodology to show you the ‘why’.
For those retailers who will allocate large chunks of their marketing budget to ad- spend, much of their efforts will be a case of “hit and hope”. Whilst A/B tests can help to improve performance, a more contextual, in-the-moment understanding of consumers' behavior can completely transform the brand-customer communication leading to more sales.
Indeemo’s ability to embed concepts (both video and image) within tasks provides the perfect opportunity to gain instant, authentic feedback. Our mobile screen-recording and desktop recording serve as a truly authentic way of understanding the effectiveness of Google, Facebook, or Instagram ads as consumers navigate through search results and social media feeds. Similarly, customer journey mapping also allows us to understand every step they take and how these steps affect their decision - accurately pinpointing the onboarding and drop off points.
Tasking Strategies for Online Shopping Research
Everything we do at Indeemo is task-based - using a combination of ongoing diary tasks and pop up projects that focus on your specific product/brand-related tasks.
Tasking is a powerful way of gaining insight into your target-consumers shopping rituals and behaviors. Using Mobile Ethnography, you have the capability of walking in the shoes of your online shoppers and understanding:
What motivates them?
Who are they shopping for?
How do they choose the products?
Where are they shopping?
What lists are they using?
How do they budget?
How do they search for the best online deals?
What are their feelings/thoughts around shipping times/tracking order statuses?
What factors influence purchasing decisions? E.g, TV adverts, social media influencers, online review sites, word-of-mouth, etc.
When do they purchase?
What their experience is like at every milestone/touchpoint in the shopping journey?
Their post-shopping evaluation of their experiences and journey?
Conclusion
Digital Ethnography is the agile, in-the-moment qualitative research methodology that will give you a periscope into the shopper journeys. Seeing every intimate decision through the eyes of the consumer will provide the type of authentic insights that allow you to truly understand customers. Understanding the feelings, experiences, motivations, behaviors, and attitudes of the consumers through their online journey can help you alleviate the brand experience and improve customer journey leading to greater revenues and consistent business growth.
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.
Tag: Mobile Ethnography