Understanding Why Your Conversion Rate Has Changed with Customer Journey Maps

Understanding your conversion rate is crucial to assessing the effectiveness of marketing strategies and overall customer experience. Monitoring and optimising conversion rates can help you enhance your venue’s performance and achieve your objectives.

How can a customer journey map help?

Customer journey maps outline every touchpoint a couple has with your venue, from before the initial enquiry to post-wedding follow-up. They serve as a blueprint and help you and your team comprehensively understand the customer experience so that you can anticipate needs, identify pain points, and enhance interactions.

Breaking your conversion rate down across the different touchpoints or phases of the customer journey allows you to better understand your venue’s performance and the health of your client’s experience.

Know your conversion rates

Knowing your overall conversion rate is key, but I want to go further by breaking it down into conversion rates for each phase of your customer journey. These figures can provide valuable insight, signpost potential areas for improvement, and help you ensure every touchpoint resonates with your target audience.

The overall conversion rate is the total number of conversions within the given time frame, divided by the total number of bookings taken, multiplied by 100. This is a fantastic high-level view of venue sales year on year.

As mentioned above, I also recommend tracking the conversion rate from enquiry to viewing and then viewing to booking to provide a broader range of data points for comparison.

To get your enquiry-to-viewing figures, divide the number of enquiries by the number of viewings attended, multiplied by 100. Viewing-to-booking is calculated in the same way, with the number of viewings completed divided by the number of bookings taken multiplied by 100.

Conversion rates and the customer journey

Customer journey maps act as a diagnostic tool, helping you to understand the shifts in customer behaviour and adapt accordingly. Below are several common challenges from various stages of the customer journey that can cause a lower conversion rate, followed by some action points to help get you back on track.

Shifting preferences and industry trends

Industry shifts in preferences, expectations and behaviours are natural and a fantastic opportunity to evolve. However, they can lead to lower conversion rates if touchpoints aren’t adapted.

Action points:

• Regularly update processes and workflows to align with changing expectations and invest time in team training to understand why the processes have changed and the importance of adapting.
• Review your offering against the wider industry. I recommend bringing in an outside perspective to help you gain a different view of the venue’s sales journey.

A mismatch between expectations and experience

If marketing materials build a picture of a certain experience or promise a certain feature and service that is not fulfilled during the customer journey, it can lead to disappointment and reduced conversion rates. The impact on conversion rates can be seen immediately, with couples dropping out of the sales funnel and booking another venue. In the future, as a result of word-of-mouth, this can also result in decreased or negative reviews and reduced supplier recommendations.

Action points:

• Gather and analyse customer feedback and complaints to identify areas for improvement.
• Plot the feedback on your customer journey map so that it is viewed constructively as an opportunity to break down obstacles or remove bottlenecks and add chances to provide your clients with moments of surprise and delight.
• Establish a feedback loop for continuous improvement.

Inconsistent messaging across channels

Leading on from the point above, if there is inconsistency in messaging or branding across various marketing channels (websites, third-party platforms, social media, etc), customers can become confused or lose trust. A lack of cohesion can result in lower conversion rates as customers may not feel confident in their decision-making process.

Action points:

• Review and refine marketing messaging across your channels. Ensure the messaging aligns with the real-life customer experience and meets their expectations.
• Enhance your online presence and communication channels by optimising your website to be as user-friendly as possible and ensuring it provides clear answers to common questions during that early phase of the customer journey.
• Ensure brand guidelines are current and distributed amongst those in charge of messaging.
• Look at your website bounce rates. High bounce rates can indicate that the content, messaging, or user experience is not resonating with visitors. This might suggest that your venue offering and the traffic source are not aligned.
• Implement regular audits to maintain consistency.

Longer sales cycles

Prolonged sales cycles can indicate misalignment and bottlenecks within the customer journey.

Action points:

• Overlay your internal processes with the customer journey and meet with the team for insight into their experience at this phase of the customer journey.
• Have a good understanding of the current climate outside of the industry at all times, including political, financial, and cultural shifts.
• Simplify and streamline your processes in response.

In conclusion, a proactive approach to understanding and responding to changes in conversion rates, supported by comprehensive customer journey mapping, is part of your commitment to delivering exceptional experiences. As you implement changes based on insights from the customer journey, remember that monitoring and continual improvement are ongoing processes.