How To Effectively Build, Manage And Measure Customer Journeys

Brick-and-mortar shopping has made an impressive comeback since the end of lockdown, but e-commerce is still retail’s dominant new force. This year alone, online shopping is predicted to bring in over $6.3 trillion in revenue, representing more than a fifth of all worldwide sales. Fast forward to 2026, and these figures will accelerate to over $8 trillion and 24%. So, as e-commerce booms, it’s no surprise to see more B2B businesses pivot to a lucrative direct-to-consumer (DTC) model.

Going direct

DTC was previously the preserve of resource-rich multinationals. But internet shopping has enabled businesses of all sizes to cut out ‘middlemen’ such as distributors and retailers and own the entire customer journey, from manufacturing, to marketing, to doorstep delivery. A good example of modern DTC success is Nike. The sportswear giant recently withdrew its products from major partners like Amazon and Urban Outfitters to focus on selling to customers directly, aiming to bring in 50% of the company’s total revenue through e-commerce sales.

If managed correctly, DTC can transform your customer relationships and company profitability. However, it also brings greater risk and responsibility. Without the support of established retailers, DTC businesses must be able to harness digital capabilities to offer an intuitive, effective online customer experience. They need to analyse data to feed into important strategies and inform relevant improvements, ready to measure their success and substantiate their digital investments.

Identifying touchpoints and pillars of transformation is key to turning a fragmented customer journey into a delightful end-to-end experience. So, let’s explore how B2B businesses can develop their digital CX into a competitive advantage, and ensure they remain ahead of the field in today’s rapidly evolving markets.

Kicking off the customer journey

A great journey begins before the customer has even reached your website. You must be easy to find, ideally on the first page of Google based on relevant keywords. If that’s not already the case, it’s important to consider search engine optimisation (SEO) to ensure that your business doesn’t get lost in the search rankings.

Once a customer has landed on your homepage, they must find it easy and pleasant to navigate. But like a great song or artwork, explaining why an experience is so good, and then trying to create our own, can be surprisingly difficult. This complexity is compounded by the ‘3-click and 7-second challenge’: amid intensified competition for eyeballs and shrinking attention spans, if we fail to pique visitors’ interest within 3 clicks or 7 seconds, then we’ve likely lost them for good.

Here, we must consider our audience. What touchpoints do they encounter? What content do they want to see? How can we personalise the experience, so it meets their expectations? And what IT capabilities are required to build this? By investigating customer needs and reviewing good examples of similar interfaces, we can begin to construct a successful online experience of our own.

Where B2C goes, B2B must follow

Research shows B2B businesses lag behind when it comes to digital customer experience index ratings, scoring fewer than 50% compared to B2C’s 65-85%. After all, traditional B2B commerce focused on slow-burning, in-person relationships with customers rather than speedy digital sales. But as B2B consumers follow their B2C counterparts and increasingly purchase products online, retailers now need to remodel their go-to-market strategies accordingly.

Fortunately, we can use our face-to-face, field-based experience to inform our digital offerings. For instance, what methods of delivery do customers usually prefer? What’s the most popular payment method? And what product information do they most often request before making a purchase decision? Armed with these insights, we can design our digital sales pages to meet our target market’s needs and supercharge sales conversions.

Post-sale however, is where we should stray from B2C norms and aim to preserve B2B’s classic personal touch. Acknowledgement emails and order tracking are powerful engagement tools. Data from UPS shows that 94% of us track the shipping of some or all of our online orders, while several customers report feeling more excited about the delivery of a product than the product itself. Whether businesses ship products themselves or use a fulfilment service, the speed, trackability, and personalisation of deliveries rank towards the top of modern customer priorities.

Turning data into revenue

Alongside profit, the most valuable income gleaned from an end-to-end customer journey is data. A greater understanding of consumers’ online navigation, behaviours and orders enables businesses to improve experiences and drive engagement. Data analytics help to highlight what’s driving or preventing transactions, validate product decisions, drive new visitors to the site, and feeds into personalisation.

For instance, effective use of data allows B2B retailers to present returning customers with more accurate product recommendations, and incentives like tailored discounts, to close sales faster than ever. Ultimately, it enables B2B businesses to get to know their audience almost as well as in the field-based days of old and offer outstanding post-purchase support.

Once we’ve established our new digital journey, the final step is to measure its success. The metrics will depend on the individual goals of a company. But some of the benchmarks you could use include monitoring the net satisfaction score of visitors to your digital platforms and services, and recording the value of orders won from customer engagement with digital marketing activities.

Making the switch to DTC

Going direct-to-consumer is a significant investment, so it’s crucial to regularly monitor the performance of your new business strategy. Simply, what gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed is often a success. To maximise your resources and react to ever-changing customer needs, ongoing benchmarking is a requisite part of your new end-to-end journey.

Ultimately, transitioning to DTC can seem a scary process. After all, every business is different, so there are no blueprints to follow that guarantee an effective proposition. So, it’s important to keep it simple. There’s no need to fully reinvent your organization or model. Just use your field-based customer knowledge to inform your digital offering, and ensure each touchpoint is ‘easy’: easy to find, choose, buy, get, use and maintain. A smooth, intuitive experience is the only sure-fire way of creating lasting relationships with online customers.