Understand Friction from Your Customers’ Point of View The first step to removing friction from the buyer journey? Figure out what’s causing it. You can kick off this process with an audit of your digital marketing and sales channels: web, mobile, paid and organic social, and messaging. If you can’t tackle a full-scale optimization effort right away, start with just the core element of many commerce journeys: the web experience. Audit your key website pages and start by removing points of friction there first. For example, evaluate your instructions in the checkout flow for clarity. • Where could steps be eliminated to help accelerate the purchase process or provide the ability to directly message your business? • Where can you provide more opportunities for opt-ins to send visitors more information about your product and services? As an enterprise business, your Even incremental improvements like these will make a big difference customers expect a seamless to users by providing them with the right info at the right time. It’ll “ experience from you online. Performing also benefit your business to start identifying these critical stages and a website audit to optimize the flow of find new ways of capturing interest and closing the loop with those your customer's journey will help you who may abandon the shopping experience for reasons unknown. deliver on their expectations. A clunky user experience and slow page load One critical thing for your business to do in order to improve the times are no longer tolerated by online quality of the buying experience for your customers is to put yourself shoppers, and more often than not, in their shoes. Go through the entire buyer journey and note any making the sale means doing whatever obstacles that inhibit a smooth path to purchase or engagement, it takes to simplify and speed up those and then look at behavioral analytics. Where do you see drop-off stages on the path to checkout. or other areas of optimization based on the data? Use this as your starting point in the pursuit of removing friction. BERTIE TYSOME, PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER FOR WHATSAPP 3