As businesses shift towards more customer-centered values and business models, customer journey mapping is quickly becoming a rising star in marketing strategy.
With today’s constantly changing technology and customer expectations, strategic small business owners must implement a customer journey map. This is a document that, step by step, outlines exactly how your customers experience your brand. You can use it to improve that experience by integrating current marketing trends, such as AI-driven personalization, short-form video content, and omnichannel strategies.
Moreover, this surprisingly simple map can improve your customer engagement while providing you with the data you need to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience. Mapping helps you know their wants, needs, expectations, and pain points — now and in the future.
In 2023, Accenture surveyed 19,000 customers in 12 countries and found that 74% of consumers walked away from purchases simply because they felt overwhelmed at some point along the journey. Customer journey maps help prevent this from happening!
Knowing where your marketing strategy and offerings fit into the buying journey unlocks your ability to personalize your brand experience for more customers. This, as a result, will improve your return on investment (ROI).
This article will answer the fundamental questions about customer journey mapping for email marketing, including a deeper dive into what it is, why we need to do it, and the steps to take to integrate this work into your outreach efforts.
What is a customer journey map?
Customer journey mapping is a technique that visualizes the behaviors and thoughts of people who interact with your brand. This method creates a visual display of your customer’s experience during the process of discovering, purchasing, and using your product or service. You can show each touchpoint or moment of interaction with your brand and identify weak and strong elements of your business and marketing strategy.
Customer journey maps in action
Business strategy group Flevy offers a case study of a textile manufacturer in Asia that embarked on this process. By tracking and analyzing their customer journey map, they recognized a weakness in on-time delivery and, as a result, rising customer dissatisfaction. These insights directed them to adopt new Internet of Things (IoT) technology to improve efficiency and boost their on-time delivery rates by 20%.
Another recent case study focused on the changing realities of the hobby, book, and music retail industry, which has faced substantial challenges in the last few years. Flevy reported that executives with a mid-sized chain of stores completed customer journey mapping exercises that resulted in a better understanding of omnichannel marketing and sales opportunities. As a result, their customer satisfaction rose by 30% and their online sales saw a 20% boost.
What does a customer journey map look like?
Templates can help you get a visual feel of a customer journey map. Know that you can always customize these to fit the individual nature of your brand and target audience.
There are many different types of these customer journey maps. For example, you can use infographics that use icons and images to convey actions. With each step along the way, think about all the methods your brand is using to help bring the customer to the next stage.
You could use a column-based chart with touchpoints connected by a line to demonstrate the flow of the journey.
Another option for your journey map design is based on the timelines your customers traditionally follow. You can create a curved flowchart that tracks each decision along the way.
While this is a creative process, don’t feel like you must design a masterpiece. It’s more important to use a template that feels straightforward and logical for your business, industry, and target audience. Instead of trying to squeeze your brand into a pretty design, be practical and keep it as simple as possible.
Building a customer journey map: 7 key steps
In email marketing, customer journey mapping requires a thoughtful, critical, and holistic approach. Here is a closer look at the different components of this process:
- Collect user data and research: To gain a big-picture understanding of your current customer journey, you must collect data and research. This can include an inventory of your existing marketing efforts, customer surveys, and focus groups.
- Create steps to capture each user’s experience: You’ll need to creatively identify the stages your customers go through. We’ll go through these soon.
- Connect these steps: How do your business goals and the goals of your customers intersect along this journey? List your customers’ goals, interactions, expectations, and problems based on the feedback you’ve gathered.
- Design a table or graphic: Pick a template or create your own design that expresses the customer experience.
- Analyze your table: Once the journey is mapped visually, determine insights. Analyze the data to pinpoint high and low points in your business.
- Brainstorm improvements: How can you improve problems along the journey and elevate the strengths of your business?
- Integrate changes: From here, you have the data to drive meaningful innovations, from marketing automation and personalization to a new email marketing strategy.
Why do we need customer journey mapping?
This process is straightforward, but it can take time away from other important daily tasks. So, let’s take a moment to clarify why this work is so important to the long-term growth of your business.
Core benefits of customer journey mapping
The customer journey mapping exercise can result in:
- Improved customer service costs
- Boosted social media engagement
- Increased customer referrals
- Quicker sales
- Stronger customer relationships
- Added efficiency for lower production and logistics costs
Sounds good, right? That’s not all.
Data-driven benefits showing the ROI of journey mapping
Perhaps the best benefit of mapping your customer journey is an improved return on investment, or ROI, of the process itself. Your map helps you target specific parts of the customer journey with a marketing campaign. When you see the impact of your efforts, you’ll know which parts of your journey work and what needs adjusting.
This data-driven method creates opportunities to dramatically improve whatever key performance indicators, or KPIs, you track within individual marketing campaigns. For example, paid social media ads are designed to drive traffic to a sales landing page and improve conversions. If you see that prospects aren’t completing sales or are dropping off at certain points in the journey, you can tweak your sales page or product.
Or, perhaps you have a search engine optimization, or SEO, strategy to present your brand as a thought leader in your industry. If your customer journey map doesn’t include a clear call to action in your blogs or website, you won’t encourage customers to move further into the process. Identifying where potential customers leave your website lets you know how to improve your online presence and make that investment pay greater dividends.
How journey maps align teams around customer experience
Especially if you’re marketing your small business on a shoestring budget, you must ensure that your teams work together for an optimal customer experience. Sometimes, different departments can be so focused on their own initiatives that they end up working in silos. This is simply inefficient.
The customer journey map brings everyone together. With this visual aid, team members from sales, operations, logistics, marketing, research and development, and any other segment of your business understand where they fit in. This holistic approach gives everyone clear direction and purpose.
Case studies: Starbucks and IKEA
If you’ve ever ordered a coffee using the Starbucks mobile app, you can thank customer journey mapping. In 2024, the company reported that more than 30% of the orders come from the app — the highest percentage since the app was launched a decade ago.
The customer journey map helped executives refine the personalization process, offering a new way to search by dietary restrictions. They used AI technology to improve the accuracy of wait times and provided ways for baristas to pause mobile orders when they were slammed.
Another example of a business that transformed through this process is IKEA. Its huge stores are notoriously overwhelming with choices and often hard to navigate. Their customer journey mapping process helped them zero in on these pain points.
After this analysis, the business created the IKEA Place app. The app uses augmented reality technology to make it easy for customers to imagine items in their homes. Then, it helps them order deliveries, allowing them to skip the store experience altogether. The result? A massive jump in e-commerce sales with an estimated $11.6 billion expected in 2025.
The 5 stages of the customer journey map
To begin mapping your customer’s experience, consider these five essential stages of the customer journey. Keep in mind that they may vary in language, nature, and order depending on your business and industry.
1. Awareness
The first step of your customer’s journey is the discovery of a need or desire for the product or service you offer. This step also includes becoming aware of the existence of your company. This can occur via an organic Google search, a recommendation from a social media influencer, a social media ad, a Google ad, your brand’s website or a link in a SEO-driven blog post, testimonials or reviews, or a social media post, story, or livestream. Local Google ads remain a top driver of customer awareness, so be sure you’ve claimed your Google Business page and fully updated the listing.
KPIs to track for awareness include:
- Social media followers
- Reach of social media posts
- Engagement rate
- Qualitative data from social media comments
- Brand mentions tracked through Google Alerts
- Website traffic
- Customer reviews on listing pages
When collecting these metrics, remember that your customers are humans, not numbers. Think about the common emotions they’ll experience when first learning about your brand. They may feel relief at discovering a solution to their pain points. They may feel excited about an innovation. Or, they could even feel confused if your messaging is not clear.
2. Consideration
The consideration, deliberation, or evaluation stage is the step in which your customer weighs their options. They’re still debating whether or not they’ll move forward with their purchase.
In this step, your customer may start shopping on your website, browse reviews, search your social media, or join your email list. Here, automated emails can help persuade customers to choose you and your services. Automated emails should link to promotions or positive customer reviews to sway prospective customers who are still undecided.
Metrics you can track here include:
- Time on your sales page
- Social media interactions
- Lead conversion rate
- Email open rates
- Click-through rates on call-to-action (CTA) buttons
Again, your customers could feel happy, confused, unsure, engaged, confident, or doubtful. They expect that you’ll provide answers to their questions so they can feel good about their buying decision.
3. Acquisition
This phase includes the action of purchasing, but it doesn’t end with the click of the “purchase” button. Rather, this stage initiates a relationship that is built on service and communication. From here on out, the goal is to gain a loyal customer who is happy with your services. Touchpoints in this stage may include customer discounts, automated emails, and more.
A 2023 survey by Aberdeen Strategy & Research found that maximizing each touchpoint makes a difference: 53% of customers are using email marketing to find promotions, and 80% reported they would be loyal customers if a store offered deals on products they frequently purchased.
Understanding the acquisition stage offers valuable insights into exactly why your customers choose you. Moving forward, your email campaigns should be tailored to their continued patronage via incentives and community building.
For this stage, you may wish to track:
- Cost per acquisition
- Return on advertising spend
- Conversion rates
- Average order value
When customers reach this stage, they often feel relieved, confident, excited, and hopeful. It’s your job to make sure you meet their expectations!
4. Retention
Once you’ve gained a new customer, retaining them is essential for maintaining the longevity of your business. This stage may include offering continued discounts, giving sneak peeks at new products, providing exclusive content, or asking customers for feedback. The goal is to help them feel engaged.
Mapping helps you understand why customers choose to leave or remain faithful to your brand over time.
Retention metrics include:
- Customer retention rate
- Customer churn rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Repeat purchase rate
In this phase, you’ll notice that some customers will feel loyalty, satisfaction, and pleasure. Others may feel disappointment and annoyance. Mapping the customer journey and tracking these emotions can help keep things positive.
5. Advocacy
In this final stage, your customer may share their positive experience with other potential customers. Social media marketing and garnering positive reviews are important during the advocacy stage.
Use automation to highlight anniversaries and offer special discounts through email list segmentation to keep customers engaged. Improve advocacy and retention by understanding your customers’ behaviors and building strong relationships across social media platforms.
To track this stage of the journey, look at:
- Referral rates
- Social media engagement
- Customer satisfaction scores
- User-generated content
- Customer advocacy rate
If the journey is a success, customers in this stage will feel proud of your brand, understood by your messaging, and excited to tell their friends and family about their experience.
The 7 steps to map the customer journey
Ready to begin the process of building a customer journey map? Follow these seven steps.
Step 1: Define your personas and goals
To create a practical customer journey map, you must be clear on who your customer is. While it’s good to understand your target audience, knowing the individuals within this group is even more important.
Create what is known as a buyer persona. Use everything you know about your current and targeted customer base to build this semi-fictional person. Give your ideal customer a name, hobbies, and specific pain points. This is the persona whose journey you will map!
Then, take a moment to clarify your business goals. Build SMART goals to set your customer journey map up for success. SMART is an acronym that stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Why are you taking them on this journey? List your values and write the story that led you to provide these services or products. Chances are, it goes much deeper than profits. This values-driven approach sets the foundation for the rest of the work.
Step 2: Understand the customer experience
Take an inventory of your current customer experience. Data collection here may look like email marketing surveys, or even having friends or colleagues play the part of a potential customer and simulating their journey. When gathering honest feedback, be open to different ideas and behaviors and take this as an opportunity to learn.
Step 3: Identify touchpoints across channels
As part of your customer research, list all the different channels you use to connect with your customers. This can include:
- Email marketing
- Social media platforms
- Your brand’s website
- Guest blogs on other websites
- Google Maps or other listing sites
- In-person interactions
- Paid social media advertisements
- Google Ads
With each channel, list all the ways a customer may interact with your brand. These interactions are known as “touchpoints,” and they serve as road signs on the customer journey.
Step 4: Map the current journey
Once you’ve determined your buyer persona and tracked all the touchpoints, you’re ready to create your map. We’ll break down this process in easy steps in a minute.
Step 5: Identify pain points and opportunities
Use your customer journey map as a tool to uncover the pain points and friction that stop customers from completing the sale or returning to your business. These friction spots may involve confusing messages, a lack of a clear call-to-action, or missing incentives that propel them toward a sale.
Step 6: Redesign the future journey
Now, you can take what you’ve learned from this work to redesign the process for future customer interactions. Remember to keep your buyer persona at the forefront. Would this individual appreciate these changes and improvements?
Step 7: Implement changes and measure results
Finally, implement your new plan! Give your newly designed customer journey at least a quarter to a half-year before going through this process again.
How to build a customer journey map
Before it’s time to sit down to work on your customer journey map, take note of these best practices. This way, you’ll avoid stumbling into common pitfalls.
Essential elements every journey map should include
Make sure your map contains:
- Clear and comprehensive customer persona
- Specifics on each stage of the journey, individualized for your brand
- Every touchpoint, or interaction, your customer has with your brand
- Actions your customer takes in reaction to the touchpoints
- The emotions your customer feels along the way
- Every channel you use to engage your customer
- Customer expectations along the journey
- Sequence of these interactions over time
Spend time on the details of each step — often, this is where the most surprising insights are found.
Tools and templates for journey mapping
While you can scratch out a customer journey map using a marker and a sheet of paper, it’s easier to edit and share when you create this digitally. Perhaps the easiest platform for mapping templates is Canva, which is a free graphic design software. You don’t have to be a tech genius or pro designer to craft a customer journey map.
As a bonus, this platform can be seamlessly integrated into future email marketing campaigns. Brand consistency is easier when you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with each strategy.
Cross-functional team involvement and workshop techniques
Don’t save this work for one or two people in your company. You’ll learn more when every department is represented. That said, the customer journey map process may be most productive if you schedule a few hours, order in lunch, and get focused.
Try these workshop best practices:
- Share your goals in advance and ask participants to start brainstorming solo.
- Don’t limit invitations to top management and include customer-focused employees, too.
- Assign a facilitator or consider hiring an outside consultant.
- Ask everyone to silence their phones and pause their laptop notifications.
- Set ground rules first to avoid endless and fruitless debates.
- Use a digital (or physical!) whiteboard to sketch the map in real time.
- Encourage everyone to participate with at least one idea.
Common pitfalls to avoid when creating your first map
Ready to schedule your mapping workshop? First, give everybody enough time. You don’t want participants to feel rushed.
Another common pitfall is not getting everyone on board with a clear customer persona. Business owners may have an excellent vision of the ideal customer, but it’s always wise to be flexible and open to different (and sometimes better) ideas.
Finally, beware of bad data. You’ve heard the phrase, “Garbage in, garbage out?” As you map the timeline of touchpoints, double-check your data. Have you included customer feedback and documented your many marketing channels? Be realistic when gathering, processing, and analyzing data and insights at every step.
Using data to map your customer’s journey
It can’t be overstated: good data is the key to success with a customer journey map. Through this process, you analyze your data and transform everything into action-oriented insights. You can then improve your conversion rates, revenue, and retention.
Here are some of the best ways to utilize your data to build a customer journey map.
Segmentation
Segmentation is the work of separating your audience into smaller, more targeted groups. This way, you target specific audiences with content that is tailored to them, particularly through email marketing. The more you segment your email lists, the more effective your message will be.
Plus, segmentation reduces the risk of overloading customers with low-value content and allows you to track your customer data even more closely.
Pinpoint your pain points
Once you have established segmented audiences, you can use your data to identify how you’re losing customers through friction.
Use researched data, critical thinking, and marketing best practices to understand why your customers are taking — or not taking — action. Look for negative feedback on social media, patterns in customer service requests, or unsubscribes during email campaigns.
But stay positive: these are telltale signs that there are ways to improve! Consider new ways to smooth out friction, perhaps with special discounts or better customer service strategies, to connect with the not-yet-loyal customers.
Meet your customers where they are
Tools like monitoring social media metrics, email A/B testing, and email tracking can help you identify the most effective touchpoints. Think critically: why are some strategies working, and with whom are they working best?
With today’s marketing strategies focused often on visual platforms, many brands use short-form videos on social media and in emails to offer value-driven engagement and authentic relationships. Statista reported that 67% of marketers were planning to increase their use of videos on Instagram and YouTube in 2024.
If you’ve tried this approach, look for positive comments, high click rates, and increased sales. Notice strengths and capitalize on these insights!
Competitive evaluation methods
To clarify your brand position, compare your customer journey map with that of your competitors. What are you doing better — and what can you do to improve in areas of weakness?
While you conduct this data-driven market analysis, remember to stay authentic to your values and business goals. Think about your buyer persona and with whom your brand best connects. Don’t abandon your brand to compete with another! Instead, stay true to you.
How to collect and integrate multiple data sources
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with all the touchpoints along the customer journey map, but the visual process helps break down each data source. Stay organized! Create a spreadsheet with the data you collect and label everything clearly, so you know where the information came from. Color coding can help.
Types of customer journey maps
You may still be wondering which map design would be most effective for your business marketing goals. Not only are there different designs, but there are various kinds of customer journey maps. Knowing the differences will make it easier to decide which is best for you.
Current state maps vs. future state maps
Two of the most common customer journey maps are current and future state maps. A current state map looks at the journey your current customer has taken to go from the awareness stage to being a loyal, returning advocate.
A future state map, meanwhile, can be designed once you’ve analyzed the current map. You can create new digital marketing strategies and map how these changes could influence your customers’ decision-making processes.
Day-in-the-life journey maps
If you’re still figuring out a customer persona, the day-in-the-life journey map may be your best choice. This is a visual representation of your ideal customer’s typical actions in a day. Imagining how they move through different activities, how they feel at each hour, and their thoughts throughout the day can help you naturally integrate your brand into their lives.
This is a powerful way to step back and gain context on how your products and services can make a difference in their day.
Experience-based journey maps
You may have a clear timeline of touchpoints within the customer journey map, but have you focused on the emotional or psychological experience your customer has at each stage? That’s the goal of an experience-based journey map.
When you emphasize the emotional component of each interaction, you can build a more satisfying and engaging relationship. If someone feels great at every step of the journey with your brand, it’s not a big leap for them to sing your praises to friends and family.
Empathy maps and their relationship to journey maps
An empathy map helps you understand and respect the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors of customers. Instead of just considering the feelings resulting from each interaction, an empathy map aids you in anticipating needs and motivations.
When you empathize with your ideal customer, it’s easier to design a marketing journey that aligns with their expectations. You can offer the products and services they need to address their pain points. You can help them, which is a very different and much more effective motivation than just trying to make a sale.
When to use each type of map
If you’re not sure which customer journey map is best for furthering your marketing efforts, revisit your business goals for the upcoming year. Add these SMART goals to your comprehensive marketing plan and share them with your brainstorming team. This way, everyone can move in the right direction together.
Journey mapping for email marketing customer journeys
Customer journey maps are especially impactful for improving email marketing strategies. That’s because you can create, schedule, and automate campaigns based on the actions (or inactions) of your current and potential customers. Let’s take a closer look.
Email automation sequences aligned to journey stages
Email is a powerful way to create a direct and personalized relationship with a customer, as you can automate campaigns to align with the journey you’ve mapped. Once you’ve created your customer journey map, look at the emails they receive. Where can you drop into their inbox to help answer questions, provide incentives, or offer additional options they may not have considered?
Personalized strategies triggered at each journey stage
Connect your email interactions with each journey stage. For example, a pop-up offer of a discount on their first order will encourage potential customers to sign up for your email list and move forward to the consideration phase.
If they are stuck in the consideration phase — with items lingering in a shopping cart, for example — consider sending a new, time-limited discount for that specific item. Once they’ve acquired your product or service, think about how you can keep them engaged and interested in buying again.
Finally, try creating digital loyalty programs in which customers can earn rewards for forwarding emails to friends and family. That makes the advocacy stage a no-brainer!
Measurement framework for email performance
Remember the KPIs associated with each stage of the journey? These connect everything together. You’ll use this data to create email strategies, and then you can use the results of your campaign to refine your customer journey.
By integrating a measurement framework based on the customer journey into your email marketing strategy, you can easily pivot and improve. Marketing work requires a dynamic and often experimental process. Try a strategy and then feel free to change it if your metrics demonstrate other opportunities.
Maintaining and evolving your journey maps
Current customer journey maps are reflections of a moment in time. With every new marketing strategy, product, or policy, a new journey is being created. After you make your first map, the following ones will be easier to create and more organic.
Journey map review cadence
Aim for a review every quarter or at least twice a year. Of course, you may need to update your customer journey map more frequently. For example, if you are launching new products, services, or even a new email marketing strategy, the journey — and the map — will be different.
That being said, give time between analyses to allow your marketing strategies to show results. Some outreach efforts, like search engine optimization, are long-term solutions to fostering relationships. Measuring results too quickly can stop momentum before it starts.
Signs your journey map needs updating
Has something recently changed in your business, but you haven’t reflected that new experience on your customer journey map? Here are some signs that it’s time to review your map:
- Your business unveiled a new product or service.
- You’ve launched a new marketing strategy.
- The market or industry has shifted.
- Economic forces have impacted customer behavior.
- New feedback provides new insights.
- You’ve updated your customer persona.
- There are obvious touchpoint errors or incorrect timelines.
Sometimes, you know you need to update a plan or a map, but as a business owner, you’re short on time. It’s normal and understandable! Prevent this by setting aside time every quarter for a customer journey map review.
Creating a culture of customer-centricity
The biggest takeaway from customer journey mapping is that your team will start to shift its focus from impersonal numbers to the personal experiences of your customers. There’s great value in treating people, both employees and customers, as the emotional and thoughtful humans they are. Value-driven businesses often perform better, and they always offer a more enjoyable experience.
To create a customer-centered culture, be sure to frequently ask for feedback. Integrate this qualitative data into your customer journey map process, and seek ways to improve friction points. Over time, this will feel natural and rewarding.
Use the customer journey map to improve the user experience
The email customer journey map is a powerful tool to strategically analyze each step of the buyer’s decision-making process, from awareness and consideration to purchase and then onward to retention and advocacy. When you look at each touchpoint along the way, you can determine ways to improve your marketing and sales strategy for better results.
For example, you may wish to try new branded email templates, send automated emails, or refine your audience segmentation lists. Keep track of new AI tools to further refine and improve the customer experience. All of this analysis will help you work smarter, not harder!
Ready to make your business’s customer journey map? If you have questions about the best KPIs to track or other ways to improve your strategy, check out our Marketing Advice blog. Use these resources to gain confidence and improve your bottom line.
