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Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer’s journey, a day in your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have one, I recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics ready.

Don’t have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started.

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you’ve learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. If you group too many personas into one journey, your map won’t accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels.
• Email marketing.
• Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

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Customer journey mapping: The path to loyalty

A version of this tutorial originally appeared in the free Primer app .

In an ideal world, the journey people take to become loyal customers would be a straight shot down a highway: See your product. Buy your product. Use your product. Repeat.

In reality, this journey is often more like a sightseeing tour with stops, exploration, and discussion along the way—all moments when you need to convince people to pick your brand and stick with it instead of switching to a competitor.

Staying on top of all of these moments might seem overwhelming, but mapping your customer’s journey can help. It can give you and your team a greater understanding of how your customers are currently interacting and engaging with your brand, and also help illustrate how your products and services fit into their lives, schedules, goals, and aspirations.

Let’s take a look at five steps your team can take to start journey mapping.

1. Find the sweet spot where your customers’ goals and your own align

Before you start journey mapping, nail down your business goals. Any marketing and communication you deliver during the customer journey should be focused on helping your brand reach those goals.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that your customers’ goals might be different from yours. For example, let’s say your goal is to sell more sunglasses with new, improved lenses that have a better profit margin. Meanwhile, your customers’ top concern might be getting sunglasses that match their personal style. Lens protection could be their second or even third priority.

Consider how your marketing and communication strategies can help your customers reach their goals while also getting you closer to yours.

2. Identify all of the communication touchpoints in your customer’s journey

When do you traditionally communicate or engage with customers? Make a list of these moments and group them based on when they happen during the journey: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

Now find communication touchpoints you may have missed. Track what actions and interactions between your brand and your customers happen just before and after each of the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages.

For example, you might decide that a major moment in your purchase stage is when your customers are guided through your website to buy an item in their shopping cart. But you might notice other communication touchpoints right before that purchase moment, like your website confirming to customers that an item has been added to their shopping cart, then suggesting related products.

Looking for all these touchpoints can quickly bog your team down in a lot of details and micro-interactions. To avoid that, prioritize the moments that get you closer to achieving your business goals.

3. Recognize pain points and moments of delight

How might your customers feel at the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages as they attempt to achieve their goals? For example, could your customers be happy that your website makes browsing easy, but frustrated at how confusing it is to purchase a product?

Find the moments where your customers might have negative experiences. Who on your team is involved in those touchpoints? Your web designers? Your marketing team? Your copywriters? Are there other team members who could collaborate and improve the situation?

Say a customer likes how your online ad describes your product. But when they go to your store, salespeople present the product differently. That’s an opportunity for your copywriters and salespeople to better align their language and sales pitches.

4. Experience the customer journey yourself

Imagining how your customers might feel during their journey is valuable, but actually experiencing it for yourself can uncover much-needed insights.

If your business is run online, open a browser and experience what it’s like to be your customer. Similarly, if you have a brick-and-mortar store, go into a location that sells your product. Afterwards, ask yourself about the main communication touchpoints you encountered. Did they work well? Did they help you complete your journey? What was missing?

And don’t forget about the competition. Become one of their customers and experience the journey they’ve created. Then ask yourself all of the same questions.

5. Visualize your customer journey map

Go beyond just writing down your customer journey and communication touchpoints, and actually create a visual map of them. This doesn’t need to be a polished, heavily-designed visualization. Simply write each of your touchpoints down on individual sticky notes or papers, then pin them in order to a wall.

By doing this exercise, you’re helping your team take a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey. You can organize your thoughts and collaboratively brainstorm new ideas for changing or adding to your communication at these touchpoints.

Make sure to create hypotheses around why new communication touchpoints will improve the customer journey, then implement and test them. If your hypotheses are wrong, go back to your journey map, reassess, tweak, and improve.

Yes, the journey mapping process can be fairly intensive, but it can have a big impact on your business. That’s why it shouldn’t be just a one-time event. Customer tastes can shift, new technology can become available, and your brand itself might evolve. So it’s important to do journey mapping at least once a year and evaluate what communication touchpoints are still working and what needs to be revisited.

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Stuart Hogg is a marketing consultant who has worked with a number of Fortune 500 brands. He created “Journey Mapping: Connect the Customer Dots” for the Primer app.

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Learn what the customer journey mapping process is and download a free template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey can give you a way to better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your business; their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.

And, it’s shown that the friction from those pain points costs big: in 2019, ecommerce friction totaled an estimated 213 billion in lost US revenue .

Customer journey maps can help you to identify any problems or areas where you could improve your customer experience . In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s get started!

Bonus: Get our free, fully customizable Customer Experience Strategy Template that will help you understand your customers and reach your business goals.

What is a customer journey map?

So, what is customer journey mapping? Essentially, customer journey maps are a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.

There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:

• Inquiry or awareness
• Interest, comparison, or decision-making
• Purchase or preparation
• Installation, activation, or feedback

Customer journey maps are used to track customer behavior and pinpoint areas where the customer experiences pain points. With this information uncovered, you can improve the customer experience, giving your customers a positive experience with your company.

You can use customer journey mapping software like Excel or Google sheets, Google Decks, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to create your maps. But you don’t actually need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these maps with a blank wall and a pack of sticky notes.

Though they can be scribbled on a sticky note, it’s often easier to create these journeys digitally. That way, you have a record of your journey map, and you can share it with colleagues. We’ve provided free customer journey mapping templates at the end of this article to make your life a little easier.

The benefits of using customer journey maps

The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with your business touchpoints. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customer at each touchpoint.

Give them what they want and make it easy to use, and they’ll keep coming back. But, there are a couple of other great knock-on benefits too.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight moments where you can add some fun to a customer’s day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer’s experience. Knowing where these moments are will let you address them before your customer gets there. Then, watch your customer service metrics spike!

Effective marketing tactics

A greater understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you to advertise to them.

Let’s say you sell a sleep aid product or service. A potential target market for your customer base is young, working mothers who are strapped for time.

The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you need is someone asking if you’re tired. But we know that over half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep at night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our Sleep Aid today and sleep better tonight.”

Building out customer personas will show potential target audiences and their motivation, like working moms who want to make the most of their hours asleep.

Product advancements or service improvements

By mapping your customer’s journey, you’ll gain insights into what motivates them to make a purchase or prevents them from doing so. You’ll have clarity on when or why they return items and which items they buy next. With this information and more, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products.

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

Customer journey mapping will show you where customers get stuck and bounce off your site. You can work your way through the map, fixing any friction points as you go. The end result will be a smoothly-running, logical website or app.

A customer-focused mindset

Instead of operating with the motivation of business success, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “how can I increase profits?” ask yourself, “what would better serve my customer?” The profits will come when you put your customer first.

At the end of the day, customer journey maps help you to improve your customer experience and boost sales. They’re a useful tool in your customer experience strategy .

How to create a customer journey map

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But, there are a few steps you’ll want to take regardless of how you go about mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 1. Set your focus

Are you looking to drive the adoption of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed issues with your customer experience. Maybe you’re looking for new areas of opportunity for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set your goals before you begin mapping the customer journey.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

To create a customer journey map, you’ll first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will want to access your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are caricatures or representations of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are created from real-world data and strategic goals.

If you don’t already have them, create your own buyer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.

Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for your remaining personas.

Step 3. Perform user research

Interview prospective or past customers in your target market. You do not want to gamble your entire customer journey on assumptions you’ve made. Find out directly from the source what their pathways are like, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.

You can do this by sending out surveys, setting up interviews, and examining data from your business chatbot . Be sure to look at what the most frequently asked questions are. If you don’t have a FAQ chatbot like Heyday , that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!

Get a free Heyday demo

You will also want to speak with your sales team, your customer service team, and any other team member who may have insight into interacting with your customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Your next step is to track and list the customer’s interactions with the company, both online and offline.

A customer touchpoint means anywhere your customer interacts with your brand. This could be your social media posts , anywhere they might find themselves on your website, your brick-and-mortar store, ratings and reviews, or out-of-home advertising.

Write as many as you can down, then put on your customer shoes and go through the process yourself. Track the touchpoints, of course, but also write down how you felt at each juncture and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Compile all of the information you’ve collected into one place. Then, start mapping out your customer journey! You can use the templates we’ve created below for an easy plug-and-play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

Once the customer journey has been mapped out, you will want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first-hand what your customers do to fully understand their experience.

As you journey through your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points, you can see areas where they might bounce off your site or get frustrated with your app. Then, you can take action to improve it. List these out in your customer journey map as “Opportunities” and “Action plan items”.

Types of customer journey maps

There are many different types of customer journey maps. We’ll take you through four to get started: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We’ll break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.

Current state

This customer journey map focuses on your business as it is today. With it, you will visualize the experience a customer has when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product. A current state customer journey uncovers and offers solutions for pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is an ideal future state. With it, you will visualize a customer’s best-case experience when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product.

Once you have your future state customer journey mapped out, you’ll be able to see where you want to go and how to get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life customer journey is a lot like the current state customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life outside of how they interact with your brand.

Day-in-the-life mapping looks at everything that the consumer does during their day. It shows what they think and feel within an area of focus with or without your company.

When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more accurately strategize where your brand communication can meet them. Are they checking Instagram on their lunch break, feeling open and optimistic about finding new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at that time.

Day-in-the-life customer journey examples can look vastly different depending on your target demographic.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along the user journey. Instead, these are divided into four sections and track what someone says about their experience with your product when it’s in use.

You should create empathy maps after user research and testing. You can think of them as an account of all that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly regarding how people feel while using products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insights into your users’ needs and wants.

Customer journey map templates

Use these templates to inspire your own customer journey map creation.

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It can be helpful to see customer journey mapping examples. To give you some perspective on what these look like executed, we’ve created a customer journey mapping example of the current state.

Buyer Persona:

Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old female, is in a double-income no-kids marriage. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; while they have research skills, they lack time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.

What are their key goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum. Her key goal is to find one that will not break again.

What are their struggles?

She is frustrated that her old vacuum broke and that she has to spend time finding a new one. Colleen feels as though this problem occurred because the vacuum she bought previously was of poor quality.

What tasks do they have?

Colleen must research vacuums to find one that will not break. She must then purchase a vacuum and have it delivered to her house.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to understand quickly and immediately the benefits our product offers; how can we make this easier? Colleen upholds social proof as a decision-making factor. How can we better show our happy customers? There is an opportunity here to restructure our website information hierarchy or implement customer service tools to give Colleen the information she needs faster. We can create comparison charts with competitors, have benefits immediately and clearly stated, and create social campaigns.

Action Plan:

• Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they want quickly and easily.
• Create a comparison tool for competitors and us, showing benefits and costs.
• Implement benefit-forward statements on all landing pages.
• Create a social campaign dedicated to UGC to foster social proof.
• Send out surveys dedicated to gathering customer feedback. Pull out testimonial quotes from here when possible.

Now that you know what the customer journey mapping process is, you can take these tactics and apply them to your own business strategy. By tracking customer behavior and pinpointing areas where your customers experience pain points, you’ll be able to alleviate stress for customers and your team in no time.

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Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

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4 Strategies to Simplify the Customer Journey

• Richard L. Gruner

Making things easy is harder than you think.

While it may be tempting to offer your customers a never-ending array of products, customizations, and information, research shows that simplicity is almost always the best option for boosting both company value and customer loyalty. But what does it take to build a customer experience that’s smooth and simple from end to end? In this piece, the author offers four strategies to ensure simplicity is baked into every aspect of the customer’s journey: identify and communicate what simplicity means to your organization, look beyond product development to find ways to simplify throughout the customer journey, embrace internal complexity to achieve external simplicity, and remember that while simplicity is often necessary, it isn’t always the answer.

The modern consumer faces hundreds — if not thousands — of choices every day. What to read. Where to shop. What to buy. And each of those decisions takes a mental toll.

• RG Richard L. Gruner  holds a PhD in marketing from the University of Melbourne and is Senior Lecturer (A/Prof) at the University of Western Australia. His work has been published in many top ranked peer-reviewed international journals, and he has a professional background in the media industry. One of his main research interests lies at the intersection of consumer psychology and digital tools.  Find out more about Richard’s experience .

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Why mapping the customer journey is so important for improving CX

Today’s savvy, well-informed buyers want an excellent customer experience (CX) every single time they interact with your product and brand.

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) helps you deeply understand every aspect of your users’ experience to help you act on your insights to boost conversions, customer satisfaction and retention—and keep up with your competitors.

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Our comprehensive guide of the ten most important benefits of customer journey mapping will talk you through why mapping the buyer journey is so crucial, who should map out the customer journey, and which challenges to look out for. 

Want to understand how customers really interact with your site?

Hotjar’s PX insights tools let you experience the customer journey through their eyes. 

10 reasons you need to map your customer journey

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how your customers interact with your brand, website, and product across different stages—from external touchpoints like social media, ads, and events, to internal touchpoints like website landing pages, CTAs, signup forms, and onboarding processes.  

To understand your users’ experiences, desires, and pain points, do customer journey map research by gathering qualitative and quantitative data from customer interviews, surveys, and product experience (PX) insights tools. A data-informed customer journey map helps you understand your users' jobs to be done as they engage with your site or product—and what they’re thinking and feeling as they navigate.

Let’s take a look at how customer journey mapping can benefit your company—and your customers. 

1. Walk in your customers’ shoes

Collecting real-world insights helps you dig deep into how customers interact with your brand, which makes it easier to empathize with their experience. A strong customer journey mapping process lets you challenge your assumptions—you’ll see customers don’t always act or think how you expect . 

Understanding where users struggle to complete actions, get frustrated, or drop off helps you prioritize website and product improvements to give them a smoother experience. Maybe that’s changing the position of CTAs, or adapting your navigation architecture so important information is easy to find. 

If you build a culture of putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, all stakeholders can see your brand from the customer perspective (outside-in) as well as the business perspective (inside-out) . 

A customer journey map enables you to observe sales experiences from the customer's perspective rather than the sales perspective. You can see why they chose your product or a different brand and understand their point of view more effectively.

Pro tip: Hotjar Session Recordings let you see exactly how customers navigate your site. Understand which areas they gravitate to, which they avoid, and where they get blocked or drop off.

Hotjar Session Recordings show you how users experience your page to improve low-performing touchpoints 

2. Identify unmet user needs

A strong understanding of customer needs across different interactions lets you identify gaps in the journey and offer additional touchpoints or improve existing ones, which means no more guesswork.  

Mapping out how customers navigate your site or app lets you pinpoint blockers, where they’re trying to engage but can’t, or where completing an action takes too much effort. 

Increase your awareness of customer needs to minimize frustrations by providing the right information and features at specific stages for a better user experience (UX). For example, if you see customers struggling with onboarding touchpoints, you can deliver an explanatory video or pop-up tooltip exactly when they need it. Or if they’re caught in an endless help-page loop, you can update your pages to provide the most relevant information at key points in the website journey.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Observe tools to see where user needs aren’t being met. Heatmaps show you whether key information, CTAs, and contact forms are optimally positioned so visitors can find them at the right point in their customer journey. If not, you can easily modify your layout for a better experience.

Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

3. Understand complex journeys across several customer touchpoints

The average customer uses multiple channels to research and interact with brands. This creates highly complex, non-linear journeys with several customer touchpoints .  

Touchpoints also vary by customer: maybe Gen Zers typically come to your website from social media and seek out video content, while Gen Xers might be more likely to arrive directly from Google searches and want written content and comparison charts before they buy.  

For B2B businesses, multiple decision-makers are also often involved—and they all have different ways of conducting research and choosing a solution.

This complexity makes creating an excellent customer experience across the board difficult. 

Customer journey mapping visualizes all these different experiences in one place—showing you exactly what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage so you can provide the right information at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channel.

4. Visualize emotions, not just actions

Buyer journeys are often emotional, but it’s hard to turn feelings into concrete data, and it’s even harder to imagine what your customers will actually feel when designing your product and site. 

A well-researched customer journey map helps you visualize what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing: the key to understanding their deepest needs and providing a better service. Gathering insights on customer emotions—and acting on them—helps customers feel you ‘get’ them and builds brand trust.

Pro tip: Hotjar Session Recordings go beyond tracking basic user behavior analytics to show you where users are ‘rage-clicking’ or u-turning because they’re not getting the response they expect when they click on site elements. You can even filter to see specific recordings of customers who told you they were dissatisfied/satisfied.

Hotjar's Ask tools— Surveys and Feedback widgets—also let you gather feedback on what customers are feeling as they take certain actions.

Hotjar’s tool stack gives you insights and user feedback ‘in the wild’

5. Create personalized experiences

Personalization is key to great customer experience, even with self-serve products, because customers value brands that understand their unique needs.

Mapping lets you dig deeper into user intent and interactions, allowing you to create personalized experiences across all touchpoints. 

For example: 

Create targeted landing pages with use cases for different customer segments

Show relevant social media ads to potential customers browsing online

Provide personalized support over multiple channels 

Improve onboarding by tailoring the process to each customer

Customize the post-onboarding experience so users can adapt your product to their exact needs, boosting adoption

6. Align cross-functional stakeholders

Mapping the customer journey works best with perspectives from UX, marketing, product, sales, customer service and success, shipping, management, and other teams. This can mean getting different roles physically in a room together, or collecting their feedback to understand how they interact with your customer. These diverse insights help speed up the process of solving customer journey issues—so users see improvements faster. 

This kind of cross-functional collaboration gets multiple teams on the same page and gives all stakeholders a holistic, coherent view of the customer experience.

Aligning different teams reduces politics and guesswork around what the customer wants and clarifies areas of ownership, accountability, and points of hand-off between teams. This makes it easier to keep tabs on where a customer is in their journey at any one time—and creates a smoother, more coherent interaction with your brand.

Behind every messed-up implementation is a fundamental mis- or non-alignment on customer journey outcomes. Mapping exposes gaps in customer-focused thinking, areas of functional misalignment, and organization change challenges…all of which traditional IT people are poor at, and IT vendors don't care about. The first step in resolution is realization. Mapping brings people together to a point where they understand the challenges.

7. Improve ROI and cost-effectiveness by creating satisfied customers

Between paid ads, marketing, and sales, customer acquisition is costly—so retaining customers is important to help boost your return on investment (ROI). 

Customer journey mapping provides you with opportunities to improve onboarding and features adoption, which increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, and product advocacy.  

Use PX insights tools like Hotjar Heatmaps to spot technical issues that prevent users from signing up for a trial, or identify points when ecommerce customers abandon their shopping carts , which boosts conversions and revenue generation. 

8. Get a competitive edge 

Mapping tells you exactly how you can improve your customer experience to make your product stand out from the competition. CJMs also reveal product strategy opportunities to differentiate your brand by identifying new ways to provide customers with additional value.

These product experience and user insights help your brand stay relevant, adapt your product and business model as customer needs change, and gain a competitive edge in a moment where having a great product is no longer enough on its own. 

Crucially, mapping helps you identify your ‘halo’ customers—the group that, when you land them, makes everyone else sit up and take notice—as well as influencers and early adopters. That’s the first step in learning how to attract more of them.

More customer success for more customers is the most important outcome of strategy and the ROI from any investment in the business. If you can’t describe how this additional success will happen, or what will bring additional customers, I’d say your strategy is a bit light on specifics, risking its credibility and, ultimately, successful execution. Mapping at the value chain level helps bring coherency to a strategy.

9. Improve marketing and product-led growth

Many companies assume the customer journey starts when someone lands on their website or blog. In reality, it starts way before that—often with the customer searching for solutions or doing research in professional groups or community forums. 

Mapping the journey from start to finish helps you get to know your users, be a part of their conversations, and create content for all stages of the buyer journey that help convert visitors into paying customers. This process is particularly valuable for businesses with long, complex buyer journeys and high-value products, like the SaaS or B2B customer journey . 

Building a CJM also reduces guesswork and helps you validate ideas—from identifying the right channels, messaging, positioning, and content to building credibility and trust with customers.  

Use PX insights tools like Hotjar to see where users get blocked—and use the information you glean to make your product itself more intuitive, user-friendly, and well-positioned for growth. The goal here is to make your product (and the user journey within it) so good that it starts to act as its own marketing channel and practically sells itself, which is every team's dream.

10. Minimize future roadblocks

Customer journey mapping requires some time and effort up front, but it increases efficiency and saves resources later on. 

Conduct customer interviews and use PX insights tools to collect qualitative and quantitative data and minimize customer roadblocks further down the line, which ultimately helps reduce assumptions across your team and lets you anticipate challenges so you can prevent them.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Ask tools—like Surveys and Feedback —to gather quantitative and qualitative insights relevant to specific pages on your site, as users are browsing them. This gives you voice-of-the-customer feedback as to why customers are dropping off in the buyer journey, which elements confuse them or get ignored, and what’s stopping them from continuing or converting. 

The Hotjar question bank makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys 

Who should map the customer journey? 

Every company, no matter its size or niche, can benefit from mapping the customer journey. Customer journey mapping is particularly useful for giving startups and SMEs a competitive edge. 

Aligning yourself more closely with your customers by getting to know and understand their needs and blockers will allow your company to give customers exactly what they want and differentiate you from the competition. 

If you don’t understand how and why your customers are choosing you, it’s going to be extremely difficult to attract and retain more customers.

What are the challenges of customer journey mapping? 

Customer journey mapping can be a quick and easy process—take a look at our guide to creating a CJM in 2.5 days —but it comes with some challenges: 

You need a strong understanding of all your customer profiles and user groups to avoid leaving anyone out. Don’t rely on assumptions: run customer interviews and collect user feedback to inform your user personas and map.

Multiple teams usually need to be involved, which isn’t always easy to organize: get everyone on the same page and share your product experience insights with Hotjar's Slack integration . To get executive teams on board, prepare a presentation outlining the benefits of customer journey mapping and how their involvement will help.   

It can be frustrating if you don’t have the resources and staffing to immediately act on the insights revealed by customer journey mapping. However, a strong customer journey map will help you see what to prioritize, and can even help you get buy-in for more resources to make changes.

It can be hard to collect enough data for a thorough CJM, but using Hotjar's PX insights tools makes customer journey map research easy by helping teams understand the online user journey on a granular level

Customer journey mapping is a continuous process 

Mapping the customer journey tells you exactly how users interact with your brand, website, and product at different touchpoints—and what they’re doing, thinking, or feeling at each stage. 

Your CJM is a living record. Refer back to it regularly during every stage of your product's design, testing, and launch to make sure you’re delivering what your customers really want and need. 

This crucial process will help you understand and improve the customer experience, creating customer delight , and boosting adoption and loyalty.

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping benefits

What is customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is the process of gathering user data and insights from surveys, interviews, and product experience (PX) insights tools. Teams then use their findings to create a visual representation of how customers interact with their brand, website, or product at different touchpoints. 

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Customer journey mapping is important to better understand your customers. By visualizing their actions, thoughts, emotions, and challenges, as they interact with your business, you can make changes to improve their experience. 

What are the steps in customer journey mapping?

The steps in customer journey mapping include:

Collecting customer feedback from surveys or interviews

Collecting insights from customer-facing teams 

Using product experience (PX) insights tools to understand how users interact with your website or digital product 

Creating an empathy map

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) that showcases all the above insights

Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

When I was a kid, I remember watching my parents switch between different credit cards to get the best rewards for a particular purchase. They almost always pulled out the American Express first because (as they explained to me) the base reward rate was higher than even the sector-specific perks offered by other cards. Twenty years later, when I decided to get a high-end credit card, Amex was the first one that came to mind.

Customer journey mapping is the process of planning out people's awareness of and relationship to your brand, starting with their very first impression—even if, as in my case, that impression is made a full decade before they can actually use your product.

Table of contents: 

Customer journey map template

Parts of a journey map, stages of the customer journey, advanced customer journey mapping tips, types of journey maps, customer journey mapping example, what is a customer journey map.

A customer journey is the path a person takes to move from general awareness to prospective customer to (in the ideal scenario) brand loyalist . A customer journey map is a visual document that traces this path through all of the interactions, or touchpoints, a person will have with a brand.

Think back to any recent purchase of your own, and try to trace your own customer journey:

When and where was your first contact with the product or service?

How many channels of communication with the company did you have available?

How was the contact you had, if any? Was it personal or formulaic?

Were your problems, if any, solved? If so, were they solved in a timely manner?

What do you now know about the brand besides the product or service itself?

Of course, every customer is different. But you can't create a customer journey map for every individual—and you don't need to. Instead, you can segment your audience into customer personas and create a map for each. 

The customer journey vs. the user journey vs. the buyer journey

What's the difference between the customer, user, and buyer journeys?

The customer journey is split up into two parts: the buyer journey and the user journey. The buyer journey covers everything up to the point of purchase. After that point, the customer becomes a user, and all of their experiences are part of the user journey. 

Benefits of customer journey mapping

In a world where there are multiple high-quality options for just about every product on the market, brands need to foster long-term relationships with their customers to prevent them from being poached by competitors who offer a better customer experience .

Here are the main benefits of the customer journey mapping process:

Touchpoint optimization: With a clear understanding of what your touchpoints are and where they occur, you can track and adjust them based on how they perform.

Enhanced customer experience insights: Through customer profiling and a better overview of all the touchpoints that make a journey, you can acquire more precise and actionable customer experience insights.

Improved product development: Thoughtful and intentional journey planning creates more opportunities for meaningful customer feedback, which gives businesses better information to improve their product.

The customer journey map includes additional details within each phase (which I'll discuss in more detail later) to help you strategically plan your customers' touchpoints and move them closer to a purchase.

This customer journey map template is separated into five stages along the leftmost column, with guiding questions to help plan the customer's experience in each stage.

Below, we'll walk through each part of the customer journey map and how to use it. 

If you're already familiar with journey mapping, you can start filling in the template right away. Otherwise, here's a quick walkthrough of what goes in each section.

What is the customer doing?

In this section, you'll jot down the main things that the prospect, lead, or customer is doing during this stage. For example, if you're a personal trainer, an awareness stage key step might include something like "Prospect wants to get in shape." Or if you offer an email newsletter app, an expansion and advocacy stage key step might be "Customer upgrades their plan." 

Each stage will likely have more than one key step or milestone—that's good. You should be specific enough to be able to create touchpoints, content, and marketing campaigns geared toward each milestone.

What is the customer thinking?

Next, put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about what questions they might have at each stage. In the awareness stage, it might be things like "How can I do X better?" or "What is [your product name]?" In the consideration phase, questions like "Is this worth my time/money?" or "Will this help me solve my problem?" will come to the forefront. 

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

After you've outlined what your customer is thinking at each stage, align each question with the relevant touchpoint that could address each concern.

Not all existing touchpoints will be a part of the planned customer journey . For example, I seriously doubt that American Express's customer journey map includes a milestone labeled "Customer gets a free ride because her friend has an Amex card and gets $15 in Uber cash each month." However, each question must have at least one touchpoint that directly and specifically addresses the customer's needs and questions at that point.

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

When you have a question or milestone that doesn't have a corresponding touchpoint, you've found a gap in your customer journey. That means customers at this stage are going to be left with unmet needs and unanswered questions, and may look more seriously at competitor products as a result. It's essential to develop touchpoints to fill this gap and prevent losing potential customers at a key milestone.

The customer journey map can be split into five phases: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and brand loyalty.

Customers can't decide whether or not they want your product if they don't know that it exists. In the earliest phase of the customer journey, a business's goal is to reach the individual and, ultimately, attract them to the brand.

For a small- to medium-sized business, the work of this stage involves reaching out directly to consumers via channels like advertising , SEO , and social media . For a household name like American Express, this stage is dedicated to ensuring the impression their brand makes is a positive one. 

Consideration

Once potential customers are aware of your brand, the next phase they enter is called "consideration" or "research." This is when the customer's perspective shifts from simple awareness of your brand's existence to an understanding of the value that you have to offer them. 

During this phase, the brand's goal is to design touchpoints that demonstrate to the user why their product can solve a problem or improve an experience that's specific to that person. This can be done using guides and how-tos, partnerships with other brands , and ads that portray a customer problem being solved.

Some businesses also include a mini-stage called "Intent" or "Onboarding," when the customer has decided they're interested in the product and is testing it out. The company's goal in this stage is simply to provide an exceptional user experience—they want to make sure the product works as intended and the customer's questions and requests are handled well.

A business can identify customers that are primed for conversion based on behavior in the consideration stage. Someone who signs up for a newsletter isn't a hot sales prospect quite yet, but when they start opening more emails and spending more time on the site, that's when brands know they're ready for a conversion push.

Types of conversions vary depending on the type of business and industry. Examples of conversion pushes include:

An abandoned cart email pushing a browsing shopper to complete a purchase

A physical mail offer pushing a potential customer to open an account

A seasonal campaign highlighting why a product is perfect for a particular holiday, celebration, or event

When a conversion is successful, a potential buyer becomes an actual customer. The goal in the retention stage is to demonstrate to the customer why they were right to make their purchase, and set them up to make more purchases or renew services in the future.

The retention stage is also where the user experience or user journey begins. The company's job in this phase, then, is to provide the best possible user experience. Easy installation, frictionless customer service, and—this part should be obvious—a product or service that works well and provides the user what they need are all key components to improved customer retention.

Brand loyalty

In the final customer journey phase, users go from run-of-the-mill satisfied customers to active advocates for your business. 

You can encourage brand loyalty by offering exceptional customer service, referral programs, and loyalty discounts and exclusives.

Keep in mind: a customer doesn't need to be a zealot for your company to be an unintentional brand advocate. One of the biggest reasons I made the decision to apply for Amex's high-end card is because my best friend has it. She didn't specifically recommend it to me, but I became interested after experiencing a lot of the card benefits vicariously through her. 

Everything we've covered up to this point will only get you as far as a basic customer journey map. That doesn't mean, however, that your customer journey map will be good . Once you have the basic journey mapping structure down, you'll want to take steps to continually improve your map's effectiveness.

Survey your customers and customer teams

When designing touchpoints and determining where and how customers interact with your business, don't guess—your existing customer base is a valuable resource you can tap for a firsthand customer perspective. You can i ncentivize customers to participate in surveys and fill out feedback forms by offering discounts and perks in exchange.

Talk to your customer-facing employees, too. The people who work directly with customers day-to-day will have more accurate information about how to interact with them.

Automate customer data collection

High-quality, premium experiences are defined by their high level of personalization, and that personalization is only possible if you have information about your customer. It's not possible to sit there and take notes on every person who interacts with your brand, but it is possible to automatically collect lead data from customer interactions and have them collated in your CRM tool . 

Set up your contact management platform to automatically tag contacts with information like gender, age, products they've bought, events they've attended, what types of emails they open consistently and what emails they regularly ignore, whether their purchases indicate that they have pets or children, and so on. The more information you have, the better your customer experiences will be.

Tweak for B2B, B2C, and SaaS industries

The nature of the customer journey is different for SaaS, B2B, and B2C companies. A B2B company's interactions with prospects might include in-person conferences, while a SaaS company's touchpoints will be mostly digital. Companies that sell to consumers will need to think through individual people's experiences in a way that B2B companies don't. A company whose products are designed for emergencies will need to think through crisis scenarios instead of day-to-day customer experiences.

Tweak your customer journey categories to fit your company, product, and industry. Using a generalized or poorly-fitting customer journey map will result in vague and unhelpful interactions with your brand.

Create multiple maps for different journeys

When people refer to the customer journey, they're typically talking about the overarching journey from awareness to brand loyalty that we outlined above. However, you can map any part of the customer journey and experience. 

Do you target college students? Replace the five stages with four academic quarters and map their experience over the course of a year. 

Is your product designed to be used in the car? Map the customer journey through each hour of a long road trip. 

Zooming in to create detailed maps of different aspects of the customer journey will help you create even more specifically tailored customer experiences.

The template above follows the standard stages of the customer journey, but it's not the only way to do your customer journey mapping.

Two other commonly-used journey maps are the "Day in a life" journey map and the customer support journey map. We've provided the key elements of both below, as well as customer journey map templates for each.

Day/week/month in the life map

The best way to map mini-journeys within the larger customer experience lifecycle is with a "Day in a Life" journey map . This map plots the same things as the general customer journey map—key milestones, questions, touchpoints, and gaps—but over a particular period of time instead of over the course of the entire relationship. 

This map includes space for you to record the buyer persona's name, occupation, and motto, but these are really just shorthand for key persona characteristics. If you're selling baby diapers, for instance, your persona's occupation would be "parent," even if the person in question is also an accountant. 

The "motto" should be a condensed version of your persona's primary mindset with regard to their wants, needs, and pain points. The motto for an expecting first-time parent might be, "I'm excited but nervous—I have to make sure I'm prepared for anything."

Use the column headers to set your time frame. If you're marketing to expecting parents, the time frame might be the nine months of a pregnancy, or you might map an expectant mother's experiences through a single day in her third trimester. At each stage, ask yourself the same questions:

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand? Alternatively: how could our brand provide value at each stage?

A day in the life customer journey map will not only help you zoom in to develop more tailored experiences, but it will also give you insights into what might be useful to add or improve in your product or service.

Support experience map

One of the most common, and most significant, customer/brand interactions is the customer support journey . A frustrating customer service experience can turn someone off of your brand and product entirely, while a particularly impressive experience can immediately convert a regular user into a brand advocate.

This journey map is a bit different in that it doesn't just map touchpoints; it maps functional interactions between the customer and customer service representatives as well as the behind-the-scenes activities necessary to support the customer-facing team.

This map starts when the support ticket is opened and ends when the customer's issue is resolved. The top row of the map is simple: what is the customer doing at each stage in the support process?

​​Next, you'll record the corresponding actions of your customer-facing, or "frontstage" team. This includes both employees' actions and the systems engaged in the support process. For example, if the first step of your customer support process is handled by a chatbot or automatic phone system, these will go in the technology row. If the customer moves forward to request to speak with a representative, then the second stage is where your "employee actions" row will come into play.

Finally, the bottom row is for behind-the-scenes activity performed by employees who don't interact with the customer at all. For example, if the customer representative needs to get information from another department to answer the customer's questions, the other department's involvement will be recorded in the "backstage actions" section of the map.

To put it all together, here's an example customer journey map for a gym. 

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

"I can't go up a flight of stairs without getting winded; I need to get my health and fitness on track."

"I wish I knew someone who could recommend this gym." 

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

Success stories on social media in a front-and-center location, like a saved Instagram Stories collection or a pinned post 

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

"This gym looks clean and modern from the photos."

"I hate calling the gym, but I'd like to learn more about personal training or class options."

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

A live chat box on the gym's website for prospective customers to ask questions about the facility or membership options before visiting 

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

"The staff was friendly and it was easy to sign up."

"I wish I could see what classes they offer and weekly schedules without having to visit the gym."

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

A mobile app where members can track their progress, access class schedules, book personal trainer sessions, and receive personalized workout recommendations

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

"I wish I knew someone who could work out with me."

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

Community-building events like workshops or challenges to foster a sense of community and support among members and staff

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

"My coworker would love this gym since it's so close to work." 

"I love that teacher. I'm going to try some of her other classes."

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

A loyalty rewards program for members' continued commitment and engagement that offers exclusive discounts, merchandise, or access to premium services 

Your customers' spending habits, interests, challenges, and problems are always changing, and your customer journey maps should adapt along with them. But with so much data to track, it's a good idea to connect your insights to CRM software. Then you can automate your CRM to create specific, valuable experiences for your customers without breaking a sweat.

Related reading:

Beyond the sales pipeline: Using a CRM for customer success

A quick guide to contact management

B2B email marketing: Proven strategies + examples

4 tips for creating an inbound marketing strategy

This article was originally published in May 2021 by Nick Djurovic. The most recent update was in August 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• Sales & business development
• Small business

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

12 min read If you want to turn a potential customer into a lifetime one, you’ll need to get to know every step of the entire customer journey. Here’s why the secret to customer retention lies in knowing how to fine-tune your sales funnel…

What is the customer journey?

What do we actually mean when we talk about the customer journey? Well, the simplest way to think about it is by comparing it to any other journey: a destination in mind, a starting point, and steps to take along the way.

In this case, the destination is not only to make a purchase but to have a great experience with your product or service – sometimes by interacting with aftersale customer support channels – and become a loyal customer who buys again.

And, just like how you can’t arrive at your vacation resort before you’ve done you’ve found out about it, the customer journey starts with steps to do with discovery, research, understanding, and comparison, before moving on to the buying process.

“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

In short, the customer journey is the path taken by your target audience toward becoming loyal customers. So it’s really important to understand – both in terms of what each step entails and how you can improve each one to provide a maximally impressive and enjoyable experience.

Every customer journey will be different, after all, so getting to grips with the nuances of each customer journey stage is key to removing obstacles from in front of your potential and existing customers’ feet.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows:

• Consideration

These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts:

• Sale/Purchase

It’s important to understand every part of the puzzle, so let’s look at each sub-category and stage in turn, from the awareness and consideration stage, right through to advocacy:

Customer journey: Pre-sale

In the pre-sale phase, potential customers learn about products, evaluate their needs, make comparisons, and soak up information.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a company, product, or service. This might be passive – in that they’re served an ad online, on TV, or when out and about – or active in that they have a need and are searching for a solution. For example, if a customer needs car insurance, they’ll begin searching for providers.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the customer has been made aware of several possible solutions for their particular need and starts doing research to compare them. That might mean looking at reviews or what others are saying on social media, as well as absorbing info on product specs and features on companies’ own channels. They’re receptive to information that can help them make the best decision.

Customer journey: Sale

The sale phase is short but pivotal: it’s when the crucial decision on which option to go with has been made.

Decision stage

The customer has all the information they need on the various options available to them, and they make a purchase. This can be something that’s taken a long time to decide upon, like buying a new computer, or it can be as quick as quickly scouring the different kinds of bread available in the supermarket before picking the one they want.

Customer journey: Post-sale

Post-sale is a really important part of the puzzle because it’s where loyal customers , who come back time and again, are won or lost.

Retention stage

The retention stage of the customer journey is where you do whatever you can to help leave a lasting, positive impression on the customer, and entice them to purchase more. That means offering best-in-class customer support if they have any issues, but it also means being proactive with follow-up communications that offer personalized offers, information on new products, and rewards for loyalty.

Advocacy stage

If you nail the retention phase, you’ll have yourself a customer who not only wants to keep buying from you but will also advocate on your behalf. Here, the customer will become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, in that they’ll actively recommend you to their friends, family, followers, and colleagues.

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Great question; the two are similar, but not exactly the same. The buyer’s journey is a shorter, three-step process that describes the steps taken to make a purchase. So that’s awareness , consideration, and decision . That’s where things stop, however. The buyer’s journey doesn’t take into account the strategies you’ll use to keep the customer after a purchase has been made.

Why are the customer journey stages important?

The short answer? The customer journey is what shapes your entire business. It’s the method by which you attract and inform customers, how you convince them to purchase from you, and what you do to ensure they’re left feeling positive about every interaction.

Why this matters is that the journey is, in a way, cyclical. Customers who’ve had a smooth ride all the way through their individual journeys are more likely to stay with you, and that can have a massive effect on your operational metrics.

It’s up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, but even besides that: satisfied customers become loyal customers , and customer loyalty reduces churn at the same time as increasing profits .

So companies looking to really make an impact on the market need to think beyond simply attracting potential customers with impressive marketing, and more about the journey as a whole – where the retention and advocacy stages are equally important.

After all, 81% of US and UK consumers trust product advice from friends and family over brand messaging, and 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.

Importantly, to understand the customer journey as a whole is to understand its individual stages, recognize what works, and find things that could be improved to make it a more seamless experience. Because when you do that, you’ll be improving every part of your business proposition that matters.

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

Ok, so this whole customer journey thing is pretty important. Understanding the customer journey phases and how they relate to the overall customer experience is how you encourage customers to stick around and spread the news via word of mouth.

But how do you ensure every part of the journey is performing as it should? Here are some practical strategies to help each customer journey stage sing…

1. Perform customer journey mapping

A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map out a range of journeys that utilize a range of touch points along the way.

One customer journey map, for example, might start with a TV ad, then utilize social media and third-party review sites during the consideration stage, before purchasing online and then contacting customer support about you your delivery service. And then, finally, that customer may be served a discount code for a future purchase. That’s just one example.

Customer journey mapping is really about building a myriad of those journeys that are informed by everything you know about how customers interact with you – and then using those maps to discover weaker areas of the journey.

2. Listen like you mean it

The key to building better customer journeys is listening to what customers are saying. Getting feedbac k from every stage of the journey allows you to build a strong, all-encompassing view of what’s happening from those that are experiencing it.

Maybe there’s an issue with the customer sign-up experience, for example. Or maybe the number advertised to contact for a demo doesn’t work. Or maybe you have a customer service agent in need of coaching, who only makes the issue worse. By listening, you’ll understand your customers’ issues and be able to fix them at the source. That customer service agent, for example, may just feel disempowered and unsupported, and in need of the right tools to help them perform better. Fixing that will help to optimize a key stage in the customer journey.

The key is to listen at every stage, and we can do that by employing the right technology at the right customer journey stages.

Customer surveys, for instance, can help you understand what went wrong from the people who’re willing to provide that feedback, but conversational analytics and AI solutions can automatically build insights out of all the structured and unstructured conversational data your customers are creating every time they reach out, or tweet, or leave a review on a third party website.

3. Get personal

The other side of the ‘listening’ equation is that it’s worth remembering that each and every customer’s journey is different – so treating them with a blanket approach won’t necessarily make anything better for them.

The trick instead is to use the tools available to you to build out a personalized view of every customer journey, customer journey stage, and customer engagemen t, and find common solutions.

Qualtrics Experience iD , for example, is an intelligent system that builds customer profiles that are unique to them and can identify through AI, natural language processing , and past interactions what’s not working – and what needs fixing.

On an individual basis, that will help turn each customer into an advocate. But as a whole, you’ll learn about experience gaps that are common to many journeys.

Listening to and understanding the customer experience at each customer journey stage is key to ensuring customers are satisfied and remain loyal on a huge scale.

It’s how you create 1:1 experiences, because, while an issue for one person might be an issue for many others, by fixing it quickly you can minimize the impact it might have on future customers who’re right at the start of their journey.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management Improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, request demo.

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What is the Customer Journey in Marketing?

Are you struggling to reach your target audience despite marketing on the most popular channels? Rest assured that while this is common, there is a simple reason why: you’re not crafting and delivering your messages based on the customer’s journey and decision intelligence .

As Annette Franz , an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, once said: “In a world where products and services are becoming more and more commoditized, customer experience is the only true differentiator.” In today’s market, this means more personalization. Research shows that most customers appreciate brand personalization: 71% have come to expect it, and 76% get frustrated when brands don’t do it. 

And the only way to provide a unique, personalized customer experience is by knowing each customer’s journey from their first touchpoint with your brand to now. So, what is the customer journey in marketing, and why is it important? Keep reading to find out!

Understanding the Customer Journey in Marketing

In the simplest terms, the customer journey in marketing refers to the path buyers take from their first interaction with your brand and products/services through making a purchase. Hopefully, the journey will continue. It’s an essential component of marketing, in particular, because it gives you insight into potential motives buyers have for moving from the stage in which they learn about your brand to the final step in which they advocate for you. 

As the iconic quote goes,  “focus on the journey, not the destination.” Although Greg Anderson was referring to the joy of doing something you love, it’s also relevant in today’s marketing.

The fact that customers purchase from you is excellent, but the real gold is found in what led to that purchasing decision. This insight will allow you to guide other potential customers to the same outcome. 

Related: How to Measure the Performance of Your Buyer’s Journey Funnel

5 stages of the customer journey.

To thoroughly understand the answer to “what is the customer journey in marketing?” you must also get familiar with the buyer stages. The number of steps can vary from company to company. However, the more detailed you are about the journey your customer takes with your brand, the better prepared you will be to guide them to not only purchase but build loyalty and advocate for your brand. 

To cover your bases, you’ll need to be intimately familiar with at least these five stages and how they will pertain to your target audience specifically. 

1. Awareness

In the awareness stage, your customers have identified they have a problem and are just now becoming aware of their potential solutions. Now would be a good time to implement marketing efforts like content marketing because it:

• Draws consumer’s in as they discover possible solutions
• Provides insight into what solutions are available to resolve their problem
• Associates your brand and products/services with the solutions they need

2. Consideration 

Consumers begin ‘considering’ their options when they move into the consideration stage. At this point, you’ll want to differentiate your brand from the competition well enough to show these potential customers that you’re the solution they need. Marketing methods like email marketing and social media are often helpful in this stage because they connect you with consumers on a more personal level. This, in turn, helps you:

• Build meaningful relationships with potential customers
• Interact and engage effectively
• Continue to provide informative information to help make their search easier (i.e., experts advice, tips, how-to’s, checklists, etc.)

3. Decision

Customers in the decision stage have made their decision — and they picked you! Great news, but your marketing is far from over. Now you want to nourish that relationship into the next step. You can do this by:

• Emailing a ‘Thank You’ for their purchase, personalizing it with their name and what they purchased (if a mailed product, a personalized thank you is often appreciated in the package)
• Sending discounts and ‘exclusive’ offers for repeat purchases or your other products/services
• Showing your appreciation for their support 

4. Retention

If you’ve guided your customers into the retention stage, you have leveled them up to repeat buyers. You can continue encouraging repeat purchases with discounts and deals, but there’s still another stage. To guide your buyers into the fifth stage of advocacy, you’ll want to consider the following: 

• Prioritize positive and seamless customer experiences
• Reward your repeat customers with gated content and exclusive deals
• Create a customer loyalty program 
• Create content that continues to resolve customer problems even after they’ve made a purchase (for instance, tips for using the product correctly or a how-to video on using all of its exclusive features)

5. Advocacy/Loyalty 

The final stage of your customer journey is that beautiful sweet spot where customers not only become loyal to your brand but are inclined to advocate it to friends and family! Loyalty essentially equates to free marketing through word-of-mouth and referrals.

To keep your repeat customers at this stage, you must truly understand them. After all, research shows that more than half ( 56% ) of consumers stay loyal to brands they say “get them.”

To maintain and nourish loyalty and advocacy, your brand will need to continue doing the following:

• Engaging with customers on marketing channels and platforms they’re most active on
• Offering promotions that are relevant to the customer’s problems and purchase history
• Delivering personalized content and communication — i.e., Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary, and customer appreciation notices.
• Asking your loyal customer for advice AND listening to it

Why is The Customer Journey Important in Today’s Market?

Now that you can answer “what is the customer journey in marketing?” it’s essential to know why it matters to your brand. You should know your customer’s journey in today’s market for several reasons. However, a few notable consumer trends in today’s market that are leading the way for more customer journey mapping include:

• Personalization — research shows that most (90%) of consumers in the U.S. say that marketing personalization is ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ appealing, and 72% report that they only engage with personalized brand messages. 
• Customer service and experience — 81% of consumers say that a positive customer experience influences repeat purchases. Another report found that more than 65% of people in today’s market have higher expectations for customer service than just 3-5 years ago (Millennials, in particular). 
• Multiple touchpoints — Studies have found that at least 73% of consumers shop across multiple channels and that buyers engage with at least 3-5 channels during each journey they take towards the decision stage.  
• Consistency — in addition to wanting to interact with brands on multiple platforms, 90% of customers expect brands to be consistent across all platforms. 

These key trends in today’s market allow marketers to understand each touchpoint at the individual level better. This level of understanding can significantly affect how well you know your audience and reach them. Imagine how well your brand would stand out if it could not only personalize the language and relevance of your messaging to the receiver but also deliver it at the exact moment they need to hear it to move forward to the next stage. 

Steve Jobs once advised that you “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need before they realize it themselves.” Mapping your Customer Journey is how you get started!

Related: Influencing Marketing’s Impact on Revenue Throughout the Customer Journey

Ready to map your customer’s journey you’ll need revops automation including integration, data hygiene, and intelligence.

Integrating customer data across marketing and sales systems is critical to understanding the customer journey and improving customer experiences. And yet, many still don’t have the necessary integrations to execute it successfully. According to one study , 88% of industry leaders believed their company was ill-equipped to meet customer expectations because of “operational obstacles of integrating customer knowledge into workflows, cross-functional collaboration, and real-time access to consumer insights.”

Another common challenge is access to clean data. You need to be sure the data is clean to make the most of the insights and leverage them in highly segmented marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, only 5% of executives trust the quality of their data despite the consequences of poor data quality averaging $15 million annually in losses. 

Now you can answer: what is the customer journey in marketing? But how do you ensure it’s backed by clean data and well integrated across marketing and sales? We’ve got that answer too!Contact Vertify so you can seamlessly automate the integration of your marketing and sales data with quality analytics to enrich your insight into what is working and what isn’t. You’ll provide more optimized marketing efforts and waste less time on initiatives that won’t get your brand in front of the right audience.

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Always Coca-Cola: An Iconic Brand's Mission to Get to Know Its Customers - S718

English closed captions will be added in early April.

Shekhar Gowda

Global Head, Marketing Technology, The Coca-Cola Company

Global Chief Experience Officer, VML

Bruce Richards

Head of Industry Strategy and Marketing - Consumer Goods, Adobe

Caroline Balschmidt

Client Partner, VML MAP

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ABOUT THE SESSION

The Coca-Cola Company is undergoing an epic marketing transformation. Previously an organization removed from its customers, it’s now on a mission to bring together two billion people with its brands digitally, refreshing their worlds and making a difference in their lives. To do this, the company partnered with Adobe and WPP Open X. It began a journey to deliver consistency and connections across a global digital ecosystem with over 1,000 websites and mobile apps.

Learn about:

• How after two years into this new partnership, accelerated innovation has impacted the business and inspired its customers
• Future ambitions of one of the world’s most iconic brands

Track: Commerce, Customer Data Management and Acquisition, Customer Journey Management , Content Supply Chain, Generative AI

Presentation Style: Case/use study

Audience Type: Advertiser, Digital marketer, Marketing executive, Audience strategist, Marketing practitioner, Marketing analyst, Business decision maker, IT professional, Marketing technologist, Omnichannel architect, Social strategist

Technical Level: Intermediate

Industry Focus: Automotive, Consumer goods, Retail, Travel, hospitality, and dining

This content is copyrighted by Adobe Inc. Any recording and posting of this content is strictly prohibited.

By accessing resources linked on this page ("Session Resources"), you agree that 1. Resources are Sample Files per our Terms of Use and 2. you will use Session Resources solely as directed by the applicable speaker.

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Meet Adobe GenStudio, coming soon, a generative AI-first product to unite and accelerate your content supply chain.

Global Head, Marketing Technology

The Coca-Cola Company

Shekhar Gowda is a leader in Marketing Technology at Coca-Cola Company. He leads the Marketing Technology Organization, overseeing global platform development, governance, and experience & campaign rollouts. He has over 20 years of Software Engineering and Management Experience, and has worked with fortune 100 companies, helping to execute their digital transformation journey by designing and delivering scalable, secure, and engaging global MarTech Platforms. Shekhar spent the past 10 years at IPG/MRM McCann leading MarTech COEx, building onshore, offshore, and partners engineering teams. He was instrumental in designing and delivering Next Gen Platforms for General Motors, AB InBev, Coca-Cola, BASF, Cabela’s, Red Robin, and Verizon.  He holds an MBA from the Ross School of Business – University of Michigan, and an MS in Computer Science from Oakland University.

Global Chief Experience Officer

Jeff is VML’s Global Chief Experience Officer and the visionary behind the company’s customer experience practice. This practice combines technology, strategy, commerce, and innovation, experience design, and creativity to transform the way companies work, how they innovate, and how they adapt to changes in technology.

As VML’s chief experience officer, Jeff grows the agency’s world-class experience design, commerce, and technology capabilities. Jeff has spent more than 20 years at VML, formerly VMLY&R, shaping many of the most pivotal client engagements through his balanced understanding of consumers, business and technology. He has diverse experience across clients such as Ford, Kellogg, Kimberly-Clark, Microsoft and Sprint. 

Head of Industry Strategy and Marketing - Consumer Goods

Bruce Richards joined Adobe in 2018 and leads Industry Strategy & Marketing for Consumer Goods. With 25+ years as an executive leader in the Retail and Consumer Goods industries, he is responsible for establishing Adobe’s industry specific point-of-view and go-to-market strategy.

Bruce specializes in customer experience, digital strategy and marketing and works with Adobe’s clients to help them establish best-in-class strategies and align the right solutions to those strategies. He has a wealth of experience in marketing and customer advisory roles having led client services in several consulting and marketing services organizations working with some of the world’s largest retailers and brands including Macy’s, Estee Lauder, Bloomingdale’s, Biersdorf, CVS/pharmacy, and Hanesbrands.

Client Partner

Caroline is a seasoned professional and Global Client Partner who has been with VML MAP for ten years. She excels in creating marketing programs for connecting brands and consumers through personalized experiences and digital engagement at scale; devising strategies and delivering solutions for turning consumer data into insights to build customer loyalty that fosters shareholder value and brand equity.

In her role as Global Lead for Consumer Data Strategy, CRM, and Loyalty for WPP Open X and The Coca-Cola Company, she globally spearheads consumer-centric strategies across the 230+ iconic brands. In her capacity as a global leader of digital strategy and activation, she has consistently delivered tangible business results through the integration of data and technology into the digital ecosystem for memorable brand experiences.

In addition, Caroline has extensive expertise in digital transformation and organizational design. She skillfully leverages digital technologies to optimize business processes and identify innovative revenue streams.

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Chinese Animation Film ‘The Umbrella Fairy’ to Be Launched by Fortissimo at Cannes Market (EXCLUSIVE)

By Patrick Frater

Patrick Frater

Asia Bureau Chief

• Indonesia’s Visinema Launches Film-to-Stage Adaptation ‘Keluarga Cemara: The Musical’ 6 hours ago
• Tran Anh Hung Set as Shanghai Film Festival Jury Chief – Global Bulletin 13 hours ago
• Chinese Animation Film ‘The Umbrella Fairy’ to Be Launched by Fortissimo at Cannes Market (EXCLUSIVE) 15 hours ago

China- and Netherlands-based sales firm Fortissimo Films has picked up the international rights to new Chinese animation feature “ The Umbrella Fairy .” It will launch the film next month at the Cannes Market .

“The Umbrella Fairy” tells the story of Qingdai, a royal umbrella’s fairy. As Qingdai fails her mission to guard a sword’s fairy who escapes the royal pavilion for vengeance, she embarks on a journey with a young craftsman to prevent a war.

Put together with a strongly Oriental aesthetic, the film brings together a rich mix of Chinese traditional crafts, architecture and opera, creating a unique fantastical world.

Popular on Variety

Production is by Maoyan Entertainment, a company which has its roots in online film ticket sales, but which has diversified into film marketing, distribution and finance.

“The Umbrella Fairy,” which will release in mainland Chinese theaters in summer, is the first animated feature produced by the company and also its first film to be handled by Fortissimo for overseas sales. Fortissimo will represent the rights worldwide, with the exception of mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Japan.

Fortissimo’s recent lineup includes another visually unique Chinese animation Tian Xiaopeng’s “Deep Sea,” which played at a raft of film festivals including Annecy, Berlin, Tribeca and Tokyo through 2022 and 2023. It also recently handled live action production “100 Yards” by veteran director Xu Haofeng, which played last year at the Shanghai and Toronto festivals and at Rotterdam in early 2024.

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