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Digital Customer Journey: Definition, Stages & Examples

Defining the digital customer journey (DCJ) our customers follow is critical to offering a good user experience. This process that finally leads to the purchase must be optimized if we want good results.

That is why more and more companies recommend products or services that might interest you. Even streaming services such as Hulu or Netflix suggest movies or series that you might like, personalizing user experience. The most exciting thing about this is that these strategies are not coincidental. There are many efforts behind it, such as building a great customer experience strategy through the use of tools like the customer journey .

LEARN ABOUT: Perfect Customer-First Strategy

One of the greatest challenges for companies is learning what their customers want. How do you live up to their expectations? What are the exact moments and places that most influence their buying decisions?

LEARN ABOUT: Time to Value

If you want to learn more about what is digital customer journey, its five stages and read some examples, this is the right article for you.

Content Index

• Digital Customer Journey Definition
• Optimizing your Digital Customer Journey

The five stages of the Digital Customer Journey

• Example of Digital Customer Journey

What is Digital Customer Journey?

The Digital Customer Journey (DCJ) is the process carried out by a user. It goes from the moment the user identifies they have a need, to the moment they acquire a product or service to satisfy or solve it.

This process or journey comprises five different phases: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and customer advocacy . The user will decide on either buying or discarding your product/service, depending on how every interaction with your brand within those 5 phases makes them feel. And remember, the best way to attain a good visualization of user interactions, touchpoints and all stages is through a user journey map .

In each phase there are different touchpoints . This term refers to the contact points where the user and the company meet. The DCJ is built to identify these points of contact. Of course, this journey is not the same for all users. Depending on the type of consumer, their trip will be different; thus, their relationship with these customer points of contact will vary.

The DCJ is not only a descriptive tool of a process but also a practical one. It is the first step in an optimization process that leads to better sales opportunities and more satisfied customers.

Learn how to create your  customer journey canvas  and download our template.

Why optimizing your Digital Customer Journey is a good idea?

The focus on customer experience has surpassed the price and the product as a brand differentiator. The strategy’s success is based on the communication of different areas within an organization. But, mainly, on understanding the importance of their role in digital customer experience .

Today, the main trends that stand out in the management of relationships between companies and clients are: a more informed, hyper-connected, self-sufficient, demanding and much more emotional consumer. Similarly, the transformation of the opening of multiple channels and their correct integration to the contact, self-service and customer experience channels regarding a product or service.

Here lies the importance of the Digital Customer Journey. While the purpose of any marketing strategy is to execute a purchase, the process the customer goes through is now as relevant as the purchase itself. In other words, if the customer does not have a pleasant, frictionless experience during their purchase journey, they will most likely not reach their destination.

If you like reading about what is the digital customer journey, you might find interesting learning about customer journey vs customer experience: the difference .

Let’s look at the different phases in the case of the online customer journey.

Awareness (pre-sale)

The customer awareness or discovery phase is where the user realizes they have a need. Keep in mind that “the need” is a broad concept in the customer journey.

A need may be, for example, that you want to try the new flavor of a brand of candies. You didn’t know that flavor existed, and suddenly, you discover it. Or, for example, you feel like getting a massage based on a post you saw on your Instagram feed.

Discovery can be offline, for example, in a conversation with friends, in a shop window, or in a TV commercial, before going online. In general, the entire customer journey can start offline and go digital.

LEARN ABOUT:  Customer Journey Mapping Tools

If you like reading about customer journey, you might find valuble to learn how to build your own Customer Journey Map .

In this case, where we’re talking about a 100% digital process, the most common way to get to the awareness phase is through advertising, whether on social networks, websites, or search engines or even through sponsored articles in the media.

It is also possible to discover it through recommendations on social networks, where influencer marketing strategies come into play.

Be that as it may, this first stage is passive for the user, requiring no effort from the user’s standpoint. They discover they have a need based on observing Ads or by listening to a friend talk about a specific brand, for instance. If they decide to investigate further, we move on to the next phase.

2. Consideration (pre-sale)

Digital consideration is the second phase of the digital customer journey. At this point, the user begins to think about what they have discovered and consider if and where to buy it.

Here it begins the search process. The brand can reach the user through SEO and SEM content strategy by sending out email campaigns, reviews on third-party websites or sponsored articles, etc…

Consideration is perhaps the stage where most companies invest more money since it is where everything is at stake. The business needs to attract the user with various digital marketing strategies in order to compete and win the first spot in the mind of the consumer. 

At this point is when the potential client has to understand what you offer that the competition does not give. And as we have already mentioned, it is not only an informative process but also an emotional one.

At the consideration stage, it is crucial to differentiate from the competition and offer the added value of your brand. It is not only about solving the need once but about truly understanding the user persona that is targeted so that later down the line, they become loyal customers. 

3. Purchase (post-sale)

Finally, it’s time to buy. We cannot express enough how the shopping experience in a digital customer journey is crucial. For instance, if the website usability is poor, you leave. In case there are too many steps or you can’t pay with your preferred payment method, you also leave.

Cart abandonment is a crucial problem in many e-commerce. Within the company’s digitization strategy, optimizing the sales process is essential to not lose all previous work.

Your potential client is lost because they instead go to an alternative where the process is more accessible. For this, it is necessary to make the purchase as easy and frictionless as possible for the customer. If they feel that it is becoming a hassle to purchase something at your online commerce, they turn around to your competition. 

You can make the purchase process easier by offering alternatives such as data autofill, having different transaction payment methods or providing competitive shipping options, for instance. These actions are essential, so the purchase is not lost at the last moment.

4. Retention (post-sale)

Once the purchase is over, we move on to retention. If your experience in customer service has been positive, it will be much easier to convince your customers to stay. 

How do you do that? It could be a telephone after-sales service, reaching out to the customer through a digital channel and touching base with them to offer extra support with their purchase. Responding promptly to the customer will aid to get a better impression of your business and, most importantly, increase the customer’s lifetime cycle rate. 

There are different strategies your marketing and customer success team can implement to build longstanding customer relationships. That could be sending out additional resources to add more value to the purchase, creating a customer online community, and keeping the CX experts following up with online surveys to learn more about their current experience with the brand, to name a few.

In the Retention phase, the key is to make the client feel that they’re important to the business. 

5. Advocacy (this is where every business wants customers on)

Lastly, we need these satisfied customers to recommend us to other potential customers. In this sense, the voice of the customer (VOC) must be listened to. As we explained in our article on what VOC means, this methodology puts the customer and their impressions at the center.

If you find it interesting reading about the voice of the customer, you might want to review these VOC survey questions and templates . 

We can know what our NPS is and what we need to change to achieve these recommendations through customer satisfaction surveys. Considering that retaining a customer is much more profitable than getting a new one, profitability will most likely skyrocket if our retained customers recommend us.

Example of Digital Customer Journey: Purchasing a guitar online

Now that every stage of the digital customer journey is explained let’s go over all of the phases in a simple example. 

Let’s say you want to purchase a guitar. In the awareness phase, you discover you’d like to learn to play a musical instrument. Maybe the mobile phone “heard you” speak with your friends about your interest to learn to play the guitar, and now your social media and every website you visit are bursting with Ads of companies wanting to sell you the “best guitar in the market.” The awareness or discovery stage doesn’t require any effort from the user other than reading the Ads that show up on your digital channels. 

The next stage, consideration , is when you start to notice you might ponder on the idea of the purchasing process of a guitar. Now the search process has begun, and you’re actively looking for the best guitar that fits you. In this stage, you could be doing things like watching YouTube reviews, reading a blog post about “the top 10 best guitar alternatives for beginners,” and even comparing prices from different e-commerces such as Amazon, Best Buy, or an official musical instruments online store. Once it’s decided where you want to purchase your product, you go to their website to order it. But then you get a couple of unpleasant surprises. The website user experience is terrible because the pages take a lot of time to load. Even when you manage to overcome such inconvenience with a lot of patience, the site marks an error whenever you’re trying to do the transaction with your card. Given your e-shopping experience got stuck, now you go to your second online shop website of preference. This time you can navigate through the website quite faster, and the payment transaction with your card gets through with ease. 

The second option you had to go for instead of the first one continues bringing in a great customer experience. What happens in the retention stage? Well, they said the approximate delivery date was going to be in a week, but you got your guitar within 3 days! Plus, it comes in a nice box with a personalized note from the business thanking you for the purchase and offering flexible return policies. Besides, you’ve also received downloadable resources and provided customer access to an online community portal where you can connect with other users and get support from the company’s Customer Success team. All of these actions may seem like a bonus, but they aim to make the client feel special, so the next time you need to purchase any other instrument or an extra set of new strings, you buy with them.     

Finally, if you’re happy with the guitar and the service they continually provide post-sale, you might start recommending them to other people, be it in person or by writing a review on their website.

This may take some time to get here, so the sum of what the business does in all the previous stages (especially retention) is critical.

 This is the part where you, as their customer, are so happy with the product and their service that you start genuinely advocating for them.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Decision Journey

In conclusion…

• The Digital Customer journey is the process carried out by a user when interacting with your brand to satisfy a need with your product or service. 
• There are 5 stages the user goes through Discovery, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.
• Touchpoints are a critical part of a DCJ because they are your company’s points of customer contact, end to end.
• The success of your company relies on the optimization of your DCJ. Remember, the customer’s process is as relevant as the purchase itself.
• Great customer experiences can be obtained through the use of a powerful customer experience management platform.

If you’d like to boost customer loyalty at your company, QuestionPro CX can help you achieve it with our extensive toolbox set of features, including the creation and deployment of CX surveys, NPS flexible dashboards, sentiment analysis , customer churn prediction, closed-loop feedback system to address customer issues better, and more! 

Do you have a CX program and don’t know where to start or how to incorporate a CEM? Share what’s your current business challenge, and we will offer you different proposals tailored to your needs.

Try QuestionPro CX today if you want to boost customer loyalty by efficiently processing large amounts of data in real-time and turning them into fact-driven action support. 

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• What is a digital customer journey?

Last updated

22 May 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Learn the definition of the digital customer journey and why it’s crucial for your product in this comprehensive guide. 

The digital buyer or customer journey encompasses all of a customer’s interactions with your company, from discovery to purchase.

It consists of all the interactions across all online brand channels and touchpoints, including: 

The company's website

Mobile applications

Social media channels

SMS messaging

These interactions influence their purchasing experience. 

• Why analyze your digital customer journey?

Since a digital customer journey guides the customer to purchase, analyzing it will enable you to offer a seamless shopping experience. 

You should also analyze your digital customer journey to: 

Understand customer needs and expectations

Proactively detect friction points that are challenging a seamless customer experience

Gain insights into adjusting your marketing efforts for better results

• The different stages of the digital customer journey 

The stages of a buyer's journey vary by business and customer. However, when a customer embarks on purchasing a product or service, they go through these five distinct phases:

Awareness: The discovery phase

Here, customers are at the start of the buyer lifecycle. This is where customers discover their problems and seek solutions to these pain points . They have a goal in mind and need to find a solution. 

During this phase, customers become aware of your brand's existence and the products you sell. Brand awareness can span multiple channels, such as: 

Word of mouth

Social media

Brand advocates

Email marketing

Search engine suggestions

Affiliate marketing

As a business, good branding and a solid social media presence are essential to capture the audience's attention. 

With a digital customer journey, you have stronger control over your marketing campaigns than the traditional customer journey.

Consideration: The evaluation phase 

This is the stage where customers have done enough research and are now evaluating the different brands and their offers. The customer is aware of your brand and may start evaluating whether you can solve their problem. 

When a customer is dissatisfied with a brand’s offerings, they move on to one that delivers a seamless experience. 

During the evaluation phase, customers: 

Visit various company websites

Review platforms

Watch product videos to choose the best solution

Read in-depth case studies and reviews

Customers who are satisfied with your company will sign up for a free trial. A brand has a lot of control at this stage, so ensure that you demonstrate how you can solve their problem. 

Decision: The selection phase

This is the final stage of the digital customer journey. The customer selects a brand they want to proceed with and make their purchase. 

Some content to promote at this stage is free demos, consultations, and product promotions to demonstrate an advantage over your competitors.

Retention: Turning users into regulars

A common problem is ensuring stickiness to your product: Companies can achieve high logins and subscriptions but fail anyway. Preventing this requires learning what keeps their users from returning. 

Meta used “Facebook friends” to retain users, which was instrumental in achieving its lofty goals. The company learned that a new Facebook user with five friends was much more likely to log in regularly. 

Advocacy: The promoting phase

What could become the most vital stage to achieve is the advocacy phase. Here, a company can cultivate a more effortless marketing cycle. 

During the advocacy stage, users become champions of your product without prompt or incentive, referring their friends and peers. This obviously saves valuable marketing dollars, organically shuffling in primed users to your discovery phase. 

Amazon uses a version of the buyer’s phases known as The Product-Led Growth Flywheel , which it refers to as the virtuous cycle. 

The Flywheel encapsulates existing metrics and structures from marketing and product to achieve organic growth exponentially by cultivating champions that do your marketing work for you.

• What is a digital customer journey map?

A digital customer journey map visually depicts a customer's interaction with a brand. 

This visual representation gives a narrative of a customer's steps, from initial engagement with a brand to the last stage of purchasing a service or product. 

It comprises: 

Consumer data

Transaction information

Customer service interactions

Cross-device browsing history

A digital customer journey map provides insight into what motivates customers to purchase and their pain points when interacting with various touchpoints. 

• What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping involves developing a customer journey. The goal is to map out the customer's actions at each touchpoint. 

Customer journey mapping has endless benefits, including:

A deeper understanding of your customers

Customer journey mapping gives you a holistic view of all customers interacting with your brand. 

It allows you to understand their varying characteristics and purchasing behaviors. This enables a company to tailor its products. 

With customer personas , your brand can better address their needs and wants. 

Curating a unique customer experience

Journey mapping provides a perspective of the customer's experience, and you learn how to structure your processes to encourage more customer purchases. 

Since customer demands are growing, digital journeys are becoming vital in how companies engage with customers. It allows companies to improve their customers' interactions over digital channels. 

Growth of business revenue

Knowing your customers' pain points positions you to offer solutions to their problems, so you can boost sales and increase revenue in the long run. 

Improving touchpoints will boost the customer onboarding process, building new revenue. 

Reducing operational costs

When you know more about your customers, forming a strategy is clearer and cheaper. Understanding their demographics means you’re less likely to spend money everywhere. For example, knowing your customers aren’t on Facebook can save your ad campaign budget. 

Sometimes customers have basic questions that bots can handle. Leveraging live chatbots can reduce the cost of hiring real agents to interact with your customers.

With personalized market campaigns, the marketing team knows what to communicate and when. This allows the company to optimize the return on market investments. 

• Creating your digital customer journey map

Here is a brief guide to mapping your digital customer journey:

Step 1: Conduct customer research

You create a digital customer journey map using data from primary research . Collecting and analyzing target audience data is vital to making customer-centric decisions. 

To ensure you have reliable information, conduct focus groups , in-person interviews , and brainstorming workshops .

Step 2: Design a buyer persona

With the collected research data, create buyer personas . A buyer persona is a profile of your ideal customer where you consider their characteristics and behaviors, such as demographics. 

As you design a digital customer journey map, account for different customer needs and expectations for your personas. These personas allow you to understand your customers better, including their motivations, challenges, needs, and what they need you to solve.

Step 3: Leverage the power of personalization  

Option overload is an issue as brands compete for consumers' attention. 

Personalizing the customer experience allows you to stand out and tailor products to their needs. With personalization, you can display appropriate messages to target personas instead of wasting resources. 

Step 4: Define the stages of a digital customer journey

The next step is to determine the actions that will lead your customers to conclude a purchase. 

Consider the customer's perspective, thoughts, emotions, pain points, and goals for each stage. This will help you understand what each customer is struggling with and trying to accomplish. 

Step 5: Outline all your touchpoints with the target audience

Touchpoints are where prospective customers interact with your brand. 

They can include:

Social media profiles

YouTube videos

First, list all the touchpoints and evaluate how each fits your customer's journey. Remember that touchpoints differ from one buyer persona to another depending on their customer journey map . 

Outlining the touchpoints allows you to assess which is most crucial in their purchasing process. 

Next, optimize each touchpoint for customer onboarding and conversion. 

If you’re unsure, use web analytics to identify traffic sources. 

Step 6: Align your touchpoints to offer a seamless customer experience

Once you’ve defined the customer touchpoints and the main stages in a customer journey, put it all together. 

Create a well-organized digital customer journey map to guide buyers from start to end. 

Step 7: Update customer journey maps frequently

A customer journey map is an ongoing investment as changes often occur. 

Once you’ve mapped out a digital customer journey, identify gaps and ways to improve customer satisfaction . 

To achieve this, frequently collect customer feedback and use it as a foundation for improvements.

You can also experience the customer journey yourself: Walk through all the stages while noting any obstacles you encounter. 

Here are some questions to get you started as you review your customer journey:

Was the purchasing process easy?

How easy was it to get in touch with customer care?

Was the agent helpful?

Is the whole exercise time-consuming?

Is the information at the different stages relevant?

How should you deliver a seamless customer experience?

• Digital customer journey examples

Here are two examples of digital customer journeys:

Example one: Repairing a broken car

During the awareness stage, the car owner knows the car is unfit for driving, so they must fix it. 

They search for a mechanic and may look for customer testimonials from previous customers of nearby garages. 

During the consideration stage, the client has various solutions and seeks the best option to solve their issue. 

Next, the customer will compare garages offering specific repair services before identifying one with the best reviews or a successful track record. 

Once the customer settles on a garage that offers repair services, they will interact with the mechanic and begin repair negotiations. 

Example 2: Booking of an airplane ticket

In this example, the customer's journey begins when they realize they need to travel. 

At the awareness stage, the customer will conduct online research on airlines and routes to their destinations. They may come across the airline via social media channels, advertisements, or even referrals from friends. 

Once they list all the airline brands, the customer will consider the available flights and decide which best fits their needs. 

On the other side, airlines try to upsell additional services to appeal to customers. Therefore, customers may consider airlines that upsell services such as priority onboarding or upgraded seats. 

Depending on their spending limits or airlines with better offerings, customers will compare the flight options that best suit their budget. They abandon tickets outside their means. 

The decision stage ends when the customers purchase a ticket and receive an onboarding pass, travel information, and guides via email.

Who is involved in a digital customer journey?

A digital customer journey is a process a user (potential customer) goes through when interacting with a brand.

What are the four types of digital users?

The four types of digital users are explorers, socializers, achievers, and listeners. 

Which department is responsible for the customer journey? 

Sales and marketing departments play a vital role in optimizing a customer journey map. 

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous user research faster?

Do you share your user research findings with others?

Do you analyze user research data?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

Businesses need to understand their customers to increase engagement, sales, and retention. But building an understanding with your customers isn’t easy.

The customer journey is the road a person takes to convert, but this journey isn’t always obvious to business owners. Understanding every step of that journey is key to business success. After reading this article, you’ll understand the customer journey better and how to use it to improve the customer experience while achieving your business goals.

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

Use the customer journey map to optimize the customer experience, what is a customer journey.

The customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

Giving customers a positive customer experience is important for getting customers to trust a business, so optimizing the customer journey has never mattered more. By mastering the customer journey, you can design customer experiences that will lead to better customer relationships, loyalty, and long-term retention .

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

The stages of the customer’s journey are different from the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer. The better this experience is for customers at each stage, the more likely your leads are to stick around.

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams optimize for these five stages of the customer journey:

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand and products. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for pens for left-handed people, their customer journey begins when they’re first aware of your brand’s left-handed pen.

At this stage, potential customers learn about your business via web content, social media, influencers, and even their friends and family. However, this isn’t the time for hard sells. Customers are simply gathering information at this stage, so you should focus first on answering their questions and building trust.

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to their problem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

Consideration-stage customers want to see product features that lean heavily toward solving problems and content that doesn’t necessarily push a sale. At this stage, businesses need to position their solution as a better alternative. For example, a nutrition coaching app might create content explaining the differences between using the app and working with an in-person nutritionist — while subtly promoting the benefits of choosing the app.

3. Purchase

The purchase stage is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers are ready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

As a business, it’s your job to persuade shoppers at this stage to buy from you. Provide information on pricing, share comparison guides to showcase why you’re the superior option, and set up abandoned cart email sequences.

4. Retention

The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

The key to the retention stage is to maintain positive, engaging relationships between your brand and its customers. Try strategies like regular email outreach, coupons and sales, or exclusive communities to encourage customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers are so delighted with your products and services that they spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

Customer journeys don’t have a distinct end because brands should always aim to please even their most loyal customers. In the advocacy stage of the customer journey, you can offer referral bonuses, loyalty programs, and special deals for your most active customers to encourage further advocacy.

Being aware of the customer journey helps shed more light on your target audience’s expectations and needs. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. This means optimizing the customer journey will not only encourage your current customers to remain loyal but will also make you more competitive in acquiring new business.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

• Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.
• Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing on only the most effective channels.
• Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.
• Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.
• Increase customer engagement. Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% of customers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.
• Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.
• Generate more ROI. You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7% .
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Businesses shouldn’t use a rigid, one-size-fits-all customer journey map. Instead, they should plan flexible, individual types of customer journeys — whether they’re based on a certain demographic or on individual customer personas. To design the most effective customer journey map, your brand needs to understand a customer’s:

• Actions. Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look for common patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.
• Motivations. Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at every stage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.
• Questions. Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of the customer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.
• Pain points. Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by just gathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

Customer journey touchpoints

Every stage of the customer journey should also include touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels. A customer’s actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will differ at each stage and at each touchpoint.

For example, a customer searching for a fishing rod and reading posts about how they’re made will have very different motivations and questions from when later comparing specs and trying to stay within budget. Likewise, that same customer will have different pain points when calling customer service after buying a particular rod.

It might sound like more work, but mapping the entire customer journey helps businesses create a better customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer’s interaction with your brand.

Before jumping into the steps of how to create the customer journey map, first be clear that your customer journey map needs to illustrate the following:

• Customer journey stages. Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.
• Touchpoints. Log the most common touchpoints customers have at every stage. For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.
• The full customer experience. Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.
• Your brand’s solutions. Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content. With these necessary elements in mind, creating an effective customer journey map is a simple three-step process.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

• Gather and analyze customer data. Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.
• Segment customers into specific buying groups. Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.
• Build the personas. Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

For example, ClearVoice created a buyer persona called “John The Marketing Manager.” The in-depth persona details the target customer’s pain points, pet peeves, and potential reactions to help ClearVoice marketers create more customer-focused experiences.

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

Every customer’s experience is different, but these touchpoints most commonly line up with each stage of the customer journey:

• Awareness. Advertising, social media, company blog, referrals from friends and family, how-to videos, streaming ads, and brand activation events.
• Consideration. Email, sales calls, SMS, landing pages, and reviews.
• Purchase. Live chat, chatbots, cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and product print inserts.
• Retention. Thank you emails, product walkthroughs, sales follow-ups, and online communities.
• Advocacy. Surveys, loyalty programs, and in-person events.

Leave no stone unturned. Logging the most relevant touchpoints at each stage eliminates blind spots and ensures your brand is there for its customers, wherever they choose to connect with you.

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint. Every touchpoint needs to consider the customer’s:

• Actions. Describe how the customer got to this touchpoint and what they’re going to do now that they’re here.
• Motivations. Specify how the customer feels at this moment. Are they frustrated, confused, curious, or excited? Explain why they feel this way.
• Questions. Every customer has questions. Anticipate the questions someone at this stage and touchpoint would have — and how your brand can answer those questions.
• Pain points. Define the problem the customer has — and how you can solve that problem at this stage. For example, imagine you sell women’s dress shoes. You’re focusing on the buyer persona of a 36-year-old Canadian woman who works in human resources. Her touchpoints might include clicking on your Facebook ad, exploring your online shop, but then abandoning her cart. After receiving a coupon from you, she finally buys. Later, she decides to exchange the shoes for a different color. After the exchange, she leaves a review. Note how she acts at each of these touchpoints and detail her likely pain points, motivations, and questions, for each scenario. Note on the map where you intend to respond to the customer’s motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions. If you can create custom-tailored solutions for every stage of the funnel, that’s even better.

A positive customer experience is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions. By mapping your customers’ motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions, you’ll find opportunities to improve the customer experience. When you truly address their deepest needs, you’ll increase engagement and generate more positive reviews.

Follow these strategies to improve the customer experience with your customer journey map:

• Prioritize objectives. Identify the stages of the customer journey where your brand has the strongest presence and take advantage of those points. For example, if leads at the consideration stage frequently subscribe to your YouTube channel, that gives you more opportunities to connect with loyal followers.
• Use an omnichannel approach to engage customers. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to gather information and create a more holistic view of the customer journey. This allows you to personalize the customer experience on another level entirely. Use an omnichannel analytics solution that allows you to capture and analyze the true cross-channel experience.
• Personalize interactions at every stage. The goal of mapping the customer journey is to create more personalized, helpful experiences for your audience at every stage and touchpoint. For example, with the right data you can personalize the retail shopping experience and customer’s website experience.
• Cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. When consumer trust is low, brands have to work even harder to earn their customers’ trust. Back up your marketing promises with good customer service, personalized incentives, and loyalty programs.

Getting started with customer journeys

Customer journeys are complicated in an omnichannel environment, but mapping these journeys can help businesses better understand their customers. Customer journey maps help you deliver the exact experience your customers expect from your business while increasing engagement and sales.

When you’re ready to get started, trace the interactions your customers have at each stage of their journey with your brand. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics — a service built on Adobe Experience Platform — can break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization let companies make better decisions with a holistic view of their business and the context behind every customer action.

Learn more about Customer Journey Analytics by watching the overview video .

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/introducing-adobes-customer-journey-maturity-model

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/create-customer-journey-maps

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-customer-journey-map

Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide for 2023

Published: August 15, 2023

When creating the ultimate digital customer experience, no business is complete without a solid online presence. In fact, 65% of consumers said their experience on a website or app is "very important" in their decision to recommend a brand.

Anymore, though, it's not enough to simply launch a site and call it a day. You need to craft a digital customer experience that's engaging, user-friendly, and delightful for your audience.

Not sure where to start? Consider this your guide to digital customer experience — what it is, why it matters, recent trends, and how you can apply it to your business.

Table of Contents

What is digital customer experience?

The importance of a good digital customer experience strategy, digital customer experience vs. customer experience, digital customer experience best practices, digital customer experience trends.

• Digital Customer Experience Examples

Digital customer experience, or digital CX, refers to the total online interactions a customer has with your brand. Most interactions take place on your website or app. Yet other channels like social media, email, and live chat also play a role in how customers connect with your brand online.

Creating a delightful online experience with your product or service has become increasingly important.

Any number of competitors can meet the needs of your target audience, but if they look forward to interacting with you, they won't look to anyone else.

Digital CX touchpoints, such as chatbots and online forms, are just the beginning of a larger experience structure.

A thorough and thoughtful customer experience strategy gives you more control over how customers perceive your company.

It also helps you discover what your audience enjoys and dislikes about their experiences so you can actively improve, attracting return customers back to see what's new while also delighting new leads.

For example, those new leads should be able to easily navigate through the content on your website and understand why they should purchase from you.

Returning customers should have access to customer success and support features built into your app's user interface.

In addition to reaching consumers where they are in the customer journey, a seamless digital experience is crucial when it comes to customer satisfaction.

In a recent survey, FullStory found that 74% of customers expect companies to use existing technologies in new ways to create better experiences. What's more, 75% of customers expect optimal experiences through new technologies.

A good digital CX strategy can help you do just that.

It lets you anticipate and map out how users move across your online channels. Plus, good digital CX facilitates a cohesive experience that nurtures customers through every stage of your flywheel .

As part of HubSpot's "Gain Grow Retain" podcast series, Gainsight Customer Success Evangelist Dan Steinman joined the show to discuss digital customer success.

Listen below to hear Steinman discuss the importance of digital CX for your business.

Digital customer experience is a key component of customer experience.

We know that customer experience, or CX, is the impression you've left on your customers throughout their entire journey with your brand. CX is a combination of customers' interactions with your people and your products.

Think of digital CX as the online arm of your company's CX strategy. It's the digital mediums your customers use to interact with those people and products. And, the perception they take away based on their experience.

Now that we've introduced you to the concept, let's review some best practices you can use to optimize digital CX at your company.

• Know your audience.
• Create an omnichannel customer experience.
• Pay attention to mobile experiences.
• Adopt analytics.
• Collect customer feedback.
• Conduct user testing.
• Think like a futurist.

1. Know your audience.

Before creating a digital experience that your customers will love, you have to know who your customers are .

Buyer personas are a great way to understand who is buying your product and why. Personas make it easier to tailor your digital CX strategy to meet your target audience's specific needs and desires.

Collecting online forms from potential leads is the best way to let people interested in your offering introduce themselves and their needs.

Commonalities among answers on initial forms can help you better understand how you are first perceived. They can even indicate what you can provide in the future to meet more of your customers' needs.

Crafting, tracking, and revising the customer journey from beginning to end is critical for building excellent CX.

Mapping out the customer journey can help you determine which digital touchpoints are most important for your customers so you can optimize those points.

Luckily, there are advanced marketing reporting tools specifically tailored to help you develop your digital customer experience.

2. Create an omni-channel customer experience.

Omni-channel experiences generate customer delight by providing more communication options for your targets. To meet them there, you must know where your customers are .

Customers want to engage with a business through the platform that they're comfortable using.

Being forced to learn and work with an interface that is unfamiliar because the company hasn't gotten its digital ducks in a row? That's a negative customer experience you can avoid.

So how do you build something better for your customers? Multichannel is faster and easier at first to simply get a presence where your customers are, but your real goal should be an omni-channel experience.

The key differences between a multichannel and an omni-channel strategy are data syncing and CX continuity .

Image source

The more channels you support, the happier your customers will be, making them more likely to buy from your company again. But it's not enough anymore to simply exist on multiple channels.

Omnichannel CX ensures those channels speak to each other so that valuable customer details aren't lost in the spaces between platforms. Think of it like the notes in a customer account.

They allow later reps to review the customer's history with your brand.

These insights help reps craft a more personal, meaningful, and informed interaction.

In the same way, data syncing between channels creates that omnichannel experience where customers can recognize that your business has it together and is ready to effectively help them wherever they are, whatever the issue.

Plus, an omnichannel strategy ensures you're creating a more consistent customer experience. CX continuity is something most customers couldn't define but can absolutely sense.

When experiences with various digital mediums are dissimilar for your customers, the continuity of your brand is noticeably disrupted. That disjointed experience feels unreliable, reducing customer confidence.

When you engage customers on the mediums they're already using — and create a seamless experience between those mediums — it's much easier and more pleasant for users to interact with you and the content you work so hard to create.

3. Pay attention to mobile experiences.

Whether you have a detailed website or a handy app, it's important to focus on the mobile experience. After all, over 90% of the global internet population uses a mobile device to go online.

That's because smartphones allow customers to compare companies while they shop. They can see how your brand stacks up against your competitors before they make a purchase.

If your website or app doesn't seem to fit their needs, chances are your products won't either.

When designing your digital customer experience, make sure it's mobile responsive. That means when it's displayed on a tablet or phone, the interface automatically adjusts to the smaller screen.

This dramatically affects the user experience and makes it much easier to navigate through your content.

4. Adopt analytics.

Like any other part of your business, you should be actively looking for new ways to improve your digital strategy. Fortunately, that's easier to do if you have reporting tools that monitor your digital customer experience.

For example, there's software available, such as Google Analytics and Apple's App Analytics , to track the features and pages that customers use most and help your team identify points of friction within the app or website.

With analytics, you can pinpoint where leads are abandoning purchases and can work proactively to prevent churn.

Or, for returning customers, you can review their favorite tools and adjust your page navigation so they're easier to find when users revisit your site.

Outside of your website or app, you can also measure other aspects of your digital CX. If you use email, you can identify ways to better personalize your outreach approach to improve open rates.

Or, if your brand is on social media, you can monitor brand sentiment and track engagement to further optimize your content.

Understanding how customers engage with your offers helps your team effectively refine your digital CX strategy.

5. Collect customer feedback.

Another way you can gather information is by asking customers for their feedback. Have them complete a survey after using your website or app and ask if they would recommend it to their peers.

You can use a Net Promoter Score, or NPS, survey to gather both qualitative and quantitative data on your digital customer experience. This should give you a good idea of how customers are reacting to your content.

Sample survey questions may include:

• On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?
• Which product/service features do you value and use the most?
• How can we improve your experience on our app?

6. Conduct user testing.

User testing is another way to determine how much customers enjoy using your digital properties.

In this environment, a select group of customers is asked to test your product. Then, they provide feedback on specific aspects of the user experience.

This gives you the chance to tweak your website or app before releasing it to the rest of your customer base.

While there are a few different types of user tests, the most popular one is usability testing .

Usability tests assess how easy it is to use and navigate your product. Participants are asked to perform a simple task. Then, they're evaluated on their ability to complete it.

This shows your development team how user-friendly your website or app is.

7. Think like a futurist.

The digital world is changing at a breakneck pace — literally overnight in the case of Open AI's ChatGPT, which took the world by storm on November 30th, 2022 — which was a Wednesday.

What is your company doing to improve customer experience next Wednesday?

The future develops one day at a time, so you need to think about your CX strategy like a living thing that grows and changes quickly.

Your digital CX strategy in 2023 may look a lot different when 2024 rolls around — nobody would be surprised if you find you need to pivot more than once.

As technology advances, trends will emerge and influence customer perception.

Pay close attention to those trends and how your target customers respond to them, be bold enough to try to create some trends yourself, and be prepared to evolve what digital CX looks like for your business.

Speaking of trends, let's review a few digital trends that businesses are following (so far) in 2023.

• Improvements in AI
• Increased Number of Chatbots
• Enhanced Self-Service Capabilities
• More Focus on Predictive Analytics
• New Augmented Reality Tools
• Personalized Customer Experiences
• Emphasis on Data Security and Privacy

1. Improvements in AI

When we think of artificial intelligence (AI), we often think of sentient robots that mimic human actions.

While these ideas make for excellent sci-fi villains, they aren't accurate representations of how AI is used in modern business, even with the recent warp forward in AI Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Most AI is used to automate business functions that assist employees. This saves hundreds or thousands of hours. AI can also help personalize experiences for the customer.

One of the best-proven ways AI helps improve the customer and employee experience is to incorporate AI into email newsletters.

Companies can send identical messages to their entire customer base that come across as personal, genuine, and sincere.

To accomplish this without burdening employees with hand-customizing thousands of emails, they use AI to pull data from the CRM and personalize each message with the customer's information.

This makes the email look and feel like it was written specifically for that person.

AI continues to develop in leaps and bounds, so you should expect lots of new features to appear in your marketplace over the next few months — and strap in because the next few years will be wild.

We know that changing this fast can drive some fear, but right now, one of the best ways to stay competitive is to take advantage of these improvements in AI.

At HubSpot, we're excited about this new wave of technology and are rolling out new AI features, including Content Assistant and ChatSpot .

Customers crave personalized experiences, and AI offers incredible opportunities to deliver to users what they want and need in the digital space.

2. Increased Number of Chatbots

Chatbots are about to explode in the retail space in North America and Europe because of how financially accessible NLP has become for medium and small businesses due to ChatGPT.

In the past, bots were very limited and could only perform a predetermined series of actions. This made for dull customer experiences that often did not provide the needed solutions.

There's still a lingering stigma that chatbots are just talkative phone trees that lead nowhere until you ask for a human being to speak with.

The good news is that chatbots are improving along with AI like a tide raising the ship. Juniper Research forecasts that global retail spend on chatbots will increase by 470% over the next five years.

This spending trend will significantly reduce the pressure on customer support teams to answer routine questions.

What's more, these automated systems companies are investing in can perform another layer of routine operations, such as opening tickets and assigning them to the proper representatives that can actually address that customer's issue.

With bots, support agents can refocus their time and energy on complex or time-sensitive cases that are more likely to result in customer churn. Chatbots were predicted to save businesses 2.5 billion hours by 2023 — and that was before the quantum leap in natural language processing in late 2022.

Like your overall digital CX strategy, chatbots can't simply be set up and left to do the work.

They require a hand at the helm to determine how to improve the customer experience at critical points along that journey to help the chatbot grow more useful to those customers, giving them the best possible experience.

When you can, spend a few minutes with this video that remains at the heart of the chatbot wave and provides guidance on using chatbots for your business.

3. Enhanced Self-Service Capabilities

Customers don't want to wait long (or at all) for support if they don't have to. More companies are focused on finding ways to help customers quickly help themselves.

In addition to chatbots, this may include:

• Knowledge bases. These searchable databases allow customers to find resources about your products and answers to FAQs. This makes the information-seeking process faster for customers. Plus, it releases some of the burden on your customer service team.
• Workflow automation. This involves setting up self-operating processes that run manual tasks, saving time and resources. For example, a customer requests a return on your website. An email is automatically triggered to send them the return label, rather than waiting for a customer service rep.

4. More Focus on Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics determine how customers will react to changes in your business. These reports help business leaders understand customer behavior and the company's role in their customers' lives.

As AI and machine learning continue to improve, we can expect predictive analytics to become a fundamental tool used by companies with a digital presence.

These reports will be built into the internal user interface and updated with the most recent customer data. That way, business leaders will have all the information they need to confidently make decisions for their company.

5. New Augmented Reality Tools

Augmented reality (AR) presents fun new opportunities to improve digital customer experience. If you're unfamiliar with AR, it's a technology that supplements real images with digital elements, such as graphics or text overlays.

Here's an example from the NFL's Carolina Panthers.

There's a lot of potential for the use of AR in customer service. For example, some brands have used it to supplement in-person customer experience by displaying product information as customers shop.

When a customer is in the store, they might use their smart device to scan a product and see data such as customer reviews and product details.

This reduces friction during the buying process, making it easier for customers to find the product or service that's right for them.

Another popular AR trend is the "try-as-you-buy" experience. If your company operates mostly online, you can let customers test out your products by using an AR version on their computer.

That way, customers can avoid the hassle of buying your product or asking for a sample only to return it a few weeks later.

6. Personalized Customer Experiences

According to research, 70% of consumers would willingly provide personal data if they knew it was being used to improve their experience.

This means customers are willing to give you information. In return, they ask that you meet them where they are in their customer journey.

One great way to personalize the shopping experience for a customer is to send them an email with product recommendations based on their recent browsing or purchase history.

It communicates to your customers that you are using data to help them, making it easier for them to find what they want and need.

As you continue to collect customer data, it will be easier to create personalized customer experiences.

Not only will you have a stronger understanding of your customer base, but you'll also have the technology needed to distribute content effectively.

What's more, you'll be able to automate this personalization to maintain a delightful customer experience as your business grows.

7. Emphasis on Data Security and Privacy

With all of this data comes great responsibility.

Yes, customers are willing to share their data with you. But they expect it to be protected and used for the right reasons. Data breaches and security compromises push customers away from your brand.

Make sure you're up to date on the latest privacy laws and regulations that affect the way you do business with your customers.

Developing and maintaining trust is critical in any relationship, so be sure you are doing your due diligence to protect sensitive information entrusted to you.

• Warby Parker's Virtual Try-On
• Apple's Omni-Channel Experience
• UNICEF's Chatbot for Societal Change

1. Warby Parker's Virtual Try-On

Warby Parker is a retailer of low-cost, quality prescription eyewear, sunglasses, and contact lenses.

If you're interested in buying a pair, the WP app lets you virtually "try on" the frames before buying them using AR technology — all from the comfort of your couch.

They cleverly harnessed the mobile experience after noticing that people would come to their stores and take pictures of themselves in different frames.

They'd share those photos with friends and loved ones, gathering opinions and having a good laugh.

Warby Parker embraced this shopping behavior that developed with the rise of camera phones and folded it into the customer experience to delight their shoppers with something fun and new.

They were uniquely positioned in 2020 because they were already helping their customers shop from home using AR on mobile devices.

They had prioritized meeting their customers where they were both at home and on mobile, where 90% of users accessed the internet, and it worked out in their favor.

Loads of companies got on board with the AR shopping trend because it was a natural fit for their customers and their products.

Consider makeup shopping during a pandemic. Sharing lipstick samples at the store went from questionably hygienic to being perceived as a blatant health hazard.

Embracing AR, makeup retailers built digital customer experiences where their shoppers could upload a picture and see various shades on themselves from the comfort and safety of home — with a low-friction path to checkout if done well.

What we like: Warby Parker's digital customer experience strategy of embracing AR created more value than the obvious. These virtual shopping opportunities offer customers access to more products than can be kept on hand in store.

Even more meaningfully, they improve access for customers with mobility challenges and low-income customers who don't have ready access to transportation.

More people than ever now have access to the low-cost prescription eyewear they need, thanks to Warby Parker’s choice to think like futurists.

2. Apple's Omni-Channel Experience

Apple is a greatexample of a company that has created a seamless digital customer experience based on the customer's data.

Through iCloud, customers always have access to their data — like messages, photos, and contacts — and this is true regardless of which Apple device they're using.

It goes beyond Apple devices as well. Simply signing into iCloud from any device with an internet signal lets them access their digital storage.

This has made each iCloud user's digital life fit more harmoniously with their physical life in ways that affect connectivity and culture.

Consider one service they offer: AirDrop. Once upon a time, you had to store a file on a single, physical device.

Sharing it was a multi-step process that could be tripped up by file size, your recipient not having the right program, and other tedious problems of mismatched technology.

So much friction just trying to share a file — all while sitting right there at the same table! Oof.

With two AirDrop-enabled devices, you can just choose a file to send and tap AirDrop. It automatically transfers to the other nearby device, and you can move on with your idea sharing and projects much faster.

Pro tip: Some folks use digital storage far more than others, so Apple's iCloud storage comes in various sizes and prices. Their goal is to provide what people need to maintain their own continuity of experience.

3. UNICEF's Chatbot for Societal Change

Chatbots and touchstones of the digital customer experience are being used in innovative new ways to build better real-life experiences.

UNICEF re-directs the last step in the digital CX process — continually adapting and improving the customer experience. They take that idea and apply it to societal problems in the real world.

U-Report is a chatbot-based polling system created by UNICEF that asks questions about social issues, and those who sign up and reply are called U-Reporters.

Critical feedback is collected from these under-served populations worldwide, most often from young people in developing countries.

It's strange to think of U-Reporters as customers, but they are the target population served by UNICEF.

UNICEF provides communication access points on several digital platforms to meet their target populations where they are. U-Report gives these populations a voice that can finally be heard via a digital experience.

UNICEF then uses the feedback to inform its policy recommendations. These recommendations are presented to regional leadership, helping people in power understand and improve societal issues where they have enough influence to help.

What we like: Retail companies and non-profit organizations alike are getting more creative with using chatbots. This is at the heart of thinking like a futurist for the sake of those you serve — creating trends above and beyond.

Bringing It Back to Business

Customers want access to your brand whenever and wherever they decide they're ready to interact. Right now, digital channels are the place to be.

Whatever you're in the business of, prepare to be responsive to change. Be bold, get creative, and prioritize finding new and innovative ways to delight those you serve by continually optimizing your digital customer experience.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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

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Digital Customer Journeys: The Ultimate Guide to Optimising Them Properly

Marie Jehanne

April 28, 2021 | 4 min read

Last Updated: Oct 3, 2023

Table of Contents

What is the digital customer journey?

The influence of digital on the customer journey, the different stages of the digital customer journey, why analyze your digital customer journey, how to optimize your digital customer journey, and finally, here are 4 examples of digital customer journeys.

Listen the article in audio format:

By multiplying the available points of contact between brands and customers, digital technology has considerably complicated the customer journey.

The recent pandemic has further reinforced this trend by converting “brick and mortar” buyers into e-buyers in the space of a few short weeks.

In this guide, you’ll discover why analyzing the digital customer journey is fundamental to business success, plus how to optimize it with illustrated examples of inspiring customer journeys.

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The digital customer journey is the path followed by an internet user – from the awareness stage right through to the purchase stage.

Essentially, it covers every single interaction that takes place online between the customer and the brand throughout the buying journey.

In some cases, the digital customer journey can extend beyond the act of purchase or subscription; to customer loyalty. For example, the brand may offer personalized post-sale offers or adapted content to improve the buyer’s knowledge and experience of their newly purchased product.

Initially, it was mostly the banking and insurance sectors that studied the customer journey in detail, due to the long and personal relationships they built with their customers over time.

But today, the digital customer journey is a hot topic amongst any brand that understands the breadth and importance of digital.

Over the last few years, the digital boom has impacted this journey by adding new stages – such as websites and blogs – alongside traditional physical stores, TV and radio advertisements, and catalogs. Closely followed by social media, voice assistants, chatbots, and even display advertising, the emergence of these new marketing channels has added layers of complexity to the digital customer journey.

And because no industry is the same, the customer journey often takes different forms. For example, within a hospital environment, we call it a “patient journey” instead. However, a patient’s journey – from making an appointment on the internet to consulting the results online – has very little in common with the journey of a customer looking to purchase a new kitchen.

You could argue (with some degree of truth) that the digital world has given us as many stages of the buyer’s journey as there are grains of sand on the beach. And to be honest, you wouldn’t be far off.

But, you’ll be glad to know there are three essential buying stages that cover every customer journey – no matter the industry. Let’s take a look…

1 – Awareness: the discovery phase

The discovery stage is when your customer realizes they don’t have something, and they need something. For example, this could be replacing a broken refrigerator or buying a second bike that’s more suitable for cycling to work.

And what does the user do? They turn to the internet to do some research. This means, as a brand, you need to make sure you’re answering their questions. You’re not selling to them just yet, but you’re answering their questions and they’re starting to think you know what you’re talking about. The content you’ll create for the awareness stage is tutorials, blog posts, and e-books.

2 – Consideration: the evaluation phase

Once the customer has consulted various sources to help answer their problem, they’ll start to think about which solution is best for them.

To do this, they’ll compare their options by reading buying guides, browsing customer reviews, and watching product videos to choose the best option for their budget. This means as a brand, you’ll need to make sure you have this content on hand to help your potential customers decide you’re their best option.

3 – Decision: the selection phase

The decision phase is the final step. Customers know exactly which product meets their needs and must now choose from the various options on offer. As a brand, it’s time to ensure you have the right content to demonstrate your comparative advantage over your competitors.

If you can, why not let the customer make up their own mind with a free test period? This could dramatically help to remove any final obstacles, so be generous if you can!

Digital customer journey mapping has several advantages, such as:

• Detecting the points of friction encountered by the customer which lead them to modify, postpone or cancel their project
• Better understanding customer needs and habits to offer them the most suitable content at the best time
• Giving you insights to adjust your marketing efforts towards the most profitable or high potential opportunities

Focus on an omnichannel approach

In today’s world, the customer journey needs to meet the demands of multiple channels.

To do this, we need to adopt an “omnichannel” approach which gives equal importance to all stages of the journey.

The objective? To build a “seamless” user experience; one that’s consistent across all channels – whether telephone, social media, or your website.

The time for compartmentalization is over.

Get everyone involved

Reshaping and optimizing your digital customer journey isn’t a small task. In fact, it can lead to huge changes within your business.

That’s why involving all employees in the process is essential for maintaining consistency and output as you optimize your customer journey.

Feedback from each department is invaluable and will help contribute to the development of a “concrete” path based on reliable data.

Take a product tour

Get to grips with Contentsquare fundamentals with this 6 minute product tour.

Personalize the experience

In today’s heavily saturated market, personalization can help you make a difference and stand out amongst the crowd.

Nevertheless, personalizing your journey effectively requires excellent knowledge of your business goals and a clear understanding of your target personas. With these things covered, you’ll be able to determine the content to display on your site or application according to age, location, areas of interest, previous searches, or purchases…

Contentsquare’s customer journey analysis tools can help you do this.

We wouldn’t want to finish this article without sharing some examples of digital customer journeys that are as different as they are inspiring.

Example 1: Digital Experience

This customer journey shows clearly how a chocolate brand might create new followers; from discovering products by chance in the street to transforming the customer into a true ambassador.

Example 2: UXFirm

This second example from UXFirm has a different objective and emphasizes the experience of the customer at each stage – from awareness to purchase.

Example 3: wcig

The third example describes in detail each stage and obstacle faced by those with disabilities in a working environment. A very complicated (but enlightening) example of a customer journey!

Example 4: Zendesk

Finally, let’s conclude with an example of a digital customer journey by Zendesk that clearly shows the dynamics of customer acquisition, retention, and loss.

Stay updated

and never miss an insight!

Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare based in France. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

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There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

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Understanding your customer is the key to survival in online adventures where you wrestle with clicks and scrolls. Enter the superhero cape of digital customer journey mapping, which swoops in to decipher the cryptic language of online behavior.

Digital customer journey and digital customer journey mapping definitions

The digital customer journey is a customer's entire process while interacting with a business or brand online. It includes stages like awareness, consideration, purchase, post-purchase engagement, and advocacy, encompassing various digital touchpoints.

Digital customer journey mapping , on the other hand, is a strategic process of visually representing and analyzing the digital customer journey. It involves creating a detailed map that outlines each step a customer takes, the touchpoints they encounter, and the emotions they experience during their online interactions.

In essence, the digital customer journey is the overall customer experience online. In contrast, digital customer journey mapping is a tool or process used to analyze and visualize that experience to better understand, optimize, and enhance the customer journey.

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Significance of digital customer journey mapping

• Enhanced customer experience: Customer journey mapping allows businesses to understand and optimize every step of the customer journey, improving overall satisfaction.
• Improved retention and satisfaction: Identifying pain points and addressing customer needs result in increased loyalty and reduced churn rates.
• Business growth: With insights into opportunities for innovation, product development, and marketing strategies, customer journey mapping helps with sustained business growth.
• Cross-functional collaboration: A customer journey map encourages collaboration between departments, ensuring a cohesive and consistent customer experience across channels.
• Data-driven insights: It utilizes customer data to make informed decisions, tailor marketing efforts, and enhance personalized interactions.
• Adaptability to a dynamic digital landscape: You can stay agile by continuously updating maps to reflect changes in customer behavior and technology trends.
• Competitive advantage: Businesses that understand and respond to customer needs gain a competitive edge by offering superior digital experiences.

Creating digital customer journey mapping

Digital customer journey mapping involves a strategic approach to understanding and improving the customer experience in the digital realm. The process includes several steps you should follow:

1. Define the scope: Clearly outline the scope of the customer journey mapping initiative. Specify the product or service, target audience, and the particular stages of the customer's interaction to be analyzed.

2. Identify customer touchpoints: Pinpoint the various touchpoints where customers interact with the brand digitally. This includes website visits, social media engagement, email communication, mobile app usage, and more.

3. Create customer personas: Develop detailed personas representing different segments of the target audience. Include demographics, preferences, behaviors, and pain points to humanize and understand the diverse needs of customers.

4. Map customer goals and objectives: Define the goals customers aim to achieve at each touchpoint. Whether it's making a purchase, seeking information, or resolving an issue, understanding these objectives is crucial for tailoring the journey map.

5. Understand pain points and friction: Identify obstacles and challenges customers may encounter during their journey. Recognizing pain points allows businesses to address issues, reduce friction, and enhance customer experience.

6. Evaluate cross-channel interactions: Analyze how customers transition between different digital channels. Understand the seamless flow of information and interactions across platforms, ensuring consistency and cohesiveness.

7. Gather data and insights: Utilize customer data, analytics, and feedback to inform the mapping process. Data-driven insights provide a factual basis for understanding customer behavior and preferences.

8. Collaborate across departments: Foster collaboration between marketing, sales, customer service, and IT departments. A cross-functional approach ensures a holistic view of the customer journey and facilitates the implementation of improvements.

9. Visualize the journey: Create a visual representation of the customer journey map. Use diagrams, charts, or other visualization tools to illustrate the various stages, touchpoints, and interactions.

10. Iterate and update: Recognize that the digital landscape is dynamic. Regularly review and update the customer journey map to reflect changes in customer behavior, technology, or business strategies.

By focusing on these fundamental aspects, you can lay the groundwork for a robust digital customer journey mapping strategy that enhances customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall success in the online world.

Customer journey map example

Creating a customer journey map involves several components that can be customized based on your specific business and industry. Here's a basic template to get you started. 

Feel free to adapt and expand upon it according to your needs:

Customer journey map template

1. Map title:

• For example, Digital Customer Journey Map for [Product/Service]

2. Customer persona:

• Create a persona representing your target customer. Include demographics, preferences, and behaviors.

3. Stages of the journey:

• List the key stages your customer goes through, such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Post-Purchase, and Advocacy.

4. Touchpoints:

• Identify and map out the specific touchpoints at each stage (Website Visit, Social Media Interaction, Email Communication, etc.).

5. Customer goals:

• Define your customer's goals at each journey stage (Obtain Information, Make a Purchase, Seek Support, etc.).

6. Pain points:

• Identify potential pain points or challenges the customer may encounter at each stage (Confusing Website Navigation, Slow Customer Support, etc.).

7. Emotional journey:

• Note the emotional highs and lows your customer may experience during the journey (Excitement at Discovery, Frustration with Checkout Process , etc.).

8. Channels and interactions:

• Specify the digital channels through which interactions occur (Website, Mobile App, Social Media, etc.) and describe the nature of these interactions.

9. Key metrics:

• Define metrics to measure success at each stage (Conversion Rate, Customer Satisfaction Score, etc.).

10. Opportunities for improvement:

• Identify areas where the customer journey can be enhanced or optimized. This could include improving website navigation, refining communication strategies, or streamlining the purchase process.

11. Feedback integration:

• Specify how customer feedback, obtained through surveys, reviews, or other channels, will be integrated into the journey map for continuous improvement.

12. Visual elements:

• Include visual elements such as charts, graphs, or icons to make the map visually engaging and easy to understand.

Remember, this is a basic template, and you can customize it further based on your business' unique characteristics and goals. Regularly update the map to reflect changes in customer behavior, technology trends, or business strategies.

Tools and technologies for creating a customer journey map

Here are the tools and software you need to create a customer journey map:

Visualization tools

• Journey mapping software

Dedicated journey mapping tools like Smaply, UXPressia, or Canvanizer provide interactive platforms for creating, visualizing, and sharing digital customer journey maps. These tools offer features such as drag-and-drop functionality, collaboration capabilities, and the ability to create dynamic, real-time maps.

• Diagramming software

General-purpose diagramming tools like Microsoft Visio, Lucidchart, or draw.io can be adapted for journey mapping, providing flexibility in design and customization. These tools suit businesses looking for versatile solutions to create detailed and customized customer journey maps.  

• Storyboarding tools

Storyboarding tools like Miro or Storyboard help visualize customer journeys in a sequential storyboard format, making it easier to illustrate the customer's experience step by step. This is particularly useful for storytelling and understanding the narrative flow of the customer journey.

CRM systems

Salesforce is a comprehensive CRM platform that allows businesses to manage customer interactions, track leads, and integrate customer data seamlessly. Integration with customer journey mapping enables a holistic view, combining sales and marketing data to enhance the overall understanding of the customer journey.

• HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is a user-friendly solution that helps businesses organize and track customer interactions, making aligning marketing and sales efforts easier. Integrating HubSpot CRM with customer journey mapping provides a centralized hub for managing customer relationships and analyzing touchpoints.

Zoho CRM is a versatile platform offering automation, analytics, and customization features for managing customer relationships. Integration with customer journey mapping tools allows businesses to align sales processes with the digital customer journey for more effective customer engagement.

Turn visitors into customers

Analytics and data integration.

• Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides in-depth insights into website and app user behavior, helping businesses understand how customers interact with digital touchpoints. Integration with customer journey mapping enables a data-driven approach, combining analytics data with mapped customer interactions for a comprehensive view.

Mixpanel is an analytics platform focusing on user engagement, providing detailed insights into user actions and behaviors. Integration with customer journey mapping enhances the understanding of user behavior across digital channels, facilitating targeted improvements in the customer journey.

• Data integration platforms (like Zapier)

Platforms like Zapier facilitate seamless integration between different software applications, allowing businesses to automate workflows and share data. Integrating data sources with customer journey mapping ensures that the maps stay updated in real time, reflecting the latest customer interactions and trends.

By leveraging these tools and technologies, you can create, manage, and derive actionable insights from digital customer journey maps, ultimately leading to improved customer experiences and business success.

Best practices for digital customer journey mapping

Regular updates.

• Scheduled reviews

Establish a regular review schedule for customer journey maps to ensure they stay aligned with evolving customer behaviors and business strategies. Regular updates help maintain the relevance and accuracy of the maps in the dynamic digital landscape.

• Real-time data integration

Implement mechanisms for real-time data integration, allowing maps to reflect the latest customer interactions and feedback. Real-time updates provide a more accurate representation of the customer journey and enable timely strategy adjustments.

Cross-functional collaboration

• Interdepartmental workshops

Conduct regular workshops involving marketing, sales, customer service , and IT teams to contribute collaboratively to the customer journey mapping process.

Cross-functional collaboration ensures diverse perspectives are considered, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey.

• Shared goals and metrics

Establish shared goals and KPIs across departments to align efforts toward a unified customer experience. Shared metrics foster a collaborative environment and encourage teams to work together towards common objectives .

Data analytics for improvement

• Utilizing predictive analytics

Leverage predictive analytics to anticipate customer behaviors and trends, allowing for proactive adjustments to the customer journey. Predictive analytics empowers companies to stay ahead of customer needs and preferences, enhancing the overall customer experience.

• Performance measurement

Implement KPIs to measure the success of the mapped customer journey and identify improvement areas. Data analytics provide actionable insights, enabling businesses to iterate on strategies and enhance the effectiveness of the customer journey.

Customer feedback integration

• Multichannel feedback collection

Collect customer feedback through various channels , including surveys, social media, and direct interactions, to better understand customer sentiments. Diverse feedback sources provide a comprehensive view, helping businesses identify improvement areas and validate the mapped customer journey.

• Feedback loop implementation

Establish a feedback loop where insights from customer feedback directly inform updates and adjustments to the customer journey map. Integrating customer feedback into the mapping process ensures the journey accurately reflects real customer experiences and expectations.

By incorporating these best practices, businesses can create compelling digital customer journey maps and foster a culture of continuous improvement, adaptability, and customer-centricity in their operations.

Customer journey map case studies

Let's look closer into two examples of successful digital customer journey implementation – Amazon and Airbnb.

Amazon's customer journey mapping has been a cornerstone of its success. From personalized recommendations to seamless one-click purchasing, Amazon uses data-driven journey maps to enhance the customer experience. 

Amazon leverages advanced analytics to understand user behavior, tailors recommendations based on past interactions, and ensures a consistent experience across its website, mobile app, and other digital touchpoints.

Airbnb focuses on creating a seamless digital journey for both hosts and guests. Their customer journey map incorporates user-friendly interfaces, transparent communication , and a robust review system. Airbnb uses customer feedback to continually refine its platform, implementing features like instant booking and personalized search results to cater to user preferences and enhance overall satisfaction.

Lessons learned from Amazon and Airbnb

1. User-centric design

Both Amazon and Airbnb prioritize user-centric design in their customer journey mapping. Understanding and catering to user preferences, pain points, and goals contribute to a positive overall experience.

2. Data-driven decision-making

Successful implementations rely heavily on data analytics. Both companies leverage data to anticipate user needs, personalize interactions, and optimize the customer journey for improved engagement.

3. Continuous iteration and adaptation

Amazon and Airbnb continually iterate on their customer journey maps. A commitment to regular updates and adaptations is crucial for maintaining relevance and effectiveness.

4. Customer feedback integration

Both Amazon and Airbnb actively integrate customer feedback into their journey-mapping processes. This iterative approach allows them to address issues promptly, validate assumptions, and stay aligned with evolving customer expectations.

5. Agile implementation strategies

The success of these case studies lies in the agility of their implementation strategies. Quickly adapting to emerging trends, technologies, and user behaviors is critical for sustained success in the digital space.

6. Embracing technology trends

Both companies embrace emerging technologies. Amazon's use of machine learning for recommendations and Airbnb's adoption of virtual reality for property previews showcase a commitment to staying at the forefront of technology trends.

You can draw inspiration from these examples to enhance your mapping strategies and drive success in the digital realm.

Creating your digital customer journey map

With journey mapping, you can create highly personalized, adaptive, and technologically immersive customer experiences across various digital touchpoints. And you should start as soon as possible. 

Early adopters of digital customer journey mapping will gain a head start in refining their customer experiences and the ability to seamlessly iterate and adapt.

Get a glimpse into the future of business communication with digital natives.

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A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Customer Journey Mapping Is at the Heart of Digital Transformation

November 4, 2015 • 12 min read.

Companies that carefully map out customer buying “journeys” are better prepared to transform their businesses, say experts from Wharton and NTT DATA.

Digital technologies such as analytics, mobility, social networks, cloud computing and the Internet of Things are making old ways of working redundant and forcing companies to transform. According to Raman Sapra, senior vice president and global head of NTT DATA’s digital business services, the best way to leverage digital is to take a comprehensive rather than a piecemeal approach. And a key tool to achieve this is customer journey mapping, where powerful new data collection and analytics tools are helping to provide deeper insights to fuel performance. In this paper, experts from Wharton and NTT DATA examine how this mapping is at the heart of digital transformation.

Companies such as Uber, Spotify and Airbnb are disrupting their industries. Take Uber. The popular taxi-hailing app does not own any vehicles and yet provides transportation to some 8 million users. Music-streaming service Spotify lets music lovers listen to a wide range of artists, yet it does not own a radio station. And Airbnb, a provider of accommodations with more than a million listings across the globe, does not own any lodgings.

These startups are leveraging new technologies to disrupt their industries while making life easier for users. But digital transformation goes deeper than simply improving the customer experience. It is also increasingly used to transform business processes and interactions within a company to keep it relevant in the digital age.

“Typically, digital is associated only with providing a superior customer experience. But digital can also help create new business models, drive operational excellence and enhance employee engagement,” says Raman Sapra, senior vice president and global head of NTT DATA’s digital business services.

“Typically, digital is associated only with providing a superior customer experience. But digital can also help create new business models, drive operational excellence and enhance employee engagement.” –Raman Sapra

New digital tools are extending information collection and then helping to turn an otherwise overwhelming flood of information into actionable knowledge. For instance, telecom providers can use data analytics to help predict data loss or network deterioration, as well as prevent service disruptions. More generally, companies can use social media to connect better with their employees. Or, they can tap data analytics to make decisions faster and bring operational efficiencies.

But before embarking on a digital transformation, organizations need to first identify their business imperatives and priorities, Sapra says. They need to understand what their customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders desire. They also must identify the digital possibilities in their industry. Using these benchmarks as a foundation, organizations can tailor a digital strategy and roadmap, and then proceed to build their digital initiatives.

There is one critical tool for successful digital transformation — smart customer journey mapping. “It is at the heart of digital transformation,” says Sapra. Adds Mahesh Kolar, director of mobility applications at NTT DATA: “There are many different ways, like focus groups and surveys, to understand the customer journey. But we believe that customer journey mapping is vital for giving organizations the ‘Aha’ moment when it comes to understanding their digital possibilities.” And new digital tools are now making it possible to create a much deeper understanding of the journey.

Identifying Digital Touchpoints

What exactly is customer journey mapping? “It is the definitive first step in the process of converting a current ‘as-is’ state to a future state that promises an enhanced customer experience,” says Siddharth Gaikwad, practice head of digital experience at NTT DATA. The term “customers,” he adds, does not only refer to end-users; it could be any stakeholder — such as employees or partners.

“A journey map is an illustrated representation of a customer’s expectations, experiences and reflections as it unfolds over time across multiple stages and touchpoints while using a product or consuming a service.”

“A journey map is an illustrated representation of a customer’s expectations, experiences and reflections as it unfolds over time across multiple stages and touchpoints while using a product or consuming a service.” –Siddharth Gaikwad

Take the booking of an airline ticket. Here, the journey mapping starts from the time the customer realizes the need to travel. It captures the customer’s various expectations at that stage. It then maps their actual experience of buying the ticket and even the emotions felt after the purchase. Expectations are thus benchmarked against actual experience.

By capturing the current “as is” state of a customer’s journey — in this case, the booking of an airline ticket — the map amplifies various pain points along the purchase path. For experience designers, questions that arise around the journey include the following: Do we know the customer’s context? Is the information about the various options adequate or even relevant? Are there too many details to be filled out multiple times? Is the whole exercise too time-consuming? Capturing the “as is” state can also predict likely future behavior.

Thereafter, in collaboration with domain experts across different parts of the organization and its extended eco-system, and using design methods like storytelling and card sorting, the map findings are converted into insights. Storytelling, the art of overlaying context, perspective and imagery around a user’s journey, combined with card sorting, the technique of identifying mental models or patterns, become important tools in rendering the “to-be” future-state. In creating the map, the organization can use the rapidly evolving elements of digital — analytics, mobile, social, the cloud and Internet of Things — to enhance the customer experience.

“By overlaying the digital possibilities upon customer journey maps, organizations are able to better visualize which aspects of their business they should focus on, which of the new technologies they should embrace and what new business models they can create,” says Gaikwad. “It helps them to realign their investments, technologies and business models so they can engage more effectively with customers, employees and partners.”

Patti Williams, a Wharton professor of marketing, points out that journeys help companies understand consumer decision-making. It reveals the types of information, sources, emotions and other factors that can influence them and their choices, she says.

Williams agrees that customer journey mapping is an important tool for transforming a business. “Journey mappings are deep, embedded consumer insights.” Developing a multilayered understanding of consumers and how they make choices in a contextual setting “offers companies the opportunity to change practices in a way that reflects the reality of consumer decision making.” Consumer journey mapping, she adds, “is at the center of all consumer-focused organizations and can transform many businesses.”

“Consumer journey mapping is at the center of all consumer-focused organizations and can transform many businesses.” –Patti Williams

And as Gaikwad points out, “very few non-consumer-focused organizations remain out there, and they will change very soon. Consumerization of the enterprise is driving that change.”

Overly simple customer journey models, however, will likely fall short, says Jerry (Yoram) Wind, a Wharton professor of marketing. It is crucial that mapping be dynamic. “Mapping is very difficult given the heterogeneity of all markets and [also because] the same consumer may have a totally different journey at different times because of different contexts.” In the airline case, for instance, consumers could be traveling for various reasons, such as a vacation, business trip or family emergency. “Thus, most maps, unless they are dynamic and include context, can be quite misleading.”

Customer journey mapping requires design, domain and facilitation skills. Typically, a customer journey map is created by using data from primary research, such as personal interviews, focus group sessions, brainstorming and shadowing, as well as secondary research such as gathering and collaborating over information from databases within the organization, websites, social media and so on. Many digital tools are growing rapidly in sophistication and usefulness, and enhancing the value of gleaned insights.

The first step is to define the exact area — for instance, product, service and task — where the organization wants improvement, and identify the “consumer.” For example, a hotel may want to improve its front desk service. Here, the “consumer” would be the customer-relations employees manning the front desk. But, if the hotel wants to enhance the self-check-in experience, the “consumer” would be the guests.

With the consumer defined, the user experience team then creates a “persona” based on the customer’s demographic and psychographic profile. This would include age, socioeconomic background, value systems, opinions, attitudes, lifestyle, likes and dislikes, and so on. Thereafter, this persona’s journey — comprising expectations, experience and reflections — is mapped across a specific task. These insights are then converted into touchpoints –where the organization literally makes a connection to the customer, whether via desktop or mobile, or through a web site or social media.

“The curious case of the touchpoint is that it does not work without context of the consumer,” says Gaikwad. This is where the new digital tools add a new dimension of value. “What better time than this digital age to mine that context — it’s available on the cloud, in the devices and all over social media,” he says.

In the case of guest check-in, some touchpoints suggested through journey mapping could be self-check-in hotel lobby kiosks. Based on the guests’ persona and their context, the kiosk could dispense personalized, magnetic access cards with QR codes (the quick response bar code), which, when scanned, could offer personalized suggestions.

“Mapping is very difficult given the heterogeneity of all markets and [also because] the same consumer may have a totally different journey at different times because of different contexts.” –Jerry (Yoram) Wind

Value Proposition For instance, if the guest is a child, the access card could recommend relevant kid-friendly activities. For business travelers, it could offer details about convention centers and other business-related information. Kolar notes: “The key is to see how much personalization you can provide and how much of it you can contextualize around a given customer in a way that delights them, but at the same time is not intrusive.”

Thus, a series of connected maps covering each phase in the customer lifecycle can give an organization complete control over their capability to deliver a product or a service, Gaikwad says. In the hotel example, there could be different maps for check-in, housekeeping, concierge service, food and beverage service, and checkout. Typically, an accurate map takes up to a couple of weeks to create based on the persona, and “if done properly, it can have a shelf life of a couple of years, even in the current market where paradigm shifts are happening so regularly,” he adds.

The Way Forward

Williams believes customer journey maps should be updated frequently and often can involve an ongoing investment. Creating a journey map is an intensive process influenced by time and materials, so “budgets influence how frequently they can realistically be done. But as changes occur, they should be updated.” Williams adds that “different customer segments will have different journeys, so journeys should be understood at a segment level” as well.

One of the biggest challenges, as with so many initiatives, is getting senior management’s commitment. Successful customer journey mapping takes time and close collaboration. The effectiveness of a map depends in part on how well managers engage in the map creation process and how far into the future they can project as they analyze customer insights.

While converting journey map findings into actionable insights about digital touchpoints requires senior members across functions to brainstorm together, this is often easier planned than executed. Busy executives typically are preoccupied with operations, and many organizations work in silos — so the all-important coordination can be challenging. Storytelling and card sorting come handy to motivate, incentivize and create stickiness among diverse groups to help keep on track.

While the value of traditional journey maps is widely accepted, there remains the issue of setting metrics for the return on investment (ROI) for the latest, digital approaches. At present, “I don’t know if there is a sure way of defining a clear return on investment for customer journey mapping,” says Kolar. “We think it is a powerful tool to understand the context of the users and to take them from their current state to a heightened state of customer delight.” The new digital tools are helping. “With advanced analytics, the value, effectiveness and cost of an investment can be understood early on and course corrections can be made to minimize impact.”

Kolar believes digital customer journey mapping is here to stay. Because of the tremendous reach of social media, a single vocal customer or employee can have a big business impact. This makes it all the more important for organizations to be on top of their game.

“My sense is customer journey mapping will become a mandatory tool for digital transformation. Enterprises will begin to do customer journey mapping as the first part of their planning activities.”

Adds Sapra: “Most customer journeys of today are rendered as static maps. As digital tools advance even further, “I think they will become a lot more dynamic. They will become a current document that will get updated in real time in this connected world. That’s when the map will become even more valuable.”

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Competing on Customer Journeys

• David C. Edelman
• Marc Singer

As digital technology has enabled shoppers to easily research and buy products online, sellers have been scrambling after them, trying to understand and satisfy their wants. Savvy companies, however, are using new tools, processes, and organizational structures to proactively lead digital customers from consideration to purchase and beyond. They are creating compelling customer journeys and managing them like any other product—and gaining a source of competitive advantage.

Building successful journeys requires four key capabilities: automation, to smoothly carry customers through each step of their online path; personalization, to create a customized experience for each individual; contextual interaction, to engage customers and appropriately sequence the steps they take; and journey innovation, to add improvements that enhance and extend the journey and foster customer loyalty.

In addition, the most successful companies have a particular organizational structure, with a chief experience officer overseeing a journey-focused strategist and a “journey product manager.” This latter role is critical—the journey product manager leads a team of designers, developers, data analysts, marketers, and others to create and sustain superior journeys, and he or she is accountable for the journey’s ROI and general business performance.

You have to create new value at every step.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

Digital tools have put shoppers in the driver’s seat, allowing them to easily research and compare products, place orders, and get doorstep delivery of their items. Sellers have largely been reactive, scrambling to position themselves where customers will find them.

The Solution

Companies can use new technologies, processes, and organizational structures to proactively lead rather than follow customers on their digital journeys. By making the journey a compelling, customized, and open-ended experience, firms can woo buyers, earn their loyalty, and gain a competitive advantage.

The Strategy

Superior journeys feature automation, personalization, context-based interaction, and ongoing innovation. To achieve all this, companies need to treat journeys like products, built and supported by a cross-functional team that’s led by a manager responsible for the journey’s business performance.

The explosion of digital technologies over the past decade has created “empowered” consumers so expert in their use of tools and information that they can call the shots, hunting down what they want when they want it and getting it delivered to their doorsteps at a rock-bottom price. In response, retailers and service providers have scrambled to develop big data and analytics capabilities in order to understand their customers and wrest back control. For much of this time, companies have been reacting to customers, trying to anticipate their next moves and position themselves in shoppers’ paths as they navigate the decision journey from consideration to purchase.

• David C. Edelman is an executive adviser and a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
• Marc Singer is the director of McKinsey’s global customer engagement practice.

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A roadmap of the digital touchpoints on the customer journey

Drive conversion , Long reads

Andrew Brzezicki

Global Content Marketing Manager

May 10, 2023

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Life is a highway, some say (Rascal Flatts, in particular) — and so is the customer journey, including all digital touchpoints. Think about the last time you went on a road trip. You had a beginning, middle, and end with some stops along the way. If you had a bad interaction on your drive it can sour the trip, right? 

Just like your trip, your customer’s journey has a beginning, a middle, and (eventually) an end. Throughout that journey, they’ll have experiences with your brand like visiting your website, using your mobile app, or interacting with a social media post. These are called digital touchpoints.

Each of these touchpoints is crucial to forming a seamless, consistent customer experience that’s informative and enjoyable. If one doesn’t go well, you risk losing that customer.

Design your digital touchpoints so they’ll give your customer a seamless experience, with quick, easy access to the information they need. And in turn, they’ll feel valued and connected to your brand.

Start by mapping the customer journey

How to optimize the essential digital touchpoints, take your customers for a smooth ride at every digital touchpoint.

You need to map out that buyer journey to determine your ideal digital touchpoints. Sticking with the road trip analogy: You want to get from point A to point B, but you’ll need to stop for gas and food — and maybe a little sightseeing — along the way. Those stops are the (digital) touchpoints in your customer’s journey.

For example, the mega gas station and convenience store chain Buc-ee’s is famous for providing excellent service and a great experience (especially their clean bathrooms!) for travelers. Make your digital touchpoints so amazing that they deliver that same level of service each time.

To design the best touchpoints, identify the most common ways people begin their journey with you and interact with your brand. Once you have those, create a map of your customer journey so that you can optimize each touchpoint along the way.

Not everyone was born a ramblin’ man who enjoys a long and winding road. Some people prefer to get to their destination as soon as possible. Think of your customers the same way. You want your digital touchpoints to, well, point the customer down the easiest route toward making a purchase. To do that, you’ll need to optimize each digital channel for the best possible customer experience.

1. Search engines

In the Year of our Lord 2023, a lot of people are making purchases online — last year, there were 268 million e-commerce shoppers. And if those people are going to buy from you, they have to find you first. 

Back to the road trip: If you’re trying to find a destination, but it’s down some nameless dirt road and doesn’t have a visible sign, you’ll have a tough time getting there. But if the address is clearly displayed and it’s easy to get to, you’ll find it. 

Think of your search presence the same way. If it’s not optimized, your customers can’t find you to start their journey with you. Make sure your search presence is optimized with these key elements. 

Google Business Profile

If you don’t have this set up, you should — and fast. 87% of consumers used Google in 2022 to look for and evaluate local businesses, and Google also holds the title of being the most trusted review platform. 

With a Google Business Profile, you can easily communicate with your customers. In addition to sharing basic company information, you can also showcase products and services. (And your customers can even message you directly.) 

A complete Google Business Profile helps you appear in local search results and Google Maps, which is essential if you have brick-and-mortar locations too by the way. One of the best perks? Customers can easily leave you reviews. If you’re managing your relationships with them, that means 5-star reviews that anyone who’s browsing can see.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of any online presence and impacts multiple digital touchpoints. It’s optimizing a website to make it more visible in search engine results. SEO helps make it easier for customers to find your website, which helps drive organic traffic to your website. (And that’s the kind of traffic you want to have — unlike a holiday-weekend backup on I-95.) 

SEO also helps improve the quality of the traffic, as it attracts leads who are already interested in the products or services you offer. To optimize your site, you’ll need to:

• Research relevant keywords. Identify keywords and phrases that potential customers are likely to use when they’re looking for your products or services
• Optimize your content. Use those keywords and phrases in the text on your website, including titles, headings, body copy, and meta tags 
• Obtain quality backlinks. Build links to your site from other quality websites, like blogs and other websites related to your industry
• Monitor your progress. Track your rankings for the keywords you are targeting and analyze your website’s traffic so you can identify which of those keywords are bringing in the most qualified traffic

Paid search ads

If you have the budget, build a paid search campaign . People don’t usually scroll too far through the search results, so they’re more likely to see you if you’re paying for a top position. For the best experience, you need to determine who you’d like to reach with your paid search ads and then tailor your campaign to their needs. 

Choose keywords that are relevant to your audience and your business that send visitors to landing pages on your website that correspond to those keywords. If someone clicks on your ad, you want them to see content that relates to what they were searching for, or else they’ll click away. 

Always monitor your campaign so you can make adjustments when needed. It’s also a good idea to A/B test different ad formats by switching your verbiage around to see which ones resonate with your audience. Keep optimizing your paid ads campaign to make sure you get the best possible ROI .

2. Social media

Another place people look for items to purchase is social media — over half of shoppers have been inspired by social media to make a purchase, making it an essential digital touchpoint on your customer’s journey.

Think about your target audience and where they’re most active. Are you selling to Gen Z, who are most likely to find you on TikTok? Or are you marketing to millennials? (In which case, you’d want to focus on Facebook and Instagram.)

No matter what platform you use, you need to post content that both promotes your product and resonates with your target audience. To reach even more people, use hashtags that relate to your posts. For example, if you sell board games that would appeal to people who play Dungeons and Dragons, you could use hashtags like #dnd or #tabletopgames. 

Another effective social media strategy is to encourage people to post their own content related to your brand, referred to as user-generated content (UGC). Interact with people who post UGC, as well as the people who comment. And be sure to answer any messages you get in your inbox so customers know you value their feedback.

3. Your website and product pages

If you stop at a convenience store on a road trip and the inside is dirty and the bathrooms are out of toilet paper, that probably isn’t going to be a great experience. It’s the same for your digital touchpoints. You want your website to make a good impression on your visitors. To do that, follow some of these best practices.

Make your site user-friendly

Your site should be intuitive and user-friendly. Don’t make your visitors hunt for the resources they need. Present the information with a clear, visually appealing design that’s easy to navigate.

Also, make sure the site is optimized for mobile devices. 91% of Americans 49 and under say they use phones to shop, so if your site doesn’t load properly on their phones, you won’t impress those users very much. 

Display your calls-to-action (CTAs) clearly, too, to help guide visitors to the next step. Make the button a different color, bold the text, or make the CTA button interactive, as Fly by Jing does.

Post relevant, up-to-date content

If your site is full of content that your target audience can relate to, you’re more likely to keep them engaged. Old, outdated content will lead your site visitors to think your site isn’t current and not keeping up with recent trends, and they’ll bounce. 

Post content regularly, like new blogs, product tutorials from your customer support team, or recent customer reviews with a tool like Ratings and Reviews . 

Along with new content, share information related to your brand and your customers’ pain points with an FAQs page. Give your site users everything they need in one place so they aren’t hunting for answers. 

Optimize your product pages

Each of your product pages should be optimized too . Provide detailed and informative product descriptions that accurately portray your products’ features, benefits, and overall value (and hit those important keywords!). Use professional, high-quality photos of your product from multiple angles to give customers a better understanding of what they are buying.

Or if you have any UGC available, feature that as well. Leverage those customer videos and reviews so you can use the power of social proof and drive your page visitors toward buying your products. 

4. Online reviews

Online reviews — whether they’re on your site, social media, or Google Business Profile — are important for people looking to purchase, but it’s also a vital digital touchpoint for you. Interact with your reviewers. Thank customers who leave positive reviews, and respond to negative reviews by assuring them you appreciate their feedback and are addressing any issues.

Responding to and engaging with your reviewers shows you care about customer experience. That helps build trust in your brand. Considering that 88% of customers use reviews to discover and evaluate products across the customer journey, it’s a good idea to make these customer interactions a priority.

5. Email marketing

If you’ve ever taken a trip between Atlanta, GA, and Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, TN, you’ve seen billboard after billboard that says “See Ruby Falls” advertising this natural phenomenon . The idea is to pique your curiosity enough to get you to take a small detour to visit the attraction.

Think of your email campaigns like that very specific reference. You’re sending your customer different “billboards” to advertise your products and services throughout their digital journey. And each email needs to present a compelling reason why your customer should continue working with you or purchasing your products. Build up their curiosity and FOMO along the way.

Your emails are powerful, important digital touchpoints. If you already have their email address, it means they interacted with you at some point. Not only that, but they volunteered to receive emails from you.

Email marketing is also a good opportunity to personalize the customer experience — something today’s shoppers want. Types of emails you can send include:

• Welcome emails. When a new customer signs up to get email updates from you, they likely did it to get a discount. Send them that discount code in this email and thank them for choosing your brand
• Newsletters . Don’t just let customer email addresses sit there unused. Send regular newsletters sharing information about your products, highlighting new blog posts, or promoting upcoming sales
• Product updates : If you make major updates to a product, let customers know so they aren’t surprised. For example, say you sell tumblers and have made a change to the accompanying lids. Letting your customers know will not only prevent confusion, it will also help them feel valued and “in the loop”
• Post-purchase emails . Any time someone makes a purchase from your site, send them a thank-you email. But don’t just leave it at that — give them a reason to come back. Offer some kind of discount code on their next purchase 
• Upselling/cross-selling . Say someone buys a tumbler from your company. Send them a cross-selling email promoting your related products like stainless steel straws or extra lids. Or, if they bought a 20-ounce tumbler, try and upsell them with an email about your 30-ounce tumbler
• Sales and special offers . It’s nice to send your customers holiday greetings — it’s also an opportunity to advertise your sales and special promotions. Whether it’s a Black Friday sale or a Fourth of July blowout, send emails to make sure your current customers are the first to know
• Feedback surveys . Measuring customer sentiment is important for managing your reputation. You want to know how customers are feeling after they buy something from you, right? Send them a survey requesting their feedback and sweeten the deal a little by offering them some kind of perk for completing the survey, like a discount code

6. Conversational commerce

Imagine: You’re on your road trip, jamming out to your ’80s playlist when someone calls you, interrupting your flow. That’s exactly why 75% of millennials avoid phone calls (plus, they think they’re too time-consuming). And, tbh, many phone calls could be texts instead.

Think of your customer service in the same light. Talking to someone on the phone does take a while, and no one likes to be on hold (unless your hold music is full of awesome ’80s bangers). That’s where utilizing conversational commerce comes in. Offering live chat on your site is a great way to relate to consumers who just want to get their questions resolved quickly.

Choose a reliable live chat provider (like Talkative) that can handle your live chat, and create a list of answers to frequently asked questions so your live chat agent has those on hand to respond quickly. If you think you may have high volumes of chat requests, you can also use chatbots, which are AI-powered bots that can resolve basic customer issues and escalate the more complex questions to your staff. 

You can also proactively offer assistance with a chat pop-up so customers know that the resource is available if they need it. (While we’re at it: it’s also a good idea to also use live chat in your mobile app if you have one.) 

7. Mobile apps

Speaking of mobile apps… We all live with our smartphones in our pockets. Or, more likely, our hands (but not while we’re driving, of course!). A mobile app makes for a perfect digital touchpoint because they can help you reach your customers where they are. 

You’ll want to design your app so it’s easy to use and compatible with both iOS and Android. Make sure to test for any bugs before launching and before sending out any updates — you don’t want your page on the Apple and Google Play stores to be flooded with negative reviews because an update affected your app’s functionality.

Use push notifications to your advantage and inform people about any special offers, product updates, or discount codes.

8. SMS messaging

Ever been friends with an over-texter? They send messages again and again and again (which can get super annoying if you’re hooked up to Apple CarPlay). Don’t be that person if a customer signs up to receive text updates from you. 

Instead, make sure your SMS marketing messages are thoughtfully planned out and only inform customers of important info — like sales and promotional offers. 

9. Loyalty programs

Do you have that one friend who is always down to road trip with you? They’re your #rideordie — that’s how you should think of your most loyal customers, too. Reward those awesome people with a customer loyalty program that includes tons of perks and exclusive discounts. 

Consider using a point-based system, which increases your sales and motivates customers to buy. If they reach a certain point level, then they get to redeem it for some kind of free merchandise or a huge discount on their next order.

Interacting with your customers and providing them with a seamless experience across all digital touchpoints across the entire customer journey from beginning to end requires the right tools.

Use Bazaarvoice to get insights and reports about your marketing so that you can continually optimize your digital (and physical) touchpoints to prevent your customers from goin’ on the road again — to a different store.

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Oct 5, 2020

How To Create A Customer Journey Map

• Digital Strategy

It goes without saying that a cohesive customer journey is absolutely critical for success. These marketers understand how a customer or user journey map can streamline processes and provide customers with a consistent experience with a brand. Ideally, a customer journey map transforms the online customer journey into a visually accessible method for digital marketers to use to their advantage.

To streamline your customer experience and be consistently available to consumers throughout their online experience, read on to uncover how you can create a best-in-class customer journey map for your own brand.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a “visual representation of every experience your customers have with you.” Throughout their experience with your brand, a customer will most likely engage or be reminded of your brand on multiple platforms, in varying ways. A customer journey map helps your brand deliver a streamlined narrative of a customer’s experience throughout the online sales funnel.

Although it may seem that the journey from first interaction through to a sale is quite simple, it is anything but. A customer is bombarded with countless advertisements, newsletters, and competitive content on a daily basis. This makes their journey with your brand complicated, and a well-rounded customer journey map is your solution to making that experience easier.

Customers can interact with your brand in countless ways in the modern digital landscape.  Some examples include :

• Reading a branded blog post
• Accessing your website from search engine platform
• Following your brand on varying social media channels

By creating a clear visualization of every possible way a customer can interact and contact your brand, a customer journey map can help you keep customers engaged while you increase conversions and revenue.

Why Create a Customer Journey Map?

With so much of the journey taking place digitally, it’s vital that digital marketers understand exactly where customers are interacting with your brand while providing accessible, high-quality content on a regular basis.

With an effective customer journey map, digital marketers will gain a better understanding of how their customers interact with their business while accessing helpful insight into what channels are most effective for converting leads into prospects, and prospects into loyal customers.

Gone are the days when products were traditionally marketed by boasting specific features. Modern buyers are interested in the brand as a whole, how they personally engage with them, and most importantly, how the offering can solve a problem they are facing. A streamlined customer journey map will help clarify how digital marketers can most effectively provide prospects with this information and keep them engaged and dedicated to completing a purchase.

Get Started with the Customer Journey Map

Now that you understand what a customer journey map is and how it can take your digital marketing efforts to the next level, let’s jump into how to map out the online journey. Your customer’s journey is complex, so the job of the map is to make it as focused and simple as possible.

Step 1: Use your sales funnel to define the buying process

Ideally, your brand will already have an online sales funnel developed that demonstrates how leads move through your content and marketing strategies to eventually complete a purchase. This information will provide you with a guideline as to how many potential touchpoints a customer has with your brand and content, and how each interaction feeds into the next.

Step 2: Think like a customer

Regardless of the massive increase in customer data, it’s tough to truly think like a customer. Each prospect is a unique human with different needs, emotions, personalities, responsibilities, and so on. So how can you, as a digital marketer, understand how your customers are making choices to eventually reach the end of your sales funnel and purchase your product or service?

Although you won’t be able to fully predict a prospect’s next steps, you can align their goals with varying stages of your sales funnel, while moving through the process yourself. Track these steps as you go through a variety of touchpoints and combinations of choices. If you come across a section of your buying journey that doesn’t feel like a natural next step, take note, and optimize this step to make the customer journey more logical and straightforward.

If you really want to optimize your customer journey, review transcripts of support calls and emails to track where a purchase process went wrong and work to fix these issues before moving onto the next step.

Step 3: Develop the touchpoints of customer interaction

Simply stated, a touchpoint is any digital place at which a customer can access information about your brand or engage with your website. In turn, each touchpoint is also critical for interaction and conversion on the business end of things.

Many of these touchpoints will have been tracked in the second step of this process. However, now is the time to plot these touchpoints logically. For example, a customer “liking” a social media post counts as one touchpoint, while clicking through to a link from that social media post is another. Group these touchpoints into logical areas, such as “social media touchpoints” and “web page touchpoints.”

Step 4: Implement your customer journey map and conduct research

First things first, though: create a visually-appealing customer journey map that is accessible for all necessary team members. A graphic designer can help compile your findings and touchpoints in a visual sequence that is understandable, logical, and beautiful.

Now that you’ve identified each possible touchpoint, grouped them into logical areas sequences, and developed an accessible customer journey map, it’s time to implement your new findings and see how they work digitally.

Platforms like Google Analytics will be of immense help if you’re looking to see where buyers are dropping out of the customer journey on a regular basis. If you notice patterns such as a lack of click-throughs from newsletters or customer abandonment just before the purchase is completed, analyze these touchpoints and make necessary improvements.

Targeted prospects want their journey to be as simple as possible, so including too many touchpoints in their buying process may not keep them engaged the entire way through. While reviewing your customer journey map, make sure that the journey is easy enough to keep them taking the ideal logical steps while providing the personalized and educational content they need to stay engaged.

Step 5: Regularly optimize your customer journey map

Like most aspects of a digital marketing strategy, your online customer journey will change frequently as technology develops and new digital platforms are introduced into the buying cycle. By taking the time to regularly review how your customers are moving through your buying cycle, you can identify gaps and develop processes to streamline the customer experience.

According to a 2016 report, the  Aberdeen Group’s Customer Journey Mapping: Lead the Way to Advocacy , organizations experienced a 16.8% decrease in the size of the sales cycle when a user journey map is developed, implemented, and maintained successfully. Although the process of creating a customer journey map can be a timely endeavor for digital marketers, it provides unparalleled value for both your brand and your customers.

Offering prospects a streamlined and enjoyable online experience will help to keep them engaged while you drive sales forward. When you understand your customers’ needs and preferences, you can increase your own productivity by focusing your digital marketing developments on the touchpoints that need most help. Enable yourself to create consistent customer experiences that align your digital marketing strategies with the high-quality digital content that your customers have come to expect from your best-in-class organization.

• Why User Experience is Key to Digital Marketing Success
• 5 Customer Lifecycle Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs
• 3 Ways Little Data Trumps Big Data For a Superior User Experience
• Walkthrough: Google Analytics with Cathal Melinn

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Customer journey analyses in digital media: exploring the impact of cross-media exposure on customers' purchase decisions

Journal of Service Management

ISSN : 1757-5818

Article publication date: 18 June 2020

Issue publication date: 6 October 2020

In the age of digital media, customers have access to vast digital information sources, within and outside a company's direct control. Yet managers lack a metric to capture customers' cross-media exposure and its ramifications for individual customer journeys. To solve this issue, this article introduces media entropy as a new metric for assessing cross-media exposure on the individual customer level and illustrates its effect on consumers' purchase decisions.

Design/methodology/approach

Building on information and signalling theory, this study proposes the entropy of company-controlled and peer-driven media sources as a measure of cross-media exposure. A probit model analyses individual-level customer journey data across more than 25,000 digital and traditional media touchpoints.

Cross-media exposure, measured as the entropy of information sources in a customer journey, drives purchase decisions. The positive effect is particularly pronounced for (1) digital (online) versus traditional (offline) media environments, (2) customers who currently do not own the brand and (3) brands that customers perceive as weak.

Practical implications

The proposed metric of cross-media exposure can help managers understand customers' information structures in pre-purchase phases. Assessing the consequences of customers' cross-media exposure is especially relevant for service companies that seek to support customers' information search efforts. Marketing agencies, consultancies and platform providers also need actionable customer journey metrics, particularly in early stages of the journey.

Originality/value

Service managers and marketers can integrate the media entropy metric into their marketing dashboards and use it to steer their investments in different media types. Researchers can include the metric in empirical models to explore customers' omni-channel journeys.

• Digital media
• Individual-level data
• Experience tracking
• Customer journey
• Media synergies

Klein, J.F. , Zhang, Y. , Falk, T. , Aspara, J. and Luo, X. (2020), "Customer journey analyses in digital media: exploring the impact of cross-media exposure on customers' purchase decisions", Journal of Service Management , Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 489-508. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-11-2018-0360

Emerald Publishing Limited

© Jan F. Klein, Yuchi Zhang, Tomas Falk, Jaakko Aspara and Xueming Luo. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Digital media have dramatically changed how customers communicate with brands. Rather than being passive recipients of information, modern customers actively co-create brand meaning through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube ( Hennig-Thurau et al. , 2010 ; Leeflang et al. , 2014 ). Whereas company-controlled advertising previously dominated, currently peer-to-peer media, such as consumer reviews, social media activities and word of mouth (WOM) represent equally important sources of brand information ( Jahn and Kunz, 2012 ). Such media fragmentation requires service managers to rely on customer journey analyses, conducted by internal departments (e.g. marketing, data science) or external service providers (e.g. marketing agencies), to understand what they can do to create superior customer experiences ( Homburg et al. , 2017 ; Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ). Customer journey analysis accordingly has emerged as a distinctive service offered by marketing agencies (e.g. Custellence), consultancies (e.g. Bain and Company) and software as a service (SaaS) platforms (e.g. SAS). These service providers go beyond identifying series of touchpoints and instead provide relevant, actionable metrics that promise to capture the overall journey and experience ( Bain and Company, 2018 ; McKinsey and Company, 2019 ).

Yet popular metrics such as the Net Promoter Score or assessments of customer satisfaction typically adopt an aggregated, “end of pipe” perspective that does not specify specific stages of individual customer journeys. Managers strive for a deeper understanding of customer decision-making processes, especially in omni-channel environments characterized by a plethora of touchpoints ( Verhoef et al. , 2015 ). For example, understanding decisions along customer journeys requires insights into customers' pre-purchase information status. It not only shapes their subsequent information search behaviour ( Verhoef et al. , 2007 ) but also informs the level of difficulties consumers likely will have in predicting the quality of complex products and service with salient experience and credence qualities ( Voorhees et al. , 2017 ; Zeithaml, 1981 ). An inability to assess quality levels prior to purchase, due to a lack of information, may prevent customers from buying a product or service in the first place.

To capture customers' information status in the pre-purchase stage, we propose a new metric that assesses cross-media exposure at the individual customer level. Beneficial media synergies might result from customers' exposures to company-controlled “paid media” and peer-driven “earned media” touchpoints. Thus, we propose assessing the effects of cross-media exposure on the basis of media entropy – defined as variation in paid and earned media sources within a customer journey. To the best of our knowledge, individual-level metrics that capture cross-media exposure and its effects on customers' purchase decisions remain scarce. This is surprising, considering the bottom-line importance of media synergies assessed based on aggregated market-level data (e.g. Naik and Raman, 2003 ; Pauwels et al. , 2016 ) and the increasing availability of individual-level data gathered from customer journey tracking tools ( Baxendale et al. , 2015 ).

We empirically test the impact of cross-media exposure on customer purchase decisions based on individual-level customer journey data. This data was collected in cooperation with a marketing agency and encompasses more than 25,000 digital and traditional media touchpoints reported by 1,831 participants from five countries (China, France, Germany, United Kingdom and United States), through a smartphone application.

Introducing and validating this individual-level metric to capture cross-media exposure yields several contributions to research and managerial practice. First, our proposed media entropy metric addresses calls for new metrics of customer experiences in general ( Bolton et al. , 2018 ; Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; McColl-Kennedy et al. , 2015 ) and for assessments of the “pre-core service encounter” in particular ( Voorhees et al. , 2017 ). Second, we make a methodological contribution to customer journey analyses in service research (e.g. Halvorsrud et al. , 2016 ; Tax et al. , 2013 ; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010 ) and to studies of media synergies (e.g. Naik and Raman, 2003 ; Pauwels et al. , 2016 ; Srinivasan et al. , 2016 ). Current studies tend to focus on media exposure or media volume, whereas our metric accounts for the increasing variety of media touchpoints in omni-channel systems and thereby captures the information structures of customer journeys. Third, we investigate the effectiveness of cross-media exposure in light of heterogeneous customer characteristics. By accounting for pre-existing brand strength and current brand ownership, this study provides an extension of the rarely considered influence of customer characteristics on media type effectiveness ( Ho-Dac et al. , 2013 ; Leeflang et al. , 2014 ). Accordingly, we advance research into the effectiveness of media synergies in brand-related conditions ( Pauwels et al. , 2016 ). For companies and marketing agencies, this study establishes an actionable metric they can integrate directly into their marketing dashboards and use to select their marketing investments in different media types.

Research background

Customer journey, media touchpoints and purchase decisions.

Unlike impulsive or habitual purchases, service purchases typically require customers to proceed along different stages of the customer journey. Theoretically, this requirement stems from the experience and credence qualities that typically dominate services and hamper customers' quality assessments prior to a purchase ( Zeithaml, 1981 ). In general, when consumers identify a need to buy a service in a certain category, they start their decision-making process with an initial consideration set of brands. This consideration set is usually formed on the basis of their past purchase experiences and previous encounters with marketing campaigns by the category's brands ( Baxendale et al. , 2015 ). Then during the subsequent pre-purchase stage, customers start to obtain and review brand information and evaluate the available brands. They next decide which service to purchase or whether to forgo purchase completely ( Court et al. , 2009 ; Edelman and Singer, 2015 ).

From a service research perspective, the pre-purchase stage thus significantly shapes the relationship between the firm and the customer. It is mainly characterized by customers' information search, through which they gather information from company-controlled and peer-driven sources in traditional and digital media channels ( McColl-Kennedy et al. , 2015 ). This puts a focus on the design and management of the customer journey to provide the customer with relevant information across different media channels ( Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ).

Despite its importance for the eventual purchase decision, the pre-purchase stage has received relatively little attention in service research, especially compared with the focus on the core service delivery ( Voorhees et al. , 2017 ). Exposure to different information sources or media touchpoints before making a purchase decision is a key feature of customer journeys though, especially in the digital age ( Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; Voorhees et al. , 2017 ). Media touchpoints include various encounters that provide information about a firm. Most prominently, literature differentiates between company-controlled “paid” and customer- or peer-driven “earned” media, which can appear either in the offline or in the online channel. Paid media encompass activities undertaken directly by the company itself or its agents (e.g. retailers), such as television advertising, online advertising or sponsoring. Earned media refer to indirect encounters with the brand, through other customers or third parties. This category includes peer-to-peer interactions such as WOM, consumer reviews and published content (e.g. expert reviews) ( Stephen and Galak, 2012 ). In contemporary media environments, peers' communication efforts exert a growing influence on purchase decisions, in addition to company-initiated communication activities ( Hennig-Thurau et al. , 2010 ). Capturing the overall influence of digital media requires investigating patterns of interactions that determine customers' information structures and measuring the consequences of their exposure to different media in their customer journey ( McColl-Kennedy et al. , 2015 ). Particularly, insights on cross-media synergies between different information sources might help reveal the influence of the information structure.

Research on media synergies

Exposures across multiple media should be more informative for customers than receiving information from a single medium. Extensive research also suggests a positive effect of such media synergies on sales (e.g. Jayson et al. , 2018 ; Naik and Raman, 2003 ; Pauwels et al. , 2016 ; Srinivasan et al. , 2016 ). These studies distinguish within-media synergies, such as between television and print advertising (e.g. Naik and Raman, 2003 ); cross-media synergies between offline and online channels (e.g. Naik and Peters, 2009 ); and cross-media synergies between different information sources, such as company-controlled and peer-driven media (e.g. Jayson et al. , 2018 ).

These contributions consistently rely on aggregate data about a company's media spending or peer-media traffic to assess media synergies, modelled as interaction effects among different media, on overall company sales. Compared with aggregated data, individual-level data pertaining to customer exposures to different media can provide richer insights, by capturing the information structure that individual customers receive. Assessing cross-media exposures along an individual customer journey also accounts for their changing information consumption, which is enabled by their more efficient access to a variety of media touchpoints. Interestingly, research that has capitalized on individual-level data focusses on the effectiveness of individual media touchpoints, not cross-media exposure and its potential media synergies ( Baxendale et al. , 2015 ; Romaniuk and Hartnett, 2017 ). To address this shortcoming, we conceptualize a customer-centric metric of cross-media exposure.

Media entropy: a new metric to capture cross-media exposure with individual-level data

Our customer-centric cross-media exposure metric seeks to go beyond simple measures of overall media exposure and media frequency to account for the information structure entailed in a customer's individual customer journey. Measures of media frequencies and their interactions are not well suited for customer journey data, because more frequent media encounters do not necessarily mean better information or risk reduction that would lead to a purchase decision. During their customer journey, some customers might seek to reduce their purchase risk early, such that they do not encounter many touchpoints; others continue searching but never purchase, despite frequent interactions. We therefore use a structural measure of the information accessed during the customer journey, independent of the frequency of exposure to an information source.

To provide such a metric, we build on information and signalling theory. The structure in which information is provided influences customers' information processing and decision-making process ( Lurie, 2004 ; Van Herpen and Pieters, 2002 ). According to information theory, assessing the structure of information is particularly important in rich information environments. To capture the structure of information, we operationalize cross-media exposure in individual-level customer journey data as the entropy of paid and earned media calculated over all previous media touchpoint encounters. Entropy is a common measure in information theory ( Shannon, 1948 ) that also has been applied to customer decision-making in information-rich environments as an elaborate concept to assess the variability of an information structure ( Lurie, 2004 ; Van Herpen and Pieters, 2002 ). Specifically, entropy is a variety measure of categorical data, such that it equals zero when only one information type is present and reaches its maximum when all information types are represented equally. In other words, higher levels of entropy indicate greater information variety. For a given customer, we calculate the cross-media exposure of media types in the customer journey for a given brand as Media Entropy =   − ∑ k = 1 N p k   log p k , where p k is the proportion of all media touchpoints categorized as the k th media type.

Entropy also has two features that make it specifically applicable in our context. First, it provides an operationalization of the variation of categorical data, such that it can capture the heterogeneity of paid versus earned media touchpoints prior to the purchase decision. Second, it is independent of the total number of brand encounters in the customer journey. As such, it goes beyond simple measures of overall media exposure and media volume by capturing cross-media exposure. Low entropy of information sources describes a situation in which customers are mostly exposed to either paid or earned media touchpoints. In contrast, high entropy means that customers encounter media touchpoints from both paid and earned media categories. The cross-media exposure indicated by the entropy of information sources then provides a new layer of information, which can reveal better how information-rich environments affect consumer decision-making. Drawing on information economics and signalling theory, we develop specific hypotheses for the influence of this media entropy metric on customers' purchase decisions.

The effect of media entropy on brand purchase

To be relevant for customer journey analyses, media entropy, as an operationalization of cross-media exposure, must exert an effect on brand purchases. We rely on information economics to provide a justification for why our media entropy metric should influence brand purchases.

Customers lack full information about brands before purchase, so they search for brand-related information to reduce their purchase risk. In general, two key factors determine the value of a signal: clarity and credibility. Signal clarity depends largely on the consistency of brand-related information; it captures the extent to which a company's communication activities reflect the intended, overall message and provide unambiguous information. Signal credibility refers to the trustworthiness of the brand-related information, depending on the believability of the source. That is, clarity ensures information consistency across brand encounters, and credibility determines whether a source conveys information effectively ( Erdem and Swait, 1998 ).

Signalling activities provided through paid media likely suffer from a lack of credibility but achieve greater clarity, due to the company's direct influence and desire to align communication activities. In contrast, signalling activities through peer-driven earned media tend to possess greater credibility but lack clarity, reflecting divergences in peer-to-peer interactions ( Ho-Dac et al. , 2013 ). If customers encounter a brand through focussed media activities, based on either paid or earned media, they likely experience high levels of either clarity or credibility. These high levels of signal clarity and signal credibility remain mutually exclusive in cases of low media entropy, which could reduce customers' willingness to purchase the brand ( Erdem et al. , 2006 ).

Conversely, purchase likelihood may increase if a media mix compensates for the weakness of obtaining either signal clarity or signal credibility through focussed media exposure. If customers encounter high levels of media entropy across paid and earned media, they might perceive high clarity and high credibility of the brand-related information concurrently. This notion is in line with the confirmation bias detected in consumer psychology, which leads people to ignore evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs, ideas or expectations ( Nickerson, 1998 ). High media entropy should reinforce the effect of coherent company-controlled signals, because customers tend to focus more on favourable than unfavourable information conveyed by other customers. Similarly, positive peer-driven information about a brand (high levels of signal credibility) may be reinforced by company-orchestrated communication (high levels of signal clarity). The potential harmful effects of negative earned media coverage even might be alleviated by coherent paid media initiatives. Overall, we predict that greater cross-media exposure, as measured by the entropy of information sources in the customer journey, enhances purchase likelihood.

The increase of media entropy, measured as the extent of a customer's cross-media exposure in the customer journey, has a positive effect on customers' brand purchase likelihood.

The effect of media entropy on customers' brand purchase likelihood is greater in digital (online) compared with traditional (offline) media environments.

Moderating effects of brand strength and brand ownership

The effect of media entropy on customers' brand purchase likelihood is greater for customers who do not own the brand, compared with current brand owners.

The effect of media entropy on customers' brand purchase likelihood is greater for brands that are perceived as weak, compared with brands perceived as strong.

Data collection

We seek to provide and test a metric of the effect of media entropy on an individual customer level. Because we need data on individual customer journeys, we employed an experience tracking approach. Instead of collecting data retrospectively, this approach asks respondents to report all their encounters with competing brands directly after the encounter ( Baxendale et al. , 2015 ), through their smartphone devices. It thus can collect data on individual brand encounters across media types (i.e. paid and earned) and channels (i.e. offline and online). It also reduces the cognitive burden associated with recalling brand encounters and the memory decay that can arise with retrospective surveys ( Danaher and Dagger, 2013 ). For an overview of this data collection method, see Baxendale et al. (2015) or Lovett and Peres (2018) .

To report on their brand encounters, respondents answered three questions through a smartphone app: Which brand is encountered? Which type of media touchpoint is encountered? How is the media touchpoint perceived (i.e. attractive vs not attractive)? This experience tracking method differentiates 23 media touchpoints and ten competing brands. The list of media touchpoints was generated for the focal product category, in cooperation with a marketing agency, on the basis of qualitative studies with customers and industry experts (see Appendix 1 ). Through a pre-survey, we also collected data on individual respondent characteristics, including current brand ownership and pre-existing perceptions of brand strength. We collected data over a six-week period, which resulted in 26,285 reported paid and earned media touchpoints.

We recruited respondents in five countries (i.e. China, France, Germany, United Kingdom and United States) who were at that time considering a search for and purchase of a certain consumer electronics product. Although consumer electronics do not represent a service category, their purchase process features notable similarities with typical service purchases. First, consumer electronics and services both are dominated by experience and credence qualities, so customers need additional information (sources), beyond the offering itself, to predict quality levels. Second, because of this need for an in-depth information search, purchase decisions in both categories typically involve a customer journey that encompasses multiple touchpoints. This feature is a central requirement for our empirical data. Participants had previously indicated their interest in buying the consumer electronics product, so they already had developed a consideration set. Accordingly, we can assess their ensuing customer journey and resulting purchase decision. From the initial respondents, we excluded those who did not participate in the pre-survey, did not report any brand encounters or did not participate in biweekly reviews (see Baxendale et al. , 2015 ). During the six-week period, we obtained 1,831 (79.2%) useable responses from our initial sample. Appendix 2 contains an overview of the initial respondents, the percentage of useable responses per country and distinct customer characteristics.

Robustness check

To gauge the validity of the data collection method, we compare self-reported data with aggregated data sources from media research companies (for similar approach, see Danaher and Dagger, 2013 ). Due to the data availability offered by the media companies, we rely on our US sample ( n  = 419) for this comparison. We first compare respondents' self-reported purchases (i.e. purchase share) with established market share data obtained from the multinational market research institute GfK. Next, we compare US respondents' self-reported paid media exposure across brands with media spending data obtained from Kantar Media's AdSpender tool during the time of the survey. We correlate aggregated media spending across different paid media types with actual advertising exposure to the media type, as captured by experience tracking. Finally, we validate the earned media data by correlating self-reports of such exposure across brands with historical social media mentions of the brand during the time of the survey. Specifically, we use Facebook's “people talked about this” (PTAT) metric, obtained from the Quintly database. The PTAT measure summarizes peer-to-peer interactions with a brand through various Facebook actions (e.g. likes, mentions, comments). For all three comparisons, the correlations between self-reported experience tracking data and aggregated data from industry sources exceed 0.70, with print advertising (0.71) having the lowest and television advertising the highest correlation (0.88). These results support the robustness of data collection through experience tracking (see Table 1 ).

Media touchpoints and media entropy

We identify whether each media touchpoint represents one of four possible categories: offline paid, offline earned, online paid or online earned. As outlined, we operationalize cross-media exposure as the entropy of paid and earned media types calculated over all previous media touchpoints in the customer journey.

Current brand ownership, pre-existing brand strength and brand purchase

Respondents reported their existing brand ownership and perception of brand strength in an online survey before the experience tracking phase. Building on Kirmani's ( 1990 , p. 160) operationalization of brand strength as the “overall quality as well as the perceptions of physical or abstract quality-related product attributes, such as the comfort, style, or durability”, our measure of brand strength spans three dimensions: brand quality, design and innovation (e.g. “[Brand name] has a more attractive design and style than other [category of consumer electronic product] brands”). We measure responses on a six-point scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Respondents report their brand purchases directly on the smartphone app, along with the purchase price.

Model development

Our unit of analysis is at the individual touchpoint level. Because customers encounter many media touchpoints throughout their customer journey for each brand, we decompose the customer journey into a series of periods. Each period consists of a particular interaction with a touchpoint and a decision to purchase. To test our hypotheses, we use a probit model that incorporates unobserved individual-level heterogeneity. Let y i j n = 1 if individual i purchases brand j during the interaction with the nth media touchpoint and 0 if we do not observe any purchase activity. We specify i 's latent purchase utility as: (1)   U i j n ∗ = β i 0 + β 1 MediaEntropy i j n + β 2 OfflineEarned i j n + β 3 OnlinePaid i j n + β 4 OnlineEarned i j n + β 5 NumTP i j n + β 6 Price i j +   β 7 BrandOwnership i j + ϵ i j n

The focal variable is MediaEntropy i j n , which measures the extent of cross-media exposure entropy across the type of media touchpoints previously encountered over touchpoints 1, 2, …, n . That is, our measure for cross-media exposure is updated for each individual i and each brand j up to the n th period. In addition, β i 0 is an individual-level fixed effect that captures unobserved heterogeneity. Then OfflineEarned i j n , OnlinePaid i j n and OnlineEarned i j n are dummy variables that indicate the type of media touchpoint individual i encounters during the n th period. Offline paid media serves as the baseline. We also control for other observable factors: (1) the total number of previous media touchpoints NumTP i j n , (2) the purchase price P r i c e i j of brand j that individual i paid and (3) whether individual i currently owns the brand using the indicator variable BrandOwnership i j , which equals 1 if individual i owns brand j .

We are also interested in the moderating effect of brand ownership and brand strength. To assess the interaction between media entropy and brand ownership, we apply the following model: (2) U i j n ∗ = β i 0 + β 1 MediaEntropy i j n + β 2 OfflineEarned i j n + β 3 OnlinePaid i j n + β 4 OnlineEarned i j n + β 5 NumTP i j n + β 6 Price i j + β 7 BrandOwnership ij +   β 8 BrandOwnership i j   x   MediaEntropy i j n + ϵ i n

For the interaction between media entropy and brand strength, we average the three items that measure perceptions of brand strength, obtained from the pre-survey before the experience tracking period, to create BrandStrength i j . Because it was measured in the pre-survey, it only varies across individuals for a specific brand. We assess both its main effect and interaction with media entropy in follow-up models. In particular, we specify: (3) U i j n ∗ = β i 0 + β 1 MediaEntropy i j n + β 2 OfflineEarned i j n + β 3 OnlinePaid i j n + β 4 OnlineEarned i j n + β 5 NumTP i j n + β 6 Price i j + β 7 BrandOwnership i j +   β 8 BrandStrength i j + β 9 BrandStrength i j   x   MediaEntropy i j n + ϵ i n .

Identification

The primary goal in our model specification is to identify the impact of our focal media entropy variable on purchase activity. Therefore, we also must control for factors that may confound our results. First, the media touchpoint interactions are self-reported by users in our sample, which could lead to systematic over- or under-reporting. Although we cannot observe whether customers do or do not have a reporting bias, we use data robustness checks, as outlined previously, as well as model controls, as specified subsequently, to address this concern. Second, unobserved, time-invariant differences across customers could bias our results. For example, some customers may shop frequently and consume different types of media, in which case they would be more likely to purchase and be exposed to more media touchpoints. This individual-level unobservable variable might correlate with both the media entropy variable and latent purchase utility (through the error term), which would bias our results. To control for such unobserved individual-level heterogeneity, we follow Soysal and Krishnamurthi (2016) and include individual-level fixed effects. By capturing user i 's baseline media consumption habits through the fixed effects, our model controls for the portion of the error term that is correlated with both media entropy and latent purchase utility. The identifying assumption is that unobservable variables, such as touchpoint reporting behaviour and media consumption habits, should remain fixed over the six-week observation period. We also control for observed heterogeneity across brands and countries, using brand- and country-specific fixed effects. Third, correlated unobservable variables are another concern. For example, some customers could have higher interest in the particular consumer electronic product. We control for this and other time-invariant correlated unobservable variables using individual-level fixed effects. For time-varying unobservable variables, we use latent instrumental variables (LIVs) to address endogeneity concerns.

Latent instrument variables

Considering the potential unobservable variables and self-selection concerns that could confound our results, it may be difficult to identify a strong instrument to adopt for the instrumental variables approach to resolve endogeneity concerns. To address potential sources of endogeneity, we use LIV to estimate our model. This method does not rely on the validity of specific instruments. Since being introduced by Ebbes et al. (2005) , LIV has been applied in multiple contexts (e.g. Rutz et al. , 2012 ; Zhang et al. , 2009 ), and it offers an appropriate approach for our empirical context. Specifically, we follow Ebbes et al. (2005) and Rutz et al. (2012) and decompose the endogenous variables into one component that is correlated and another that is uncorrelated with the error term (e.g. ϵ i j n in Equation 1 ). Considering MediaEntropy i j n as our endogenous variable, we specify: (4) MediaEntropy i j n   = θ · D i j n + ψ i j n , where D i j n is a latent categorical variable that we estimate with the Gibbs sampler, and θ is a vector of category means for the latent variable. Similar to Ebbes et al. (2005) and Rutz et al. (2012) , we set the number of categories to two. Then D i j n follows a binomial distribution with probabilities π 1 and π 2 ( π h is the probability that latent instrument h equals 1, or   ∑ ​ π h = 1 ). We assume that the error terms [ ϵ i j n ,   ψ i j n ] follow a multivariate normal distribution with mean 0 and the variance–covariance matrix: Ω = [ σ ϵϵ σ ϵ ψ σ ϵ ψ σ ψ ψ ] , where σ ϵ ψ captures the correlation between the endogenous variable and the error term in Equation (1) .

To estimate the model ( Equations 1 and 4 ), we use Bayesian estimation and specify the following priors: [ β ] ∼ N ( β ¯ , σ 2 ) . We ran 20,000 iterations (first 10,000 as burn-in). The iterations converge to a stable posterior, according to a visual examination of the posterior iterations and Geweke's (1992) diagnostic. To use the Gibbs sampler to estimate the model, we first relax the assumption in the probit model that σ ϵϵ = 1 , which provides a more stable estimation of Ω . We then identify the posterior estimates through post-processing of the posterior draws ( Edwards and Allenby, 2003 ). After running the Gibbs sampler, we rescale the estimates by first setting each iteration of σ ϵϵ to 1, then rescale all other parameters accordingly.

Table 2 contains the main results pertaining to how media exposure across paid and earned media, as measured by media entropy, affects customers' purchase likelihood. In Model 1, we calculate media entropy across media types. In Model 2, we separately calculate the effect of the media entropy metric in offline and online channels, to assess the effect of media entropy in digital (online) and traditional (offline) media environments. The parameter estimates for the media entropy variable are consistent with our theory; media entropy appears to have a positive effect on customers' brand purchase likelihood. Specifically, we find that customers who encounter more diversity in media types are also more likely to purchase the brand ( media entropy  = 0.367), in support of H 1.

We find varying effectiveness of media entropy across offline and online channels. Specifically, the coefficient of media entropy within the online channel is greater than that within the offline channel (media entropy (offline) = 0.089, media entropy (online) = 0.585). Enhancing media entropy in the online channel likely increases purchase likelihood more than enhancing in media entropy in the offline channel, as we predicted in H 2.

The control variables also provide interesting results. The main effect of a particular media channel on the likelihood of purchase, compared with the baseline condition of offline paid media, indicates that that offline earned, online paid and online earned media have greater value in driving purchase incidence. We also find a negative price coefficient as expected – because higher prices generally are associated with lower purchase incidence. In addition, we find a brand ownership effect; customers who currently own the brand are more likely to repurchase the same brand than are non-owners.

Media entropy is positively related to purchase likelihood. However, different context factors, such as brand ownership and brand strength, could moderate our results. Table 3 reports both the main effects of brand ownership and its interaction with media entropy. For comparison, we present the main effects of brand ownership from Model 1 and include the interaction component in a new Model 3. The parameter estimates for the media entropy variable (media entropy = 0.367 and 0.558 for Models 1 and 3, respectively) and brand ownership (brand ownership = 0.095 and 0.108) are consistent with our previous results. Also consistent with our predictions, we find a negative interaction between media entropy and brand ownership (−0.437). This suggests that the positive impact of media entropy is stronger for customers who currently do not own the brand than for current brand owners, in support of H 3 .

In Table 4 we report both the main effects of brand strength (Model 4) and its interaction with media entropy (Model 5). Not all respondents provided data on brand strength for each brand, so we rely on 19,893 reported paid and earned touchpoints in Models 4 and 5. The parameter estimates for the media entropy variable are consistent with our previous results (media entropy = 0.364 and 2.236 for Models 5 and 6, respectively). In addition, Models 4 and 5 indicate positive effects of brand strength (brand strength = 0.014 and 0.022 for Models 4 and 5, respectively). That is, stronger brands are associated with higher purchase incidence. We also find a negative interaction between media entropy and brand strength (−0.370), which suggests that the positive impact of media entropy is greater for weak brands than for strong brands, in support of H 4 .

Robustness checks

We conducted an additional analysis to check the robustness of the results. First, whether customers perceive a touchpoint as more or less attractive might influence their purchase decision. Thus, we obtained results from a model in which we included information about touchpoint valence, collected via experience tracking. The results for media entropy and the moderating effects are consistent with our preceding model. Second, instead of using a LIV approach, we obtained results from a logit model using maximum likelihood estimation. The results of both models are consistent for the main model (see Appendix 3 ) and for the moderating effects (see Appendix 3 ).

Theoretical implications

In the age of digital media, customer journeys are characterized by increasingly fragmented information sources that reside within and outside the company's direct control. In this complex media landscape, the analysis and management of customer journeys have become vital for managerial practice and particularly for managers in service industries. Although customers' exposure to information from different media has increased, decision-makers lack a metric to track the ramifications of this trend. Therefore, this article introduces a new metric, media entropy, to capture cross-media exposure on the individual customer level and illustrates its effect on customers' purchase decisions. The media entropy metric contributes to service research that seeks to improve the management of communication and information search efforts in the pre-purchase or pre–core service encounter stage ( Voorhees et al. , 2017 ). In contrast to the core service delivery, and despite its importance for the ultimate purchase decision, this initial part of the customer journey has received little attention so far. Our empirical results highlight that neglecting the effect of cross-media exposure in the pre-purchase stage will result in missed opportunities to provide a better service experience and exert a bottom-line impact on customers' purchase decisions.

By providing a novel media metric for customer journey analyses, we investigate patterns of interactions that may alter customer experiences before a purchase. We thereby address calls to develop new metrics to measure customer experiences during the customer journey ( Bolton et al. , 2018 ; Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; McColl-Kennedy et al. , 2015 ). Importantly, our metric addresses the need for service firms to obtain a more complete view of customer interactions across media and channels ( McColl-Kennedy et al. , 2015 ). Finally, this study emphasizes the need to track and manage customer experiences carefully in the service context ( Bolton et al. , 2014 ).

Empirically, the results reveal that customers' exposures across paid and earned media increase brand purchase likelihood, beyond what can be achieved by focussed exposure to paid or earned media alone. The amplifying effect across paid and earned media implies media synergies and, as such, offers insights for the cost-effectiveness of media allocations. Diversifying a media budget across paid and earned media should lead to greater brand purchase likelihood.

We specifically assess the effect of media entropy in digital (online) environments and find that media entropy is more effective in driving purchase likelihood in digital (online) than traditional (offline) environments. This effect is due to the information gains caused by cross-media exposure in digital channels, which typically are associated with higher uncertainty and perceived as less clear and credible than traditional media ( eMarketer, 2017 ; Nielsen, 2015 ). Our findings thus shed new light on the effects of new media on purchase decisions ( Hennig-Thurau et al. , 2010 ; Lamberton and Stephen, 2016 ).

Our study also provides a methodological contribution to customer journey analyses in service research (e.g. Halvorsrud et al. , 2016 ; Tax et al. , 2013 ; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010 ) and for considerations of media synergies in general (e.g. Naik and Raman, 2003 ; Pauwels et al. , 2016 ; Srinivasan et al. , 2016 ). By moving from an aggregate to an individual-level metric, our measure offers a customer-centric perspective on media synergies that capitalizes on the information structure of individual customers. Such knowledge about customers' information structure may assist service firms in steering their communication activities and ultimately reducing customer perceived purchase risk.

Beyond the main effect, we investigate the effectiveness of media entropy in light of heterogeneous customer characteristics. We reveal the effects of pre-existing brand strength and current brand ownership on media entropy and thus extend recognition of the influence of customer characteristics on media-type effectiveness ( Ho-Dac et al. , 2013 ; Leeflang et al. , 2014 ). The findings show that media entropy is less effective for current brand owners than for non-owners. Previous research on brand ownership similarly acknowledges that current brand owners have first-hand access to brand information, based on their own experience ( Kirmani et al. , 1999 ). For existing research on media synergies that investigates the effectiveness of exposure across media and channels for different brand-related conditions (e.g. Pauwels et al. , 2016 ), our findings also suggest that companies can leverage media entropy to enhance brand-switching behaviour among customers who currently do not own the brand. Moreover, weak brands can gain more from media entropy than strong brands. This result underlines the importance of incorporating brand measures into customer journey models and the need to investigate the effects of media synergies in different conditions.

Managerial implications

Due to the development of digital media, managers need to address the challenges of customer journey analyses by relying on either internal departments or external service providers, such as marketing agencies, consultancies and SaaS platforms. To help these internal and external service providers meet these managerial needs, we provide a new metric that captures cross-media exposure and its effect on purchases. With this media entropy metric, managers can monitor the information structure of an individual customer's journey, allocate marketing investments to different types of media to balance media investments in accordance with their bottom-line effects on sales and target individual customers on the basis of their prior experience (i.e. prior ownership and brand perception). These implications are especially relevant for customer journey analyses in services settings, because firms must offer effective communication measures to lower customers' perceived purchase risk caused by traditional high share of experience and credence qualities. Applying our metric to digital services, such as marketing dashboards, can help companies manage their customer journeys more effectively and identify the impact of their communication efforts on bottom-line purchases. We encourage managers and professional marketing service providers to use this metric to track individual-level data and closely monitor media entropy in customer journey analyses, as well as communicate these effects to clients. Although brand perception tracking (e.g. YouGov's BrandIndex) and social media tracking (e.g. Facebook analytics) provide profound insights on the aggregate level, insights about customers' information structure provide further valuable information on the individual level.

On a more general level, this study focusses on customers' information search and information obtained from company-controlled and peer-driven sources in traditional and digital media channels. Thus, companies can adopt the proposed media entropy metric to understand and more effectively manage customer journeys in pre-purchase stages.

Our findings also address a question that has plagued executives deciding how to allocate limited media budgets: Should they diversify their investments in both paid and earned media or instead focus media efforts in a particular channel? We show that companies can increase brand purchases by diversifying their fixed budget across more media types. In other words, instead of seeking repeated paid media exposure, they should attempt to increase media entropy. Thus, we call for proactive management of customers' cross-media exposures in their journeys, including the proactive creation of peer-to-peer interactions beyond organic WOM. Managers of brands that are perceived as weaker by customers can especially benefit from these media synergies. Moreover, managers of brands that are currently not owned by the customer might target potential customers with media synergies to increase purchase probabilities. In doing so, companies can reach currently untapped customer groups that might be reluctant to purchase the brand because they already own a competing brand or have a weak perception of it.

Limitations and avenues for further research

We capture cross-media exposure using entropy (i.e. variation) of media within a customer journey to provide a metric that is easy implementable in managerial practice. Extending this metric to include more complex features of customer journeys provides an interesting avenue for further research. For example, it might include time-related aspects of the customer journey, such as the sequence of brand encounters or decay effects. Additional investigations might consider how media entropy affects the dynamics of customers' information search from competing brands. While the current metric is well suited for applications in research and managerial practice, advancing it to address other features of the customer journey could contribute further to research that relies on attribution modelling with individual-level data (e.g. Baxendale et al. , 2015 ; Danaher and Dagger, 2013 ).

By capturing the effects of cross-media exposure between company-controlled and peer-driven media, we illustrate that the information structure in the customer journey influences customers' purchase decisions. As the fragmentation of media increases at the touchpoint level, other interesting effects might emerge, beyond the overall media level. Due to the vast heterogeneity of customers' exposures to individual touchpoints, we could not assess these effects with our data set. However, investigations of the effects of media entropy on the individual touchpoint level would offer an interesting opportunity to generalize our results from a media to a touchpoint level.

The benefits of experience tracking as a data collection method enabled us to assess the effects of our metric on brand purchases overall, as well as in the digital and traditional channels, but there are also limitations of this method. We illustrated its robustness by comparing self-reported data with aggregated data obtained from media research companies (see also Lovett and Peres (2018) ). However, because it relies on self-reporting, our data collection method cannot detect brand encounters below perceptual thresholds. We encourage replication research that uses clickstream data to test the effect of our metric on customers' brand purchases in digital channels.

Finally, our study underlines the novel challenges for managing customer journeys that result from the increasing usage of peer-driven media in the digital age. To address these evolving challenges, we recommend continued research across media and channels at the individual customer journey level, particularly in service settings ( Voorhees et al. , 2017 ). Specifically, companies that actively seek to shape the customer journey need tools to track customers, as well as actionable metrics that can be implemented easily. The development of metrics that address cross-media, cross-channel and cross-service provider exposures offers great promise and high value for managerial practice.

Correlation between experience tracking data and established industry sources

Overview of sample by country and customer characteristic

Effect of media entropy on brand purchase (ML results)

Note(s) : The baseline condition is offline paid. The standard are errors reported in the parentheses. ** p  < 0.01; * p  < 0.05; ^ p  < 0.1

Appendix 3 Results obtained from a logit model using maximum likelihood estimation

To address potential sources of endogeneity, we use a latent instrumental variables (LIV) approach to estimate our model. Here, we provide the results from a logit model using maximal likelihood (ML) estimation.

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The digital customer journey: from awareness to advocacy.

13 min read Just understanding a customer’s needs and wants is no longer enough. You need to know not only what they think and feel about every online interaction with your product, but also what they might do in the future. This is where digital customer journey mapping comes into play.

Customers expect not only a  high-quality digital experience ; they also expect to be treated as individuals. Their online experience must be personalised, relevant, and tailored to their wants, needs  and interests. And where customers have high expectations, it follows that they have low tolerance for a below-par experience.

Now, more than ever, customers will abandon a purchase or a brand with a single click if they’re not happy, and move onto another brand that seamlessly delivers what they want. A recent study from the XM Institute asked large organisations to evaluate the quality of the experiences they deliver across different channels. Less than 30% rated any of their digital experiences as “good” or “very good”.

Modern customers are digital kangaroos, able to hop from brand to brand and product to product, on any device. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that your brand’s path to purchase is as easy as possible, to stop them from hopping off to a competitor.

How do you do this? With digital customer journey mapping.

What is a digital customer journey?

This is the path to purchase and  retention  – from first noticing the product to buying and using it. The journey combines all the  touchpoints  (i.e. points of interaction with your business) a customer has, and collects consumer data, transaction information, cross-device browsing history, and  customer service  interactions. There are five stages in the digital customer journey:

• Consideration

Let’s look at each in more detail, and the touchpoints at each stage:

• Awareness:  this is the point at which a customer notices your product. Awareness can come from a multitude of channels: social media and word of mouth from friends, influencers and brand advocates, search engine suggestions, adverts, marketing emails, blogs, SMS, apps, loyalty programs, and affiliate marketing.
• Consideration:  A customer likes what they’ve seen, so they start to think about and research the product. They’ll visit your website, engage with a chatbot, sign up for free trials, demos, webinars, look at discounts, and check online reviews and testimonials.
• Purchase:  To buy online, customers will create an account (or log into their existing one), fill their shopping cart, may be upsold or cross-sold, apply discounts, choose an electronic payment option, check out, and leave a review about the purchase.
• Experience:  This is how well the order is fulfilled, and includes: shipping and delivery, tracking, online help center, support content (FAQs, instructions and assembly guides), chatbots and assisted chat, guarantees, follow-up emails and social media interactions.
• Loyalty:   Loyalty programs , personalised rewards, newsletters, and social media interaction are all well and good. But creating an emotional connection with the customer, and ensuring they receive the value they expect from the brand is the new approach to loyalty: is the product good quality? Did the customer receive good support?

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What exactly is a digital customer journey map?

When you map out the digital journey graphically, including all the devices, and touchpoints your customer interacts with, you’ll understand how they make decisions, connect and interact with your brand. You can also identify and rectify any pain points that make the customer experience less than seamless.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

• You’ll  walk in your customers’ (virtual) shoes :  Employees sometimes find it difficult to empathise or understand the customer’s perspective. They may try to second guess what customers are feeling, rather than experiencing the journey themselves. By collecting feedback at touchpoints along the journey, the customer can express how they are feeling (frustrated? Happy? Disappointed? Cared for?) and employees can jump in to solve issues and make the customer experience  smoother and more enjoyable.
• The whole company will work together:  All too often, organisations work in silos: not only communication silos (when different teams don’t speak to each other) but also system and data silos that hold customer information that’s specific only to that part of the journey.  It’s the lack of a 360 view of the customer and seamless sharing of insight that creates this fragmented experience. With a customer journey map and centralised customer information, everyone, across all departments, knows where they fit in and what their role is in delivering a seamless experience.
•   You’ll inform your content marketing and content creation:  Customers buy more if your content is relevant and targeted to them. Your customer journey map will help you build a full 360° picture of your customers:  demographics , behaviour, and  psychographics , so you can target new and returning buyers.
• You’ll be able to predict customer behaviour:  Not only will journey mapping give you valuable insight into customers’ wants, needs, feelings, actions and aspirations, you’ll also be able to use the data to  predict  and influence how customers will behave.
• You’ll be able to identify gaps:  when you map out each stage of the journey, and then map out your existing processes, you can not only uncover gaps, but also identify what your highest value journey touchpoints are. Without mapping, you could be focusing on optimising touchpoints that are not really that influential, while missing a more important point.

Creating your digital customer journey map

The first thing to understand is that you have no control over a customer’s journey. A customer will go where they like, on whichever device or platform they choose, negotiating the touchpoints to achieve their goal of a satisfactory purchase. Your role is to build an  omnichannel framework  that anticipates where they are going to go and supports their goal.

• Base it on your sales funnel:  You will probably have the basis for your digital customer journey already – your online  sales funnel  (awareness, interest, decision, action). Use this as a guideline to define how many touchpoints your customers have, and how each interaction funnels into the next.
• Put your customer hat on:  Walk through all the stages of your sales funnel as a customer would, noting the touchpoints. What social media would they interact with? Does your website have the right information? How easy is your booking process? How helpful are the after sales people? Is the loyalty scheme attractive? Would you be happy to recommend your own product?
• Customise your touchpoints: You know which social media platform attracts most customers, how to respond to reviews so your business demonstrates it cares about customers, how your purchase process works, how good your aftersales team is, and how you reward loyal customers. These are the touchpoints that are specific to your company. When you bolt them onto your customer journey map and  collect feedback  about each of them, you’ll be able to see if they are performing as well as you think they are.
• Create personas:  As companies scale, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of individual customers. This is where  personas come in: these are fictitious customer types based on real customers, using demographic and psychographic profiles that include age, gender, socioeconomic background, lifestyle, interests, opinions, likes, dislikes, and attitudes. Each persona travels along their customer journey in a slightly different way, enabling a company to recognise the differences and cater to every type of customer.
• Use customer journey mapping software: Customer journey solutions are now so sophisticated that they can give real-time visualisations of your customers moving towards purchase and beyond, capturing their online interactions with your brand. AI-enabled software will flag any touchpoint where customers are struggling and highlight any places where they drop out. Not only can you jump in and fix the problems, you can also measure the impact that improving the customer experience at those points has on the company’s bottom line.

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Data you can collect with digital customer journey mapping

These are just some of the types of data you can collect along your digital customer journey. When you feed all these into a single platform for analysis, you’ll be able to see how they relate to each other, and where they have knock-on effects.

• Web-browsing data:  Every time someone clicks onto your website, you can track their activity on the site and see how they are interacting with your brand. You can also see what devices they are using to access your site.
• Mobile app data:  If a customer is using your mobile app, they already have a degree of loyalty. Mobile apps yield more customer information from profiles, sign-ins, and location.
• Sales data:  You can track a customer’s purchase history and shopping habits over time. Do they buy immediately, leave items in their shopping cart, or abandon their cart periodically? Don’t forget sales that  didn’t  happen – finding out why not is valuable for understanding what needs to improve.
• Advertising data:  Who has clicked through to your site from an advertisement? This data will give you information about customers who are just starting out on their journey with you. You can marry advertising data with sales data to test the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
• Loyalty data: Your best customers are usually those in your loyalty program. By analysing who they are and how they use your brand, you’ll be able to target people just like them.
• Survey data:  Want to know what customers think of your brand? Ask them. Sending  surveys  at touchpoints along the customer journey can give you quality information about what’s working and what’s not.
• Social media listening:  Increasingly, customers  interact with brands through social media . Understanding the nature of this interaction can help develop your social, as well as general marketing strategies.
• Aftersales data:  Information from your customer services department can reveal a wide range of issues: product quality, delivery reliability, areas that need product support. How customers are treated after they’ve made a purchase is pivotal to whether they become loyal, or not.

What about B2B digital customer journey mapping?

Whether you’re selling B2C or B2B, the main principles of journey mapping are the same. After all, although you are trading with companies, you are still selling to  people  within those companies – there are just more of them, and your feedback processes will need to be a little different.

When you map B2B journeys, you need to bear the following in mind:

• More types of people are involved in a B2B journey than a B2C one:  Therefore, you’ll need to create more customer personas. For example, if you’re supplying an online finance platform, you will have to deal with the CIO, executives, managers, tech personnel and the call center assistants. All these people are your customers, segmented by persona.
• B2B customers are more valuable: Building business relationships can take years of investment, and if you lose a business customer, you might lose a lot of revenue as a result. You’ll need to prioritise and segment your customer personas by business value: the CIO has more purchasing power than a single call center assistant, for example.
• B2B customer feedback is different:  Because much B2B is built on personal interaction and recommendation, business people often know each other. It’s more acceptable to pick up the phone and talk through a problem than send out a generic survey. Your feedback techniques will have to be much more personalised to each of your B2B customers, so that they feel heard, and still special.

Related resources

Website survey questions 17 min read, phygital 9 min read, session replay 14 min read, using customer dashboards for better cx roi 15 min read, digital customer service: how to get it right 13 min read, digital transformation strategy 23 min read, digital customer engagement 12 min read, request demo.

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Five Unexpected Places Where Ads Are Enhancing the Customer Journey

Have you ever signed up for a newsletter, reserved a spot at a fitness class, or booked a dinner reservation? Chances are you arrived at a landing page or confirmation message at this point in the digital customer journey.

These touchpoints allow businesses to surprise and delight consumers with special offers directly after they complete a specific action. This can be either a monetary transaction, like making a purchase, or a simple exchange, like submitting an email address.

When placed on digital confirmation pages, these ads help to turn fleeting moments into lasting relationships, leading to positive consumer sentiment, strong brand loyalty, and incremental revenue that goes straight to the bottom line. 

Untapped Opportunities for Engagement

Businesses across industries are tapping into their under-utilized digital real estate to take the consumer experience to the next level. In fact, according to a Fluent survey , 64% of retailers have reported positive consumer responses to ads on their websites. Below, we explore the fast-emerging – and sometimes unexpected – places where ads are popping up. Dive into how post-purchase and post-action ads can elevate the digital customer journey.

Purchase Confirmation Pages:

Purchase confirmation pages are the most obvious choice for launching post-transaction ads . With access to a trove of customer data, retailers, online ticketing sites, resale marketplaces, and other ecommerce businesses can tap into first-party insights to target ads based on purchase history and other demographic and contextual data. At the same time, customers enjoy the convenience of exploring personalized offers without having to leave the original site.

RSVPs & Event Sign-Ups:  

Whether you’ve just signed up for a ceramics workshop on Eventbrite or RSVPed to a baby shower via Paperless Post, the customer journey doesn’t need to end there. By showcasing relevant services after event sign-ups, businesses can anticipate customer needs and encourage them to explore related activities.

Newsletter Sign-Ups:

Virtually any business can have its own newsletter, but how many are monetizing this piece of prime digital real estate? Newsletter sign-ups serve as a great entry point to deliver curated offers and deepen the relationship with your audience. Going beyond simple product promotions, businesses can also engage customers with content or loyalty programs that align with their interests.

Reservation Confirmation Pages:

If you just snagged a hard-to-get restaurant reservation or booked a hotel room for your best friend’s wedding, you’re likely going to want to stick around for a confirmation. Businesses can capitalize on the attention of this highly engaged audience to deliver offers and promotions for complementary services.

• Restaurants : After a customer reserves a table, offer a discount code for a rideshare service to get them to their reservation on time.
• Hotel/Lodging: After a customer books a hotel stay, offer related services like travel insurance or airport transportation to help streamline the planning process.
• Fitness Class : After a customer signs up for a personal training session, offer a discount code for protein powder to support their fitness goals.
• Dog Walking Service: After a customer books a dog walker, showcase a free trial for a pet food subscription service, catering to the complete pet care experience.
• Babysitting Service: After a customer books a babysitter, promote online education programs or children’s book subscriptions, providing additional value to parents and their kids.

Appointment Confirmation Pages:

A personalized approach to post-appointment ads can enhance customer service, strengthen customer trust and loyalty, and encourage repeat business. Businesses can transform a single appointment into a long-lasting relationship by strategically utilizing these touchpoints.

• Hair/Nail Salon: Hair salons can offer targeted product recommendations based on booked services, such as specific color-safe shampoo after a highlighting appointment.
• Doctor’s Offices: After a checkup, an ad can remind patients to schedule their next appointment or present offers for relevant wellness programs.

Enhancing the Digital Customer Journey

Post-action and post-purchase ads aren’t just about immediate revenue. By leveraging purchase history and browsing behavior, these ads can deliver highly personalized recommendations based on customers’ needs and preferences. To maximize impact and build stronger consumer connections, consider these tips:

• Personalization is key: Tailor your message to reflect past purchase history or browsing behavior.
• Focus on value: Offer genuine benefits like exclusive deals, helpful content, or a chance to connect with the community.
• Keep it non-intrusive: Maintain a positive user experience by keeping the ad format engaging yet unobtrusive.
• Track and analyze: Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns to optimize your targeting and maximize ROI.

Post-action and post-purchase ads have emerged as powerful yet often overlooked tools for transforming one-off transactions into springboards for lasting customer relationships. They offer a win-win scenario: consumers benefit from personalized offers and experiences while businesses unlock new revenue streams. Businesses can foster continued connection and loyalty by embracing these natural touchpoints throughout the digital customer journey.

Ready to enhance the customer journey with tailored ads on your website? Get in touch with us here .

Check out more resources to get fluent in:

Commerce Media  |  Retail Media  |  Post-Transaction Advertising

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How To Accelerate the B2B Customer Journey with Webinars

May 15th, 2024 Lauren Teneriello

Today, effectively generating pipeline and increasing revenue requires digital marketers to meet prospects and customers where they are. They do so by providing precisely what potential customers need, and when they need it, through highly customized and targeted approaches. 

This means digital marketers need to reinvent their approach to the B2B customer journey and develop cohesive, full-funnel strategies for engagement.

Fortunately, webinars , virtual events and content hubs provide marketers with excellent opportunities to engage audiences at every stage of the buying journey — from awareness to advocacy. 

Here’s how. 

What is the B2B customer journey and how has it changed? 

The B2B customer journey is a marketing concept that divides purchase decisions into different stages. Traditionally, the customer journey encompasses five main stages : 

• Brand awareness
• This is the stage where brands typically establish themselves as having the solution—or product—that fulfills the customer’s need.

2. Consideration

• Here, the brand proves itself to the customer, identifying why it is a good pick and the perfect provider for the prospect’s needs and wants.

3. Decision 

• This stage is when the prospect decides to go along with the brand. A great way to encourage customers to do this is to include a “book a demo” button on digital content, such as a webinar or offer them the opportunity to speak to a salesperson.

4. Retention 

• This segment focuses on building customer loyalty and retaining accounts you already have. Providing help when needed, offering to upsell opportunities, or even encouraging the customer to renew their membership or contract are all standard ways a brand can sustain and increase its retention.

5. Advocacy 

• Consider this the “reward” stage for customer loyalty. Advocacy is a way for brands to interact with customers, asking them to provide testimonials and referrals. Meanwhile, brands can publicly celebrate customer success with anything from reciprocal advocacy, social posts, gift basket and more. 

Ultimately, there is no “right” customer journey. In today’s digital-first world, prospects can enter the buying funnel at any stage and quickly go from brand awareness to decision or from advocacy to consideration. 

That means that brands must have strong strategies for each part of the funnel.

What is the B2B customer journey?

The B2B customer journey is just the customer journey theory in a business-to-business context. Specifically, it seeks to plot out an account’s varying steps to convert. 

For B2B marketers, this map can be as detailed as they want. For example, a customer journey map can include elements like which marketing channels you’ll use to communicate with your audience (and at what stage) to assigning internal marketing teams to specific steps in the journey. You can (and should) map out which KPIs you’ll monitor at each stage. 

However, having a detailed, well-thought-out map is not always necessary. What’s important is aligning your customer journey to your key objectives. These key objectives would obviously include conversion and increasing your ROI, but they might also include putting your brand on the map and becoming recognized within your industry sphere.

What has changed?

In the past, B2B marketers understood the customer journey as a simple, sequential funnel where prospects enter one end and customers exit the other. In other words, prospects would start out at the awareness stage and emerge as loyal customers once they complete each stage. 

This linear journey is an old way of thinking. Digital experiences , including webinars, have drastically changed how prospects and customers engage with a brand and, consequently, convert. 

For example, a prospect may engage with and promote a brand evangelist well before even considering a purchase from the brand itself. Brands need to accommodate this change in the buying journey by empowering audiences to explore and experience a brand on their own terms. 

So, how can brands do that? The answer lies in building a network of engaging digital experiences that educate prospects and customers on their terms in their preferred mediums. That’s why virtual events and content hubs can easily meet customers wherever they are on their B2B customer journey.

How digital marketers can accommodate the customer journey today

To accommodate today’s diverse B2B customer journeys, digital marketers must invest in the channels where they know their customers consume content. 

Here are some key steps that marketers can take to make the most out of their investments:

• A buyer, or customer, persona is simply a description of the target customer a brand is looking to connect with. Developing a persona should be completed early since it can point marketers in the right direction and naturally unfold the rest of their strategy.
• Knowing where your customer “hangs out” is important. Are they on social media; if so, what kind? Answering these questions can determine the format of your content.
• Find out what content your customers are engaging with . This can help you decide what content you have that may or may not be working. Is it time to create new material or label high-performing pieces as ‘evergreen’?
• Knowing where an account is within the funnel can help determine what additional information they may need so that you can provide better offers and experiences. For example, if they are still between the consideration and decision stages, you can tailor and deliver content specifically for their stage, encouraging them to book a demo that shows how a product works in more detail.

How to build engaging B2B customer journey experiences 

An engaging B2B customer journey starts with planning. First, you’ll need to understand the content and experiences that connect with every stage and persona. You’ll also need to map out different touchpoints that empower audiences to enter or pivot to a new stage in their journey. Finally, you should have a strategic plan to drive as much engagement as possible. 

Let’s dive into it. 

Start with B2B customer journey mapping

Mapping the customer journey can help you determine what content is needed and for which funnel stage. A content hub is a perfect way for users to access your content on their own terms. 

Think of this content hub as a menu that prospects and customers can choose from — a buffet of content, including webinars and experiences that meet the appetite for every stage of the funnel (top, mid, bottom) and for every audience type (decision maker, tactical doer, etc.).

When you can, try using your existing content—a lot of it will be relevant. There’s no need to recreate the wheel; it’s just a matter of positioning your content in the right place.

Create customer touchpoints

Here, you can connect with every role, use case, and industry that is part of your target customer/buyer profile. Ask yourself questions like:

• Depending on where you think your touchpoint will live can determine the content itself. Will it be a full-length webinar or simply a webinar excerpt? It might be a CTA button leading to a registration page or a full-length blog piece that speaks to the webinar topic in a different format.
• Have relevant content steps for each stage in the funnel. For example, including content where the customer can learn more about your business and product is equally important as content that encourages them to sign up for a demo or see what other customers are saying.

Provide engaging customer journeys 

Enabling customers to move to the next experience in any direction within the customer journey (up, sideways, or down) is a way for you to meet them where they are.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when it comes to determining where next to point your customer: 

• What content can I link out to or encourage them to check out? 
• How can I make them want to interact and engage with the brand even after this experience? 
• Are there offerings to satisfy every version of my brand’s buying persona?

Regardless of where you might steer them next, don’t simply offer just one conversion touchpoint or CTA like “Book a meeting” or “Sign up for a free trial.” Those options are great, but they may not meet everyone where they are. 

At best, you’ll most likely end up with false positives — people you think are ready to buy or trade up but are nowhere near ready to do so. At the worst, you’ll annoy your audience — leading them to go elsewhere. 

Ensure quality leads and a seamless user experience by including multiple avenues and content for your customers to explore.

Optimize your B2B customer journey with webinars

Work smarter, not harder. With webinars and similar digital content, you can quickly and easily create holistic customer journeys — especially when you incorporate the power of generative artificial intelligence in your marketing strategy. 

Let’s take a look at how.

Personalize for different customer journey segments

Our CTAs, offers, resources, and more can all be tailored to the most important segments of your audience. And for those not in a segment — no problem! They will also see an offer that they may want to choose.

Map customer personas based on engagement data

Using AI-generated heat maps can help your brand understand which parts of the webinar resonated most for each viewer segment based on their engagement and behavior. You can use this information for follow-up content and to improve future experiences. 

You can also use this information to tailor your customer persona. For example, suppose many viewers were engaged around a particular part of the webinar that explored how to solve a unique problem. In that case, you know this information may be key to many of your customers. These insights are a great way to either bolster your confidence in your existing persona or tweak your persona to meet what you learned from your data.

Repurpose webinars into new content 

The hard work put into one format of content or experience shouldn’t sit in isolation. An artificial intelligence marketing plan can help you  repurpose a webinar into new assets to maintain engagement going forward. For example, use the data analytics to pull out specific parts of a webinar and recreate it into either smaller, snackable bits that live on social media, or into longer-forms like blog posts, e-books and reports.

Create your B2B customer journey today

With the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform , you can create amazing, interactive digital experiences that speak to audiences when and where they’re ready to be engaged. 

Sign up for a demo of ON24 today to learn how to use webinars to interact with your audiences, create content and provide your prospects with a highly personalized customer journey — not to mention accelerate pipeline for your organization. Click here to get started.