shopping customer journey map

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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

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What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of using customer journey maps

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

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

Improved customer support

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

Effective marketing tactics

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

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

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

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

Product advancements or service improvements

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

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

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

A customer-focused mindset

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

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

How to create a customer journey map

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

Step 1. Set your focus

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

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Perform user research

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

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

Get a free Heyday demo

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

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

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

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

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

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

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

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

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

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

Types of customer journey maps

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

Current state

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

Future state

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

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

Day-in-the-life

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

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

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

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

Empathy maps

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

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

Customer journey map templates

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

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

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

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

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

Buyer Persona:

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

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

What are their struggles?

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

What tasks do they have?

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

Opportunities:

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

Action Plan:

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

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

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

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Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

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

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

Table of contents: 

Customer journey map template

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the customer doing?

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

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

What is the customer thinking?

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

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

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

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

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

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

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

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

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

Consideration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand loyalty

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

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

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

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

Survey your customers and customer teams

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

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

Automate customer data collection

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

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

Tweak for B2B, B2C, and SaaS industries

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

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

Create multiple maps for different journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day/week/month in the life map

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support experience map

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

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

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

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

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

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

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

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

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

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

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

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

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

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

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

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

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

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

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

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

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

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

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

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

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

Related reading:

Beyond the sales pipeline: Using a CRM for customer success

A quick guide to contact management

B2B email marketing: Proven strategies + examples

4 tips for creating an inbound marketing strategy

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

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

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How to create the perfect customer journey map (+ template), share this article.

Creating a customer journey map is key to growing and retaining customers. Here’s our guide to customer journey maps and why they matter.

If your business/organization has been selling products and services online for some time, you’ve probably seen potential customers spend a long time on your website and add products to their shopping cart only to leave at the last moment.

Why would something like this happen? Why are some sales not linear in nature?

To answer these questions, you need to understand your buyer persona and learn to map out your ideal customer’s journey in a way that reflects their real behavior.

In this article, we’ll explain what customer journey maps are, and how you can use a customer journey map template to visually sketch out the purchasing process for your product or service (e.g. an online course).

• What is a customer journey map?

Why customer journey maps matter

What to include in your customer journey map, how to create a winning customer journey map, the best customer journey map templates, what is a “customer journey map”.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the way your potential customer interacts with your brand, from the moment of the first encounter to the actual time of purchase.

As every customer journey is a process, its mapping involves lots of steps, which might seem irrational at times. The key is to remember to describe your customer’s touchpoints based on real customer experiences rather than your own perspective.

There’s a simplistic but prevalent view of online sales: someone gets referred to your website or clicks on the ad, gets interested in your content and eventually buys from you.

Most of the time, this is not the case. The experience that customers go through when they come across your business/organization makes a world of difference. Some of them might talk to your customer service team, others might reach out on social media and some more might stumble upon your website looking for something completely different (e.g. an answer to their problem on your blog).

An effective customer journey map takes note of every interaction with your brand and allows you to accurately predict the customer experience.

You can scroll through multiple customer journey map examples online, but the best way to get comprehensive information on the subject is through books. Consider picking up The Journey Mapping Playbook by Jerry Angrave.

In the book, Mr. Angrave describes a customer journey map as “the narrative of what your customers do, think and feel when they do business with you in a way that helps you drive meaningful change.”

Most customer journey map templates are different but, in general, they try to touch upon similar concepts:

User actions

Brand touchpoints, pain points.

All these are then mapped on various stages of your customer conversion funnel:

• Consideration
• Service / Loyalty

The key part of your customer journey map is trying to predict the most likely user (or visitor) actions at every stage of the buying process, from looking at online ads to sharing their positive experience with friends.

Tip: Try to consider all the ways customers might achieve certain goals outlined by your busines/organization.

Outline where all the user actions are taking place. Are your potential customers looking at ad banners? Are they on your landing page? Are they reading your newsletter?

Having a complete list of brand touchpoints will help you steer your customers in the right direction.

Contrary to our expectations, not all brand touchpoints result in positive emotions (e.g. repeatedly ending up on the error page). That’s why aligning user emotions with actions and touchpoints is essential to maintaining brand reputation.

Inspect all the causes of negative emotions for your users and customers, from having to go through too many steps to sign up to their form of payment not being accepted, or shipping to their address not being supported.

Pain points are issues that can be turned into to-dos and potential solutions , from building more effective user flows to improving customer support.

While it seems like gathering customer feedback and sketching out a customer journey map is easy — very few businesses and organizations do it right.

“Most customer journey maps are critically flawed,” say Mark S.Rosenbaum, Mauricio Losada Otalora and Germán Contreras Ramírez, the authors of the paper “ How to create a realistic customer journey map ” published in Business Horizons.

They assume all customers of a particular organization experience the same organizational touchpoints and view these touchpoints as equally important.

The key to creating a successful customer journey map is conducting thorough research on how a customer interacts with your brand and observing customer feelings every step of the way.

You should also make sure to profile all your brand personas and know their goals well. You can’t predict the future state of your customers, but having done the research, you can repeat their journey yourself and notice things that can be improved.

To create an effective customer journey map, you don’t need fancy software or even detailed templates.

Just create a table with the header column of user actions, brand touchpoints, emotions, pain points and solutions, and a header row of awareness, consideration, decision and service or loyalty. Fill out each resulting cell with as much detail as possible.

If you think you need customer journey map templates and brand persona examples, look no further than the book titled CX That Sings: An Introduction to Customer Journey Mapping by Jennifer Clinehens.

Ms. Clinehens’s book includes access to online resources, downloadable templates as well as a companion course for customer journey map creation.

How to use your customer journey map

Having a customer journey map is key to making sure you maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction at every stage of the buying process. What makes a customer journey map stand out is visualizing information and shining the light on every customer touchpoint.

Relying on customer journey maps becomes even more important if your business/organization is looking to create online courses that increase customer satisfaction and retention, and bring as much value to your customers as possible.

Looking to start improving the customer journey in your organization? 

Download our Ultimate Customer Success Guide to take the first step today.

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Speak to an expert in ours.

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Colin is a Content Marketer at Thinkific, writing about everything from online entrepreneurship & course creation to digital marketing strategy.

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How 5 businesses successfully mapped out the customer journey

Creating a customer journey map puts you in your customers’ shoes to help you understand the user experience—what your users think, feel, and do at each stage of their buying journey.

Last updated

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We’ve put together a list of five brilliant customer journey mapping (CJM) examples to show you how it’s done, so you can learn how to improve the user experience (UX) for your customers. 

Want to know how customers really interact with your product?

Hotjar’s product experience insights tools let you see things through their eyes. 

5 great examples of customer journey mapping 

A good customer journey map identifies buyers’ actions, desires, and experiences at every key touchpoint—from when a customer lands on your webpage all the way to conversion, onboarding, and beyond.

Our list of customer journey examples breaks down the best B2B, B2C, ecommerce, and SaaS journey maps—and shows you how to understand your customers better to build your own.

1. Hotjar’s B2B customer journey map 

At Hotjar (👋), we make product experience (PX) insights tools to help businesses understand how their customers interact with their websites and digital products. And, of course, we’ve done some B2B customer journey mapping of our own to understand what our customers want, by tracking their interactions across key touchpoints. 

The result was the digital customer journey example shown above that maps our customers' experience when they use Hotjar tools for product testing. We visualized the key actions, questions, technical limitations, and opportunities of customers using our tools to get granular data to validate our product ideas and experiments. 

We started by identifying one specific customer journey, then used Google Analytics, Hotjar tools, and data from customer interactions with our brand to understand user actions, thoughts, and feelings. Then, we got UX, dev, engineering, and customer success teams to fill out empathy maps before mapping the journey. 

To increase empathy with our customers, we included two rows dedicated to pain points and happy moments—like the pain of finding patterns in complex customer data, and the ‘a-ha moment' when our users first realize value.  

We made our map flexible enough to be updated as customer needs change and new information becomes available, so we continually validate our assumptions against customers’ real-world experiences.

The benefits of customer journey mapping included helping us visualize customer motivations, drivers, and pain points, align cross-functional teams , eliminate silos, and clarify who owns each part of the buyer journey. 

How B2B companies selling self-serve digital products can create a similar map: 

1. Define the goal and scope of your customer journey map. We recommend starting with a narrow scope and only a few people involved. Focus on a specific problem you can break down into a few steps—like identifying where you’re losing users, and mapping out the pains, desires, and experiences of customers who exit your site.

Ask yourself: 

What do you want to achieve? 

Which customer journey touchpoints do you want to focus on? 

What KPIs do you want to measure? 

Where can you get the data you need? 

Which teams need to be involved?   

2. Use Google Analytics and Hotjar's Observe tools to collect user insights about online interactions:

Create Hotjar Heatmaps on key product pages to see where users are clicking and which parts of your page aren’t engaging users or working as intended. Then, improve UX and optimize the placement of on-page elements to boost conversions. 

Use Session Recordings to see how users scroll, click, and move around your site across an entire session. Focus on spotting bugs and blockers that cause them to bounce. 

3. Add qualitative user data from service chat logs, emails, or by asking customer support teams. 

4. Get key product and customer service teams to fill in an empathy map detailing what your buyers do, say, see, hear, think, and feel. Feel free to steal our free template below!

5. Map the journey with Post-its and pens before digitizing it and sharing it across the company. 

2. Rail Europe’s B2C journey map 

B2C ecommerce travel provider Rail Europe gives customers an easy way to book rail tickets online. Their on-site user interface (UI) is strong, but the company wanted to go deeper to understand the customer journey across all touchpoints. 

Mapping the customer journey produced a full spectrum customer experience map that illustrates the buyer's journey before, during, and after a purchase. It reminded their team that the buyer journey starts long before a customer lands on the website to book a ticket—and continues after the trip, through touchpoints like post-trip refunds, sharing recommendations, or publishing photos on social media. 

Rail Europe’s customer journey map also shows the transition between stages or channels to accurately visualize what is often a non-linear journey . For example, in the initial research, planning, and shopping phases, customers often move back and forth between comparison pages, checking timetables, and website chat and planning features.  

Mapping the journey like this helps Rail Europe understand different customers’ channel preferences, see which touchpoints aren’t working as they should, and which aspects of the user experience need more attention from design teams, marketing, and customer support. They visualized actions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences and rated the customer satisfaction of each stage, as well as the relevance and helpfulness of Rail Europe, to home in on areas for improvement.

The map doubles down on customer empathy by identifying travelers’ overall concerns and frustrations while on the trip, even those unrelated to their rail journey—the overall travel experience is still connected with the company brand in customers’ minds. 

This stand-alone map can be understood across teams without supporting materials, and there’s a focus on actionable insights—like the need to address customer frustrations over snail mail ticket delivery. 

Ecommerce website analysis like this is valuable for any company selling experiential products or services, like concert tickets, vacations, or tours. If that’s you, follow Rail Europe’s example and conduct customer journey map research by surveying current and potential customers to uncover exactly what they’re hoping for, thinking, and feeling as they engage with your brand.

Tips to map out the ecommerce customer journey:

1. Ask yourself: 

How can we access users who aren’t yet customers? 

What happens before the customer gets to our web page? How do they do research for a trip? What kinds of search keywords do they use online?  

Is the buyer journey non-linear? If not, how can we represent this? 

2. If your buyer journey has multiple touchpoints, group them into categories like 'research and planning', 'shopping', 'booking', etc. 

3. Match survey insights to touchpoints and map out the journey visually, adding qualitative insights about what the customer is thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage. 

💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar Surveys to collect real-time suggestions about your website or app from users to make data-driven decisions and validate assumptions that inform and elevate your customer journey map. 

Hotjar’s no-code UI makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys  

3. Rewind’s SaaS customer journey map 

Rewind makes backup & restoration software for SaaS platforms. Their team decided to map out the B2B SaaS customer journey when revenue fell short of expectations after the acquisition of a similar product. It also became clear that marketing efforts weren’t attracting the ideal customer.

Like many SaaS companies, Rewind relied on sales calls and customer relationship management (CRM) data to understand their users. But they were missing key insights about what happens before the customer lands on their website. 

To map the journey, the Rewind team defined their ideal customer profile (ICP) before conducting customer interviews to deeply understand buyer motivations and the decision-making process. They also used Google Analytics, Hubspot , and PX insights tools to understand users’ online behavior and how they were interacting with marketing materials. 

This showed them a short, high-intent, back-and-forth customer journey that happens almost exclusively online—since Rewind is installed in SaaS platforms, a lot of traffic is referred from their app marketplaces. 

The map showed event triggers and the customer’s thoughts and feelings as they moved through becoming aware of their problem (loss of important data), understanding the need for a solution, and doing online research—before arriving at Rewind.  

By mapping the full journey, the Rewind team discovered that customers often use professional forums or communities as part of solution research, and discovered a new buyer motivation and market segment: data compliance. 

According to Content Lift Founder Ryan Paul Gibson , who helped Rewind conduct customer interviews, the company also realized “potential buyers don’t want to speak with sales or ‘get a demo'. They want to research the product themselves and evaluate it. They also don’t want to enter a credit card to test it; they want to try it first and pay if it’s a good fit.” 

Rewind updated their go-to-market strategy, personas, product positioning , and marketing to complete these missing steps in the customer journey map.

The result? A two-fold increase in product installations, and better internal alignment on their ICP—which has improved their efficiency and helped them maximize resources. 

To create a great SaaS customer journey map: 

Set your research objectives

Create a list of topics that align with your ideal buyer journey. For example, in Rewind’s case, they were customers’ reasons for buying, details about their company and role, and what caused them to start searching for a solution. 

Create questions to ask customers during interviews, but leave flexibility for discussion.

Run in-depth customer interviews to capture the exact order of events in the buyer journey and make sure you understand every customer action and touchpoint—from users identifying a problem to making a purchase.

Bucket interview insights into user priorities, pains, and anxieties—what happened to trigger a search; which research channels the customer uses; how they evaluate solutions.

4. Spotify’s B2C customer journey map 

When music streaming app Spotify mapped the user journey, their team focused on tracking touchpoints for one specific feature: sharing playlists via third-party apps.  

Their map zeroes in on clearly defined user personas and identifies key areas of customer engagement with a focus on users’ emotions and thoughts at each stage.

The team’s journey mapping research revealed a key customer pain point—fear of being judged for their music taste—that can hold users back from sharing music. They also identified an awareness gap to address: some users didn’t know the feature existed. 

By mapping the user journey, Spotify improved their UI and in-app flows to streamline the customer experience and make every touchpoint relevant to how real customers use the product.  

Mapping user flows is key for digital B2C brands with a product that lives and dies by good usability—and a business model that relies on customer loyalty. 

To map the user journey before improving or launching a feature:  

Conduct market research based on direct and indirect competitors to understand how people use similar features, and what they expect from yours. 

In user interviews , focus on the specific feature or stage of the journey. Why aren’t customers using it as you’d like? What are the barriers to product adoption? Dig deep into what motivates users to complete a specific action—and what blocks them.  

Using interview data, create a buyer persona and include their key needs and motivations. What can you do to bring this feature to their attention and boost adoption? 

Create a customer journey map combining stages in the user’s interaction with the feature, and break down the actions they take and the thoughts and emotions they have at each stage. 

Use these insights to remove friction and improve user flows, validating your design with real users. 

Pro tip : use Hotjar's Observe tools to study Session Recordings and Heatmaps and get insights into the product experience of real or test users at every point in the customer journey.

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

5. Emirates Airline’s multi-channel customer journey map 

To reflect their customers’ multi-channel journey, flag carrier Emirates created a CJM that covers reservations, check-in, and onboarding experiences. 

As well as digital channels, the map includes call center interactions, which provide context for interactive voice response (IRV) technology and human service agents. It also sheds light on customer desires, broken down into categories like ‘comfort’, ‘safety’, ‘confidence’, and ‘freedom & control’, shown in the corners of the map.

With a global brand like Emirates, customers expect the same experience at all touchpoints, in all countries. This exercise helped the Emirates team understand customers’ main interactions and expectations to better coordinate service touchpoints and provide a consistent, high-quality experience across each one.  

For example, they set up a single, virtual contact center platform to increase efficiency and ensure consistent interactions across every channel. It’s not just the customer who benefits: the Emirates team now better understands exactly how to meet user needs across several channels and countries.

This map is ideal for businesses whose customer journey combines online and offline touchpoints, especially companies looking to differentiate themselves through the quality of their service. 

How to implement a multi-channel customer journey map: 

Define your key goals for producing the map.

Conduct thorough market research and customer interviews to reduce your assumptions and understand every single interaction and channel customers experience.

Interview customer experience and support staff members at all touchpoints and in all regions.

Use analytics tools and product experience insights software to understand how buyers interact with your digital marketing, website, and chat functions across channels and locations.  

Use AI to analyze customer call recordings for tone and sentiment.

Pro tip: use Hotjar Feedback widgets to get in-context insights about what users really think about your app or website. You can filter feedback by region or channel to better understand your global customer touchpoints.

Hotjar's non-invasive Feedback widgets allow customers to give their opinions of your website or product as they experience it.

You’ve reached your destination: a truly valuable customer journey map  

Customers interact with your brand over a variety of channels and touchpoints, and their journeys aren’t always linear. But understanding their journey is key to improving your product and boosting customer acquisition, adoption, and retention. 

Follow these customer journey mapping examples to experience key touchpoints from your users’ point of view and grasp their pains, needs, and frustrations so you can build a journey your customers will love.

Want to know how customers really interact with your brand?

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping, what are the stages of the customer's journey.

Buyer journeys can typically be broken down into three steps or stages: 

Awareness of a problem or pain

Consideration (researching and evaluating solutions)

Making a decision

What does a strong customer journey map look like?

A good customer journey map includes all the touchpoints where a customer interacts with your brand. It should include the various stages of the marketing and sales cycle, customer touchpoints across your product and website, and map out customers’ actions, thoughts, and feelings at each stage, as well as KPIs.

For example, Rail Europe’s customer journey map tracks all the stages of research, planning, and shopping, through to booking, travel, and post-travel. At each stage, it maps out customer questions, concerns, and feelings, as well as the helpfulness and relevance of Rail Europe.

What are the stages of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map stages are: 

Collecting data and conducting customer interviews or surveys 

Mapping the customer journey in a workshop

Extracting insights and producing a report

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Unraveling the Retail Customer Journey: A Comprehensive Guide to Effective Mapping

Customer journeys are the lifeblood of retail. Understanding the unique steps customers take from discovery to purchase is crucial.

In this article, we delve into the intricacies of retail customer journey mapping and its significance in today's rapidly evolving marketplace.

Let's embark on this enlightening voyage.

What Is A Retail Customer Journey Map?

A retail customer journey map is a visual story of your customers' interactions with your brand. It's a depiction of the path customers take from initial contact through to a long-term relationship.

It's a vital tool for understanding customer experience. By capturing all touchpoints and phases in the buying process, it enables businesses to identify opportunities and pain points.

The journey begins when a customer first becomes aware of your brand. This could be through advertising, word of mouth, or a search engine result.

The journey then continues as they gather information, make a decision to buy, and finally make a purchase.

After the purchase, the journey doesn't stop. How does the customer feel after buying? What's their experience with your after-sales service ? These questions form the final parts of the journey map.

By mapping the retail customer journey, brands can empathize better with their customers. It highlights where the customer's experience is smooth and where it's not.

This insight drives improvements in the overall shopping experience.

So, a retail customer journey map is more than a diagram. It's a catalyst for creating a better, more customer-centric business.

5 Phases Of The In-Store Customer Journey

Customers navigate various stages when interacting with a retail store.

Understanding these distinct phases is key to improving their shopping experience.

Let's delve into the five crucial stages of the in-store customer journey: Pre-visit, Entrance, Exploration, Purchase, and Post-Purchase.

Pre-visit Phase

The Pre-visit phase marks the beginning of the customer journey. It's when customers become aware of your brand and what it offers.

This could occur through online research, advertisements, or word-of-mouth recommendations.

During this phase, potential customers form their initial impressions of your brand.

They might visit your website or social media pages, read online reviews, or browse through your online catalog.

In essence, they're gathering information to decide whether your store meets their needs. This phase sets the tone for the customer's future interactions with your brand.

Ensuring a positive pre-visit experience is key to attracting potential customers to your physical store.

Also Read: Customer Journey Optimization

Entrance Phase

The Entrance phase begins when customers step into your physical store.

First impressions matter immensely, and this stage sets the tone for the entire shopping experience.

Here, customers form opinions about your store's ambiance, cleanliness, layout, and staff availability.

Factors like lighting, music, and in-store marketing materials can influence their overall perception.

Customers also start to gauge the level of customer service. They notice if staff members are welcoming and ready to assist.

They may also look for clear signage to guide their shopping journey.

The goal during the Entrance phase is to create a positive, inviting atmosphere. It's about making customers feel comfortable and eager to explore what you have to offer.

Exploration Phase

The Exploration phase is the heart of the in-store shopping experience . This is where customers dive into your product offerings and evaluate their options.

During this phase, customers browse through your store, interact with products, and compare different items.

The organization of your merchandise, the quality of the product displays, and the ease of finding desired items all play crucial roles.

In-store staff can greatly influence this stage. Their product knowledge, helpfulness, and ability to cater to customer needs can enhance the shopping experience.

The goal here is to provide a seamless and enjoyable exploration experience.

When customers feel well-served and find what they're looking for easily, they're more likely to make a purchase.

Also Read: Customer Journey Metrics

Purchase Phase

The Purchase phase is the pivotal moment when a customer decides to buy.

This stage revolves around the checkout process and the final steps that lead to a successful transaction.

Here, customers evaluate their chosen products one last time before making the final decision. They consider factors like price, quality, and perceived value.

The ease of the checkout process also plays a significant role.

At this point, friendly and efficient customer service can make a substantial difference.

Quick checkout lines, multiple payment options, and proactive assistance can help seal the deal.

The goal in the Purchase phase is to make the transaction as smooth as possible. Any hiccups at this stage could deter a customer from completing their purchase.

Post-Purchase Phase

The Post-Purchase phase happens after customers have made their purchase and left your store.

It's about fostering a long-term relationship with them, ensuring they're satisfied, and encouraging them to return.

This phase includes elements like customer service support, return or exchange policies, and feedback collection.

Your engagement with the customer during this time can greatly affect their overall perception of your brand.

Remember, a positive post-purchase experience can turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers.

It can also lead to positive word-of-mouth marketing, boosting your brand's reputation.

The goal here is to leave a lasting impression, ensuring that the customer feels valued and appreciated.

It's about turning a single transaction into an ongoing relationship.

How To Build A Retail Customer Journey Map

Creating a retail customer journey map is a strategic process. It involves data collection, identifying touchpoints, and ongoing revisions.

In the following section, we'll guide you through a step-by-step process to create your own customer journey map, helping you to better understand and enhance your customer's experience.

Also Read: Customer Analytics

Creating a retail customer journey map begins with setting a clear goal.

Your goal could be improving customer service, reducing churn rate, increasing customer loyalty, or optimizing in-store experiences.

Decide what part of the customer journey you want to focus on. Are you interested in the entire journey, or do you want to concentrate on specific touchpoints or stages?

You could also tailor the map to a particular customer persona or demographic group.

This initial goal-setting step provides direction for your journey mapping project. It guides the kind of data you'll collect and the insights you're hoping to gain.

A clear goal ensures your map is focused and relevant. It steers the development of strategies to improve your customer's experience in line with your business objectives.

Remember, a well-defined goal is the foundation of a successful customer journey map.

Keep Tracking & Analytics Tools Ready

With your goal set, the next step is to prepare your tracking and analytics tools.

These are vital for gathering data about your customers and their interactions with your brand.

Your tracking tools could include a website analytics tool like Google Analytics, which provides insights into how customers interact with your online platforms.

Heat mapping tools can also be beneficial for understanding on-page customer behavior.

In-store, consider using tools like customer feedback surveys, mystery shopping, and point-of-sale data analysis.

Technologies like Wi-Fi analytics or people counting cameras can also provide data about in-store customer behavior.

These tools help you gather quantitative data, such as how many people visited your store or website, what they purchased, and how much time they spent.

Having your tracking and analytics tools ready ensures you have reliable data to build your customer journey map.

Collect Data

Once your tools are set up, it's time to collect data. Your goal here is to gather as much information as possible about your customers and their shopping behavior.

Start by gathering demographic data. Who are your customers? What are their ages, genders, locations, and income levels?

This information can help you understand who you're serving and what they might expect from your brand.

Next, collect behavioral data. What are customers buying? When are they visiting your store or website? How much time are they spending? This can reveal patterns in shopping behavior.

Don't forget about attitudinal data. How do customers feel about your brand?

You can gather this information through surveys, feedback forms, or social media sentiment analysis.

The more comprehensive your data collection, the more detailed and accurate your customer journey map will be.

Understanding your customer's behaviors, attitudes, and demographics is key to crafting an effective map.

Identify All The Possible Touchpoints

After collecting data, the next step is to identify all the possible touchpoints.

Touchpoints are the various ways customers interact with your brand, from initial discovery to post-purchase.

These might include your website, social media platforms, email newsletters, in-store interactions, customer service, and even word-of-mouth referrals.

Remember to consider both online and offline touchpoints.

Examine each touchpoint from your customer's perspective. What are they experiencing at each stage? Are there any obstacles or frustrations they encounter? What moments delight them?

Mapping out these touchpoints gives you a comprehensive view of your customer's journey.

It highlights areas where you're providing excellent service and where you might be falling short.

Identifying all possible touchpoints is crucial to building an accurate customer journey map.

It's the step that brings your map to life, illuminating the path your customers follow when interacting with your brand.

Plan The Journey Map

With your data and touchpoints identified, it's time to plan your journey map.

This visual representation of your customer's experience will help you see their path through their eyes.

Start by plotting out the stages of the customer journey we discussed earlier: pre-visit, entrance, exploration, purchase, and post-purchase.

Then, populate each stage with the relevant touchpoints.

Use the data you collected to depict what happens at each touchpoint. Highlight areas of customer friction and delight. Include customer thoughts, feelings, and expectations.

Your map could be a simple flowchart, a storyboard, or an intricate infographic. Choose a format that suits your needs and preferences.

Remember, the purpose is to facilitate understanding of your customer's experience.

Creating a journey map is like piecing together a puzzle. Each touchpoint, each piece of data, adds to the overall picture of your customer's journey with your brand.

Take Feedback & Revise The Map

Once your customer journey map is drafted, it's essential to seek feedback and be ready for revisions.

Your map should be a living document, continually updated as you gain new insights and as your customers' behaviors evolve.

Share the map with your team, especially those who interact directly with customers. Their frontline experience can offer valuable insights.

Are there touchpoints they feel have been overlooked? Do they have suggestions for improving customer experiences at specific stages?

Next, seek feedback from your customers. Use surveys or interviews to understand if your map aligns with their actual experiences.

They are the ultimate source of truth about the customer journey.

Finally, use the feedback to revise your map. Make necessary adjustments to reflect the most accurate customer journey.

Remember, creating a customer journey map is an ongoing process, not a one-time task. Regular revisions ensure your map stays relevant and valuable.

The Best Examples Of Retail Customer Journey Maps

Zara's customer journey starts with creating a buzz around its fast-fashion model.

Through social media platforms and window displays, Zara attracts customers with their fresh, trendsetting styles.

Once in-store, customers are greeted by well-organized, frequently updated merchandise that encourages exploration.

The purchase phase is expedited by helpful staff, clear price tags, and multiple payment options.

After purchase, Zara keeps customers engaged through email newsletters, featuring new collections and fashion tips.

The seamless integration of online and offline channels enhances Zara's customer journey.

2. Starbucks

The Starbucks journey begins with its strong brand presence and enticing aroma. The entrance phase is about welcoming customers into a comfortable, cozy space.

During the exploration phase, customers choose from a wide range of beverages and food items, with staff readily available to assist.

The purchase phase includes an easy, efficient payment process and the Starbucks rewards program.

Post-purchase, Starbucks engages customers through the mobile app, offering personalized deals and rewards for loyal customers.

IKEA's journey starts with its catalog and website showcasing stylish, affordable furniture.

In-store, customers enter a well-planned route displaying various room setups, sparking inspiration.

During the exploration phase, customers interact with the products in home-like settings.

At the purchase phase, customers are guided to the warehouse to pick up flat-packed products, with staff available for assistance.

Post-purchase, IKEA provides detailed assembly instructions and customer service for any issues, reinforcing IKEA’s commitment to customer satisfaction.

Understanding the retail customer journey is paramount in today's competitive marketplace.

By mapping this journey, brands can uncover key insights to improve customer experiences and drive loyalty.

It's an ongoing process that requires continuous tracking, analysis, and improvement. Start your journey mapping today and unlock a new level of customer-centric success.

Full insight into the customer journey. No SQL required.

Get started with Woopra for free to see who your customers are, what they do and what keeps them coming back.

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Customer journey map: How to visualize the buyer experience

El customer journey o recorrido del cliente es el camino que realiza el cliente desde que tiene una necesidad hasta que compra el producto o servicio. Mientras que el customer journey map es una representación visual de este viaje del consumidor. Sigue leyendo y aprende cómo crear un customer journey y utilizar un customer journey map.

If you skip to the end of a book, you’ll know where every character ends up. But without reading the middle, you won’t understand what took place. A story can’t occur with just a beginning and end—you need the journey between. The buying process is like a story. Analytics show you where each customer ends up, but to understand why they got there, you must examine the buyer journey. 

A customer journey map helps you visualize a customer’s experience from point A—their pain points—to point B—their purchasing decision. When you know what leads people to one decision versus another, you can tailor your business strategy accordingly.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a tool that helps you track a customer’s behavior through the buying process. The map includes the customer’s thoughts and feelings about their problem, as well as the corresponding actions they take. 

Simply put, customer journey maps help you:

1. Identify and understand which customers are interested in your product or service.

2. Tailor your messaging so customers understand the benefits of your product or service.

What are the 6 components of a customer journey?

A customer journey map has six components that—when observed together—give you a clear picture of why a customer behaves the way they do. While these components are all relevant to a customer journey map, they don't necessarily happen in order.

The buying process: Start by outlining what you know about your customer’s buying process. How do they move from awareness to interest to eventual purchase?

Customer actions: Customer actions focus on the specific actions your customers take. This can include actions like reading an article, downloading an ebook, or requesting a sales demo.

Customer touchpoints: Different from user actions, touchpoints are company-focused. What does your company do to engage with your customers? These may include posting an ad on social media or distributing an email newsletter.

Emotions: For every action your customer takes, they’ll have a specific thought or feeling tied to that decision. Knowing these emotions provides the “why” for customer behavior. 

Pain points: Pain points drive a customer to purchase your product. They either have a problem to solve or want to fill a need in their life.

Expectations: Customers looking to fix their pain points will have certain expectations for what they’re seeking. This is how they narrow down their product search. 

When you analyze customer actions, make sure you’re taking all six elements into account. For example, emotions happen throughout the entire process, whereas pain points and expectations typically influence the buying process. 

How do you map a customer journey?

You’ll map the customer journey by working through each action your customer takes and assigning emotions to accompany them. Marketing and sales teams often use customer journey maps to assess their current strategies and improve them. You can also use customer journey maps when developing new marketing or sales campaigns. That way, your customer stays front of mind. 

Use the steps below to build a customer journey map. Consider the different stages of the user experience, from their first interaction with your company to their last. 

1. Set your map objectives

Any time you begin a new project or build a new tool, you’ll need to set objectives . When you know what you want to accomplish with your map, you can move through the development process with clarity. Your customer journey map objectives may include:

Determining why customers abandon their carts

Understanding what makes a customer commit to a purchase

Identifying areas where you can influence the customer journey

When setting objectives, pull together a cross-functional team to provide insight. Make sure to ask individuals on the sales, customer support, and marketing teams about how they perceive customer behavior. By incorporating everyone’s viewpoints, you can round out your goals and achieve greater success.

2. Create buyer personas

Buyer personas—also called customer personas—are fictional customers that represent your target audience . The persona profiles who the customer is, what they like and dislike, and their general motivations or frustrations. By looking at a buyer persona, you’ll have the information you need to tell your customer’s story. 

Target market: Women

Target audience: Mothers 

Buyer persona: Daniela Vargas, 32, married with one child.

The target market for your product may be women, but if you serve all women, you’ll still have various audiences. By building out a fictional persona, your team can more easily empathize with your potential customer and create messaging that’s relevant to them. 

Your marketing and sales teams likely have multiple buyer personas—one for each type of person who buys your good or service. After all, people have unique buying experiences depending on who they are. Therefore, you’ll need a unique journey map for every persona.

3. Label customer actions and touchpoints

Customer actions focus on every action the customer takes, while touchpoints are the vehicle for those actions. Touchpoints can include interactions before a customer finds your website or once they’re on your website. Use analytics from past customers to assess how the buyer from your target audience might interact with you online. 

Customer touchpoints outside of your website:

Social media posts

Email newsletters

Customer actions outside of your website:

Searches for your website on Google.

Navigates to your website from a paid ad on Google.

Clicks your website link from a social media post.

Navigates to your website from an email.

Opens your email but doesn’t take action.

Likes your social media ad but doesn’t go to your website.

Customer touchpoints on your website:

Website landing pages

Customer actions on your website:

Puts items in their shopping cart.

Stays on a page for a specific period of time.

Clicks an ad on your website. 

Leaves your website.

Abandons their shopping cart.

Completes a purchase.

Make a timeline of these touchpoints to use as the foundation of your buyer’s story. With this visual representation, write down each customer action associated with the touchpoints.

4. Map the customer journey

You should now have a timeline of how your customer got from their awareness of your product to their final action—whether they decided to purchase or something else. Divide the timeline into stages based on the buyer’s journey.

Stages of the buying process

Awareness: The customer realizes they have a problem that needs solving and determines that your product or service may be the solution. 

Consideration: The customer considers whether to buy your product or service.

Comparison: The customer may compare your product to others on the market.

Decision: The customer decides that your product is best. 

Purchase: The customer buys your product or service.

Retention: The customer likes your product or service and returns for another purchase.

Advocacy: The customer likes your product or service so much that they recommend you to others.

Your first three touchpoints may fall into the awareness stage, while the next two may move into the consideration stage. Not every customer will move through these stages seamlessly, but these transitions can show you where to improve. 

Fill in the story

To complete your journey map, write a step-by-step storyline to fill in the gaps between your touchpoints. Since you know the background of your persona, use what you know to explore what they were thinking when they initially searched for your product. If the customer abandons their cart, consider how they went from being interested to jumping ship. 

Add customer emotions

Your customer will have unique thoughts to accompany every action or situation of their journey. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and try to understand how they feel. Emotions are hard to determine, but with support from your buyer persona, their touchpoints, and your storyline, you can make confident assumptions.

5. Evaluate your marketing strategy

Your completed customer journey map will show you turning points where a customer hesitated to buy your product or abandoned it altogether. For example, a customer that goes to your website but bounces quickly has made it to the awareness stage but may not move into the consideration stage. 

Assess what customers need to move between these stages and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. In this scenario, ask the following questions:

How long did they stay on our website?

Did they move past the homepage? If not, why not?

What are the weaknesses in our homepage?

How could we improve our homepage to engage customers?

If a customer bounces from your website after viewing the homepage, then the first impression you’re giving them may not be strong enough. It’s possible that your homepage design isn’t intuitive or your content doesn’t stand out. By examining the turning points in your map, you can find ways to make the next customer’s journey more linear.

Customer journey map example

In this customer journey map example, Sally’s pain points are that she struggles to stay organized at work. As Sally makes her journey from problem to solution, there are various touchpoints that guide her. For example, she decides task management is a good solution because she’s heard success stories from friends. She then sees a social media ad for a project management software company that influences her to consider the company’s brand. Sally’s emotions throughout the buying process explain how she processed each step.

Company: Project management software company

Scenario: Sally needs a task management solution to get organized and improve her work performance. 

Expectations: Easy-to-use tool, holds her accountable at work, affordable solution 

1. Realizes she has an organization problem at work

2. Determines task management can solve the problem

Touchpoint: Word of mouth, radio/TV/print

Corresponding emotion: “I need to solve this problem.”

Consideration

3. Sees social media ad for task management software

Touchpoint: Online ads

Corresponding emotion: “This product looks interesting”

Comparison:

4. Compares software to others on the market

5. Reads user reviews of software

Touchpoint: SEO, blog

Corresponding emotion: “What tool best fits my needs?”

6. Decides your product is worth trying

Touchpoint: Customer reviews

Corresponding emotion: “Did other users like this product?”  

7. Goes to software website and signs up for trial offer

Touchpoint: Blog, website

Corresponding emotion: “This looks like the best option, I’ll try it."  

Retention/Advocacy

8. Purchases software once trial period is complete

9. Recommends software to coworkers

Touchpoint: Email, website, word of mouth

Corresponding emotion: “This tool is worth the investment. I should tell my team.”

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is beneficial because it gives you a new perspective on how customers act, think, and feel when interacting with your brand. Other benefits include:

Inform your customer service: When you can see your customer pain points clearly, you can use them to better support customers and improve their experience. 

Eliminate ineffective touchpoints: The customer journey map will show you which touchpoints aren’t working. If a customer interacts with your brand but doesn’t move forward in the buying process, then you may need to adjust that touchpoint. 

Focus strategy on specific personas: The customer journey map helps you find a strategy that works best for one group. When you create a map for each target audience, you can customize your strategies for each one.  

Increase understanding of customer behavior: Understanding your audience is crucial to selling products or services. The journey map shows you how customers behave and gives you insight into why they behave that way. 

You can make maps for the current state of your customers or a predicted future state. Both types of customer journey maps can help you learn the customer’s perspectives.

Use a customer journey map to better understand your audience

Your maps can serve as a resource for marketing and sales teams. Once you create one, store it in an accessible place so others can reference it. When you keep your map digital, you can also change it as your audience changes. 

Work management software provides a central source of truth for your team and stakeholders. Whether you’re sharing your customer journey map or putting your improvements into action,  Asana  will keep your team on the same page.

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How to Create an Ecommerce Customer Journey Map and Optimize for Sales

March 10, 2022

Elise Dopson

“I saw an ad for running shoes on Instagram, so I visited the store’s product page, read a review, and bought them.” — your (ideal) customer

As much as we’d like to think the steps someone takes to purchase from your store are always this simple, the reality is: they’re often far from it! Consumers switch between devices, channels, and platforms in the weeks leading up to a purchase.

And this information—their journey—can be crucial for you as you scale your brand.

A customer journey map shows the activities shoppers undergo prior to purchasing a product online (and can even extend to post-purchase activity). By understanding the pathway to purchase through your ecommerce site, you can better craft the right messaging to reach target customers , at the right time.

Below we’ll share how to create your own customer journey map, with tips on how to spot drop-off points and fix them.

The result? A positive customer experience that makes someone’s decision to purchase faster, easier, and friction-free.

This guide will cover:

What is a customer journey map?

The benefits of customer journey mapping, how to build a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how people purchase products. You might see it called the “buyer journey” or “user journey map” as well.

In the case of ecommerce brands, a customer journey map shows:

• When a customer first became aware of a problem
• The options they considered when searching for a solution
• Why they decided to purchase your product

Take a look at this customer journey map example below by Nielsen Norman Group , which shows the touchpoints a customer has prior to buying a new car.

So-called “Emotional Eric” goes from seeing a TV commercial about a car company, through to downloading the mobile app, visiting a dealership, and driving away with a new vehicle. The map displays Eric’s thoughts, feelings, and considerations at each point in the journey, giving the dealership’s marketers greater insight into what Eric needs to see before converting.

There are up to 24 million ecommerce websites in the world—many of which sell comparable products to those in your own inventory. Customers have more choices than ever. But what made existing customers—those who’ve given you their hard-earned cash—choose you?

Understanding the customer’s thoughts, feelings, and objections at each touchpoint gives you greater insight to improve your online store’s conversion rate.

Using the example of Emotional Eric, the dealership selling the car can use the customer journey map to:

• Personalize messaging . Purchase decisions depend largely on the content someone sees throughout their journey. Greater insight into thoughts, motivations, and customer pain points helps the dealership’s marketers produce materials that cater to Eric’s needs—from dedicated landing pages to social media posts.
• Understand channel performance. Your ecommerce brand may spend equal amounts of time on Instagram and Facebook. But a customer journey map could reveal TV commercials and Facebook advertising are the two channels that drive the most awareness with new customers. It makes sense to maximize ROI and double down on those channels instead.
• Prioritize user experience changes. If we come to learn Eric is disappointed by the quality of images in the mobile app, uploading new images can become a priority for the dealership. It’s a leak in their customer journey map that needs to be plugged to prevent other prospective customers from abandoning a purchase.

Not convinced on the power of journey mapping? High-performing teams are 1.6 times more likely to use customer journey management.

Though these personalization tactics aren’t just marketing checkboxes to tick. It’s a purchase motivator for the 65% of people who’d become a long-term customer of a store that provides a positive experience throughout the entire customer journey.

“Customer journey mapping heavily relies upon how the information is relayed to its target audience. The message should be clear and concise so that even a layperson has no trouble understanding the message.” — Albert Vaisman , founder of Soxy

When creating your own ecommerce customer journey map, you can focus on components of the journey (instead of taking on absolutely everything).

Though, as seen below, the highest performers are three times more likely to use customer journey orchestration, and two times more likely to analyze customer interactions over three or more channels over time. There’s a connection between how detailed you map your customer journey and the results you’ll reap!

This can guide your investment in the process.

#cta-visual-pb#<cta-title>Create a high-converting shopping experience that meets customers where they’re at<cta-title>Your perfect store is waiting for you to build it. Start building with Shogun today

Ready to uncover the steps a customer takes before purchasing your product? Here’s a step-by-step journey mapping process to create one for your ecommerce business.

1. Segment your audience

It’s impossible to lump all customers in one bucket. Different customers have different preferences, and use cases differ from product to product.

People who buy your toothpaste bundle won’t be solving the same problems as customers purchasing a teeth whitening kit.

“Some ecommerce brands don’t research enough, or the research they carry out is weak. You can’t start making a journey map through guessing.” — Ai Hiura , CMO and chief editor at FAVERIE

When building your customer journey map, don’t paint all customers with the same brush. Segment your audience by the traits they share, such as:

• Demographics. The beauty of ecommerce is selling products to anyone, anywhere. But scaling a global brand comes with its own challenges—like cultural differences. The shopping habits of European consumers differ from American consumers. You’ll want to consider segmenting out customers based on geographic location.
• Job to be done. The JTBD framework expresses the goal someone wants to achieve when purchasing a product. If you’re selling sneakers with your ecommerce website, for example, this can range from “look fashionable” to “support my feet when running.” You’ll want to identify your customer’s “jobs to be done” for various, finer segments of your audience.
• Product price. Customers purchasing expensive items have longer customer journeys than with cheaper items. The same applies to subscriptions. The higher the commitment, the longer the purchase journey. You can segment your audience by average order value ranges as you create your map.

2. Uncover common touchpoints

Once you’ve isolated your customer personas with segmentation, it’s time to conduct research.

Our goal at this point is to uncover the touchpoints a potential customer has prior to purchasing. Here’s how you can find them.

Collect customer data

There’s no better way to understand your customers than talking to them.

Aaron Masterson, founder of Local Furniture Outlet , says, “While it may be tempting to believe that we know more about our customers than we do, doing additional research that provides valuable data through interviews and analytics is the best way to approach building a customer journey map.

“Since customer journey maps are all about customers, it would be a mistake not to involve them when building one. Without putting customers at the center of focus, it is not possible to completely represent their experiences.”

Find the touchpoints previous customers had with your brand via order confirmation emails. Follow-up their purchase with an invite to complete a customer feedback survey —or, for more in-depth data, voice of the customer interviews.

Key questions to ask in these conversations include:

• What was happening in your life when you first decided you wanted to solve a problem?
• Did you consider any other options before purchasing this product? If so, why did you choose ours?
• What factors, if any, almost stopped you from purchasing this product?

You can use a market research repository like Userzoom or Aurelius to store all feedback—or a classic spreadsheet. Common themes will begin to appear over time, unveiling the touchpoints for your customer journey map.

#cta-paragraph-pb# Read more on creating buyer profiles: How—And Why—You Should Use Buyer Profiles and Quizzes for Your Store

Analyze your website activity and drop off points

While customer interviews are a great source of data, you’re not going to get the full picture of how people engage with your brand pre-purchase through interviews alone.

People forget about steps they’ve taken, thoughts they had, or content they engaged with. Customers also have a different point of view—even if they did take the same path to purchase.

Lift the lid on how potential customers engage with your website through:

• On-site surveys. Expand your data by surveying people in the middle of the customer journey—not just those who’ve completed it. Understand the frame of mind of a website visitor on your product page by asking, “What problem are you looking to solve?”
• Heatmaps. Software like Hotjar and Mouseflow shows “hot” parts of your website—places a visitor pays the most attention to. If you’re selling coolers through your online store, for example, you might find that people spend time reading whether items inside the box can withstand desert temperatures on a specific site page about this. That’s useful data for your customer journey map (maybe you can surface this info in your ads top-of-funnel, for example).  
• Visitor recordings. Get granular with website activity by watching how people engage with your store. Pay close attention to the order in which they view different pages. Do they go from blog post to landing page to pricing page? Or the opposite direction?
• Google Analytics . Use the Shopping Behavior Analysis report to discover drop-off points or how many shoppers fall out of the customer journey. It becomes more clear where you need to focus your efforts (maybe you learn your new goal is to increase sessions with “add to cart” if drop off here is particularly noticeable, for example—or that you need to focus on cart abandonment).

Albert Vaisman explains how they get their starting point mapped at Soxy: “I use direct traffic data when building a customer journey map. This measure provides me insight into how the target audience perceives my brand.

“I use direct traffic in my web analytics tool to observe the number of visitors who manually typed in my company’s URL. Then I compare this metric to other traffic sources. [I can also look at] my website’s bounce rate, optimizing accordingly.”

Mine your social media data

Social media is a hive of activity. Your ecommerce brand can listen in on conversations—even if your brand name isn’t explicitly mentioned—to understand the customer journey for products in your industry.

Adrienne Barnes, founder of Best Buyer Persona , is currently working with her client on this process. For shoe retailer Kuru Footwear , “We’re really trying to understand what was going on when a customer was encouraged to start looking for these shoes in particular.

“We’re trying to figure out when, in a buyer journey, do people go from being aware that they have a problem, to being solution or product aware?”

Using the orthopedic shoe example, Adrienne says the prospective customer is likely thinking, “I know that my feet hurt. I need something that’ll stop my feet from hurting. What are the things that I can do?” At this point, they start looking at shoes, insoles, surgery, or chiropractic care. You can see that on social media.”

“Delving into the social media data of the people who follow your brand can supply you with their age, gender, languages, and locations. You can also identify your audience’s interests, which can help you optimize your content strategy to address your target audience’s needs at every stage of the customer journey.” — Shaunak Amin , co-founder and CEO of SnackMagic

Collect team feedback

“A customer journey map is an organization-wide undertaking because the customer interacts with basically every part of a business,” says Stephen Light, CMO and co-owner of Nolah Mattress.

“Maps simply won’t be as effective as they could be without input from those actually delivering the customer’s experience.”

Merge the data you’ve got at this point from customers with your internal team feedback. Consult the following people to corroborate your existing data:

• Sales teams
• Stakeholders
• Customer support agents
• Social media managers

Chances are, they’ll have direct experience talking with your customers—valuable data you should add to your buyer journey map.

Validate your research

Not all data you collect throughout this process is 100% accurate.

“If you don’t talk to your customers and you’re not validating the things you see in your data, you could be putting the steps in the wrong place or making assumptions that aren’t true,” says Adrienne Barnes.

“We really put a microscope on the moment they decided to change or purchase a new product. That helps me identify: was it on social media? Was it within a Facebook group? An ad? I like to ask via interviews and verify via digital intelligence.”

As Adrienne says:

“People tell me, ‘I first heard about the product because I saw an ad on Instagram.’ I can go and look through analytics and internal data to see whether we’re actually doing that—including the conversions we’ve had and what [value props] we’re talking to within the ad.”

3. Organize customer touchpoints

At this point, you have more data than you know what to do with. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

Start making sense of your data by organizing touchpoints into different silos.

There’s no “best practice” for labelling these categories, though it makes sense to model your customer journey map on the marketing funnel.

Let’s put this into practice for building a customer journey map for an ecommerce business. For example, shoppers purchasing blue light-blocking glasses have the following touchpoints at each stage:

Next, you’ll add context around the thoughts and feelings the customer experiences at each stage in the buyer’s journey. This includes:

• Questions they’re asking
• Pain points they’re experiencing
• Actions they’re planning to take

Then, refine every interaction you have with your customer—including site content/copy, messaging, and your marketing strategy—to address each point at the right time . Each is an opportunity to personalize your approach and close the deal.

For example, if we learn that those shopping for blue light glasses need to see proof that they work (because they’ve tried solutions that don’t), you’re going to want to include this prominently across your ecommerce site:

• Endorsements from optometrists (social proof)
• References to scientific studies that prove the validity of blue-light glasses
• Case studies from previous customers whose eyes have stopped hurting because of the glasses

Consider as well that user-generated content could be a great way to address something like the consideration or comparison phases of the journey.

If we realize that in the consideration stage the customer wants to try on the glasses, maybe your eyewear brand needs to invest in a virtual try-on interaction on the site to help alleviate questions the customer has around the size of the glasses (something that’s difficult to judge online vs. in-store).

Warby Parker takes this approach with its mobile app . Shoppers can overlay eyewear onto a livestream of their face—much like a Snapchat filter—to see which suits them.

Finally, as customers reach the decision stage, they need one final vote of confidence before hitting “confirm order.”

If they’re struggling to overcome an expensive pair of blue light-blocking glasses, for example:

• Promote a free at-home trial or risk-free order
• Cross-sell lower priced items
• Show the shelf-life of your glasses (i.e. a $299 pair of your glasses every two years is cheaper than replacing $199 glasses yearly)

4. Identify points of friction

The goal of a customer journey map is to uncover the thoughts and feelings your target customer has prior to purchasing your product.

But not everyone will make it through the entire funnel. Customers fall out of the buying journey for several reasons—some of which are outside of your control; others you have the power to prevent.

Use the data collected earlier, including Google Analytics’ Shopping Behavior Analysis report, to uncover points at which customers stop engaging with your brand. This might be:

• When they switch devices
• When they exit your website
• When they read a specific piece of content

Once you isolate where customers are dropping off, you can make tweaks to your site and marketing materials to fix!

5. Improve your map’s conversion rate

Found the gaps in your customer journey? Next, plug the leaks and improve your conversion rate .

You’ll get customers from homepage to products, to purchase, and into post-purchase flows with as little friction as possible when you put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

For example, a consumer in the consideration stage falls out of the buying journey because they switched devices and couldn’t remember the name of the site they viewed. The potential fix might be a pop-up modal encouraging your website visitors to opt into SMS or email marketing (so the drop-off isn’t permanent!).

Similarly, you might find that customers fall out of the purchase journey because they haven’t found a solution to their problem. In this case, understand the customer’s perspective and:

• Run A/B tests on the site pages with the highest number of drop-offs to test your hypotheses of what needs to be added to this content to convert based on your new learnings.
• Cross-sell different items better positioned to the customer’s motivation you discovered with your customer journey map research
• Showcase social proof from customers suffering with the same issue your visitor has

Is your ecommerce website customer-centric?

As we’ve covered, in its simplest form, a customer journey map shows the touchpoints a shopper takes when purchasing items online, and you can even carry it into post-purchase.

Remember that while we can do our best to organize these touchpoints, your ecommerce customer journey map may never be entirely accurate—and that’s ok! As Adrienne Barnes says, “We like to think of a customer journey map as a linear process, but in reality, it’s pretty convoluted and messy.

“Have an awareness that the customer isn’t always going to follow your streamlined idea of a buyer journey. They have a whole life that purchasing your product is a minuscule piece of.”

Overall, work to uncover the touchpoints customers have for your ecommerce brand and craft the messaging your shoppers need. You’ll position your products in the right place, at the right time, to the right people—a winning formula for sales.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Create a high-converting shopping experience that meets customers where they’re at<cta-title>Your perfect store is waiting for you to build it. Start building with Shogun today

Elise Dopson is a freelance writer for B2B commerce and martech companies. When she's not writing, you'll find her in the Peak Freelance community or on Twitter.

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Customer Journey

Definition, mapping, examples and template.

The customer journey, also called the shopper journey, is the series of steps a customer takes when interacting with a brand, product, or business. It starts with the realization of a pain point and ends with a purchase decision. The customer journey refers to the entire experience a customer has from discovery to purchase.

Download a blank customer journey map

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Online Shopping Customer Journey Map

Assemble a trendy shopping customer journey map and more by customizing this online shopping customer journey map template.

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Design a modern online customer journey map and more with this customizable Online Shopping Customer Journey Map Template. The template features a bright color scheme, shapes, and a classic font that are simple to modify. Put your own spin on the customer journey map by editing the bright color scheme. You can easily customize a new bright color scheme, or you can apply one of Venngage's pre-generated bright color palettes. Consider utilizing shapes to help direct the reader's focus and maintain a good flow of content. Venngage has a large variety of shapes available to help you enhance the Online Shopping Customer Journey Map Template. When it comes to the text, make sure the data is easy to comprehend by incorporating a classic font. It'll also make your customer journey map look professional, and there are loads of classic fonts you can use on Venngage. Not sure if it's the right customer journey map for you? Check out the Venngage library for more trendy customer journey map templates!

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