Customer Journey Map – A Complete Guide to Help You Create Yours

Over 4 out of 5 respondents in a study stated that they would leave a brand to which they are loyal after three or fewer instances of poor customer experience. This makes it crucial for brands to focus on customer experience.

Businesses must comprehensively understand the customer journey to improve the customer experience. 

Customer journey mapping is an effective strategy for gaining valuable insights into customer behavior. This can help you identify areas for improvement to optimize your business processes and improve the customer experience.

The customer journey includes the customer’s complete experience with a brand, from their initial awareness to post-purchase interactions.

In this guide, we’ll explain how you can create a customer journey map to help with your marketing strategy.

Let’s get started.

What Are Customer Journey Maps?

A customer journey map is a visual asset that illustrates each touch point a customer makes with your business. Instead of aisles and departments, it describes social media, pages on your website, email marketing, and more.

Ultimately, it describes how consumers find and interact with your business. How many touchpoints do they need before they convert? Which touchpoints contribute more toward conversions?

You can use the information from customer journey maps to better understand where you should put most of your marketing energy. For instance, if most people never interact with you on Twitter (Now X), you might be better off connecting with prospects on Facebook or LinkedIn.

What Is an Experience Map?

If customer journey maps describe how customers find and interact with your business, experience maps illustrate how customers feel about those experiences and how those experiences influence their buying decisions.

For instance, a customer might love interacting with your brand on Instagram. In fact, your Instagram posts might lead to a purchase. You’ve identified a high spot on the customer experience map.

But when they get to the checkout page on your website, they might get frustrated with the number of fields they have to fill out or the lack of payment options. That’s a trouble spot on the map.

Then, you have periods of inactivity. Those are low points on the map.

What Is a Customer Touch Point?

A customer touchpoint is an experience between you and the customer. If your customer follows you on Twitter, that’s a touch point. If a consumer reads one of your blog posts, that’s also a touch point.

Each touch point forms a dot on the customer journey map. Obviously, every customer will follow a different route, but when you create customer journey maps, you’ll see patterns in the individual touch points.

For instance, let’s say you create a viral YouTube video. Suddenly, tons of consumers are interested in your product.

That single viral video might become your most popular touch point. It might also be the touch point that convinces most people to convert.

You can’t discount the other touchpoints. They combine to create consumers’ overall experience with your brand.

Why Should You Create Customer Journey Maps?

Customer journey maps are critical to creating targeted marketing efforts. Here are five major reasons why you should create customer journey maps:

• To Identify Customer Pain Points: Creating customer journey maps helps you identify specific areas where your customers experience issues. These journey maps enable you to address and resolve issues more efficiently, creating a smoother customer experience. 

• To Optimize Marketing Strategies: Creating customer journey maps can help you understand the journey and identify the best touchpoints and engagement channels. 

With this, you can have an effective targeted marketing effort. Your marketing campaigns will yield a better ROI since you target the right audience. 

• To Improve Customer Understanding: To provide a personalized customer experience, brands need to understand their customer’s motivations and preferences. Creating a customer journey map helps you gain valuable customer behavior insights.

It helps you tailor your marketing efforts, products, and services to suit your customers better, boosting customer engagement.

• To Improve Collaboration: In a business with multiple departments, there is a need for cross-collaboration across various departments. For example, sales teams and customer service departments need to collaborate to provide a positive customer experience. 

These customer journey maps can help teams align their goals and efforts based on a mutual understanding of the customer experience. For startups, it is very important. With this, you can create a consistent and collaborative approach to efficiency and satisfaction in terms of startup customer experience. 

• To Drive Business Growth: Customer journey maps provide opportunities to modify and improve the buyer journey. They contribute to an improved customer experience, resulting in a higher customer retention rate and long-term business growth.

How to Create Customer Journey Maps

There are two ways to create customer journey maps:

• Manually establish the most common touch points your customers will make with you, then create maps based on hypothetical scenarios.
• Use software to automatically generate customer journey maps.

Both options are viable, and you might want to create them both.

Let’s explore the first option to help you see that it’s not as difficult as it sounds and can even be fun.

Identify the key stages of user interaction — touchpoints

It’s brainstorming time. Write down all the potential touch points your customers might hit when interacting with your business on a piece of paper- or in a Google Doc. They could include:

• Social channels
• Landing pages
• Blog posts
• Paid ads
• About page
• Third-party mention
• Influencer mention
• Comparison page

There are plenty of other options. Run a Google search for your name or your business’s name (or both). Make a list of the pages that come up. Yelp reviews, YouTube videos, and more might appear.

After you have the full list, narrow it down to the touch points with the highest potential for generating action and capturing your audience’s attention.

For instance, people aren’t going to find your brand if it’s mentioned on page 20 of the Google search engine results pages.

However, if you’re active on X and have a following, it belongs on your customer journey maps.

Identify the information you want to have on your customer journey map

Your customer journey map doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s. It should represent what you want to know about your customers. To do this, gather data from various sources, including your website analytics, customer feedback, and customer data platform.

Every business is different. B2B businesses, for instance, tend to track B2B customer journeys and different interactions than B2C businesses. But let’s say you’re a B2C business that sells toys for young children. Your target audience will probably interact with your brand differently than if you sold sporting goods.

Some of the most common information to collect include the following:

Tasks/Actions

Make a list of what your customers do. Maybe they perform Google searches, scroll through social media, check email, and engage in comparison shopping.

Knowing how your customers seek and consume information will allow you to present them with the right message at the right time. If you know that most of your target audience spends at least two hours per day on Facebook, you can focus on giving them information to interact with on that platform.

Similarly, if you know your target audience is highly competent in using Google, you can create blog posts based on long-tail keywords to specifically target their queries.

Tasks can also include interactions with your brand. For instance, someone follows you on social media, leaves a comment on a blog post, sends you an email, or clicks on your call to action (CTA) on a landing page. Those actions are essential to track.

Touch Points

We’ve already discussed the touchpoint basics. Now, let’s discuss it in detail

A touch point is typically engineered. In other words, you create a landing page for your audience to discover and follow the call to action. Similarly, you create an Instagram account to converse with your target audience.

On your customer journey maps, you want touch points to reflect real life — not your fantasy journey. It’d be great if your customers saw your brand, visited your sales page, and bought your product. It usually doesn’t happen that way, though.

Instead, a consumer might interact with your brand via six or seven touch points — or even more — before making a purchase. Typically, the cost of the product correlates with the number of touchpoints. More expensive products demand more touch points because consumers are more hesitant about the purchase.

Emotions/Motivations

Think of your customer journey map as a series of causes and effects. In other words, there’s a reason behind and a result of every action.

Emotions and motivations act as the catalyst. Why does a consumer land on one of your touchpoints?

Maybe a young mother is searching for educational toys on Google. She finds your blog post about the best educational toys and clicks. Then, after reading your recommendations, she clicks through to the product page and makes the purchase.

The motivation was her desire to provide her child with educational toys.

Emotions and motivations can also come from negative places. For instance, if a man wants to lose weight, he might ask friends on Facebook for weight-loss product recommendations. Someone recommends your supplements, so he clicks through and buys them.

In this case, the pain point — wanting to lose weight — was the motivation.

Objections/Questions/Weaknesses

Now we come to the reason people might buy or not buy your product — the effect of the touch point.

Price is often an objection. The consumer says, “I like the product, but I’m not ready to spend $99.”

A weakness could be a lack of motivation to follow through on a goal, while questions typically relate to the product itself.

Your customer journey maps can help you find ways to solve objections, weaknesses, and questions.

Provide an F.A.Q. on the page that answers the most common questions. Offer a discount code in an exit popup for people who might click away because of the price. Hit the pain point in your page copy to overcome weakness.

Perform Comprehensive User Experience Research

This is where you introduce a tool or two to help you better understand how to plot your customer journey maps. Don’t panic, though. You don’t need to spend money or parse inscrutable data to make it happen.

In fact, Google Analytics can give you all the information you need.

If you’ve had Google Analytics for at least six months to a year — perform a behavior flow chart.

The chart shows you the engagement on your website and can pinpoint potential bottlenecks. It’ll show you the starting pages for customer journeys and the first and second interactions.

Conduct Analytical Research on User Experiences

You can also use Google Analytics for attribution modeling. In other words, you want to know which touchpoints contribute toward conversions and then assign them weight.

There are several attribution models. For instance, last-touch attribution gives all the weight to the last touch point before the customer converts. Similarly, first-touch attribution gives all the credit to the first touch point.

You can discover which touchpoints contribute most heavily toward actual conversions using different attribution models. There’s a wealth of data here.

Collect Anecdotal Research on User Experiences

Believe it or not, anecdotal research can be just as compelling as hard data. There’s no substitute for your customers’ actual behaviors in real time.

You can use Crazy Egg to run heatmaps and scrollmaps and record mouse movements. This information tells you about activity on your website’s various pages.

You could also conduct a poll or customer surveys. Ask your users to answer a few simple questions to better understand how they found your business and how they interact with your brand.

Get Your Website Visitors’ Email Information Using Hello Bar

Collecting emails can help you flesh out your customer journey maps and gain direct communication with your audience.

Start by logging into your Hello Bar account. Choose the “Grow Your Mailing List” goal.

Then, create your top bar with whatever offer you like.

When people subscribe, they’ll receive the offer you promised and become part of your mailing list.

Send Emails Asking Your Visitors About Their Experiences With Your Brand

Once you’ve built a relationship with your subscribers, ask them for some key information. You can insert a survey in your email or ask for individual replies.

You want them to tell you about their specific experiences with your brand. What do they like? What do they dislike? How can you improve?

This data becomes invaluable when you need to make changes to your website and other aspects of your online presence.

Create a Spreadsheet to Help Visualize Your Map

Spreadsheets are another invaluable tool for customer journey maps. They allow you to organize your information so you don’t suffer from overload — or get confused.

Your spreadsheet can be organized however you like. For instance, you could create a column for each touch point, then assign each row a task, motivation, and objection or question.

Design Your Customer Journey Map

Now you’re ready to make your map. Don’t worry. There aren’t any hard-and-fast rules here.

It might resemble an actual map, with roads representing travel between touchpoints. You could also create a flowchart, a confetti chart, or anything else you desire through process mapping software.

The important thing is to remain consistent. You might make several customer journey maps — one for each buyer persona — but you want them all to feature the same format. Otherwise, you’re liable to get confused and mishandle the data.

6 Key Attributes to Keep in Mind for Effective Customer Journey Mapping

We will create our own customer journey map in a minute, but first, let’s look at some of the most important things to remember.

1. Use Your Customers’ Perspectives — Not Your Own

It’s tempting to think like a business owner when preparing customer journey maps. After all, that’s what you are.

However, you need to think like a consumer instead. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes so you know how they behave, think, and make decisions.

2. Capture Your Customers’ Goals, Needs, and Expectations

What does your target audience want? What do people in that audience need? What do they expect from you? 

These questions should all be reflected in your customer journey mapping process. If your customers want information about your product, supply it. If they need a lower price point, figure out how to close the gap. If they expect high-quality customer service, provide it.

3. Capture a Clear Understanding of Your Customers’ Experiences Across Multiple Touch Points

Consumers behave differently based on the touch point. For instance, a customer will interact with your brand differently on social media than in one-on-one chat.

That’s why you need to understand each touchpoint individually and how they contribute to the whole journey. 

4. Determine Your Customer’s Buying Phases

The customer journey involves various phases. You need to capture these phases effectively for your customer journey mapping to be effective. Here are the five major phases:

• Awareness: The customer journey usually starts with awareness, during which the customer sees a need or recognizes a challenge.

• Consideration: During this stage, the average customer researches possible options, and then compares and evaluates the options. 

• Decision: During this stage, the customer chooses a product or service and then purchases. 

• Retention: The journey doesn’t end here, however. There’s another phase known as the retention phase. This involves post-purchase support, product use, and satisfaction. 

• Advocacy: The last stage is the advocacy phase where the customer makes repeat purchases and can also recommend your brand. It involves customer loyalty.

Determining your customer’s buying phases helps to improve your marketing efforts through the creation of targeted and relevant marketing strategies. This improves customer engagement, conversion rates, and optimizes resource allocation.

5. Capture a Clear Understanding of The Channels In Which Customers’ Actions Occur

People typically don’t buy products on social media or read 4,000-word articles in email. Each channel comes with certain expectations, norms, and actions.

However, social media can encourage a consumer to click through to your sales page, just as an email can invite subscribers to click through to a long-form blog article.

Your job is to figure out how all these touchpoints interact.

6. Use Performance Indicators to Identify Critical Opportunity Areas

Performance indicators are metrics you should track to understand consumer behavior.

For instance, website traffic is a performance indicator. It tells you how many people find your site via various avenues.

The same goes for referral sources. How do people find your site? Social media? External links? Google search?

After you’ve collected data, examine it in terms of performance indicators. For instance, do you have tons of traffic and very few conversions? Your customer journey map can help you identify areas for improvement.

7. Create Recommendations for Change and Improvement Based on Your Journey Map Story

You don’t create customer journey maps just so you have something pretty to look at. These tools are extremely useful.

Maybe you’ll discover that you’re not active enough on Facebook. You can easily remedy that. Or perhaps you’ll learn that people are thirsty for educational content. Start a content marketing campaign.

The important thing is to use what you learn to help your business grow. 

8. Use a Good Customer Journey Mapping Tool

Lastly, a good customer mapping tool is vital when looking to create accurate and detailed customer journey maps. These tools are vital as they help to streamline the mapping process. 

Look out for tools that provide templates with visualization features. The best mapping tools offer data integration features, making it easier to gather and analyze customer data.

To gain a better ROI, you can automate repetitive tasks using this tools. This saves time, reduces the chances of human error, and allows efficient resource allocation. Also, through automation, you can quickly update new information and implement responsive strategies.

Customer Journey Map Example

Your customer journey map can be as creative and colorful as you want. You can even download vector maps from stock sites and fill in the blanks if you don’t want to do the creative work.

We will create a very simple customer journey map so you can get an idea of how it looks in practice.

Let’s look at the imagery first:

It’s a straightforward customer journey map that outlines one customer’s touch points and activities.

It starts with an internal decision: “I want to learn more about photography.”

Next, the customer performs a Google search or two. It’s likely information-based, such as “How to learn photography” or “What does photography entail?”

Then, they will find our blog post on a topic related to the Google search. Out of curiosity, the searcher views our sales pages and reads our About page to learn about our company.

Then, the customer follows us on social media and signs up for our mailing list. They read and interact with our emails and might also do some comparison shopping with our competitors.

Next, the customer returns to our sales page — maybe for a camera body with a kit lens — and reads the F.A.Q. At that point, the sale either takes place or the customer abandons the shopping cart (since we’ve identified a bottleneck with our research).

As you can see, customer journey maps are all about figuring out how customers get from Point A (discovering your brand) to Point Z (making a purchase). It also identifies touch points that need some work.

FAQs

Q1. What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps and interactions a customer goes through with a brand. This includes the initial awareness and post-purchase engagement. It also highlights key touchpoints, customer emotions, and potential pain points. This helps businesses understand and optimize the customer experience.

Q2. Why is a customer journey map important? 

A customer journey map is essential because it provides insights into customer behavior and experiences. With these, businesses can identify and address pain points, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance engagement. It also improves departmental collaboration, ensuring a cohesive customer service and marketing approach.

Q3. What are the key stages in a customer journey? 

The key stages in a customer journey are: 

• Awareness 
• Consideration 
• Decision 
• Retention
• Advocacy 

Each stage shows a different phase of the customer experience. 

Q4. How can I create a customer journey map? 

To create a customer journey map, follow these steps: 

• You can use surveys, interviews, and analytics to collect customer data. 
• Identify key touchpoints and stages in the customer journey. 
• Use a customer journey mapping tool to visualize these stages, highlighting customer emotions and potential pain points. 
• Continuously update and refine your map based on new insights.

Q5. What tools are recommended for customer journey mapping? 

The top tools include Microsoft Visio, Lucidchart, and specialized software like Smaply and Touchpoint Dashboard. 

These tools offer templates, data integration, and visualization capabilities, making creating detailed and accurate journey maps easier. 

Conclusion

Customer journey maps don’t have to be confusing, but they do rely on data. You can collect anecdotal data and complex data. Combine the two to get the most accurate model of your customers’ general journeys.

Each of your buyer personas deserves its own map. Otherwise, you’ll confuse the data.

Use tools like Hello Bar, Crazy Egg, and Google Analytics to collect your data. Add the information you collect to a simple spreadsheet as you go.

Remember to think like your consumers. Understand their goals, needs, and expectations, but don’t factor yourself into the equation.

Look for performance indicators and draw conclusions based on the data. Customer journey maps are only useful when you apply what you learn.

Have you created a customer journey map for your buyer persona?