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How to create a customer journey map in e-commerce (+ free template)

The e-commerce market is growing rapidly. With new e-commerce businesses emerging daily, it is getting increasingly harder to stay competitive. So, how do you succeed in such a rapid and competitive environment?

Among all the variables of all the success formulas out there, there's only one constant — an exceptional customer experience. And other e-businesses cannot copy this ingredient.

And there’s one framework that is really good at helping you step up your customer experience game — e-commerce customer journey mapping.

• 1 Customer journey mapping
• 2 What is the e-commerce customer journey?
• 3.1 Set the goal
• 3.2 Define the scope
• 3.3 Use personas
• 3.4 Collect the data
• 4 E-commerce customer journey stages
• 5.1 Draft the backbone
• 5.2 Add some meat
• 6.1 Streamlined navigation
• 6.2 Personalization
• 6.3 Mobile optimization
• 6.4 Transparent product information
• 6.5 Efficient checkout process
• 6.6 Responsive customer support team
• 6.7 Post-purchase engagement
• 6.8 Social proof and trust signals
• 7 What to do next

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a visualization of every interaction happening between customers and your product or service at all stages of their engagement.

Here is what a complete customer journey map may look like:

You can use this technique to understand how your business performs from your customers’ standpoint, as it allows you to put together all the data and order it in a clear and comprehensive way.

Some of the things you can do with the help of customer journey maps in e-commerce are:

• Capturing all the touchpoints and channels customers go through when visiting your e-commerce website. And what’s most important, understand what happens during those interactions;
• Understanding how customers feel at every step of their journey with you and what you can improve so they get less dissatisfied and more happy with your service;
• Indicating the pain points of the journey and brainstorming solutions;
• Discovering moments of truth for your customer.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s proceed to a customer journey in e-commerce.

What is the e-commerce customer journey?

In e-commerce, a customer journey is a dynamic and evolving story shaped by individuals' interactions and experiences during their online shopping endeavors. At its core, it embodies the seamless fusion of technology, user expectations, and brand engagement.

This narrative extends beyond the mere act of making a purchase, encompassing every touchpoint from the first spark of awareness to the post-purchase engagement.

In this intricate journey, the significance lies not just in the transaction itself but in the holistic experience crafted by businesses. A successful e-commerce user journey is characterized by personalized interactions, user-friendly interfaces, and the ability to anticipate and cater to customers' needs.

The journey becomes a testament to a brand's commitment to customer satisfaction, weaving together elements of convenience, trust, and delight, resulting in loyal and returning customers.

Understanding and optimizing the e-commerce customer journey is pivotal for businesses seeking to forge lasting connections with their clientele. It is a strategic approach that goes beyond the transactional aspect, acknowledging that each customer journey phase influences the brand's overall perception.

A positive journey fosters customer loyalty, encourages repeat business, and can transform satisfied customers into advocates who willingly share their positive experiences with others.

An e-commerce customer journey is also a valuable source of insights for businesses aiming to refine their strategies. By analyzing customer behavior, preferences, and pain points along the customer journey, companies can adapt and enhance their offerings continually. This iterative process ensures a competitive edge in the market and positions the brand as one that prioritizes and evolves with its customers.

Ultimately, the e-commerce customer journey is a narrative of reciprocity — a continuous exchange between the customer and the business. When thoughtfully navigated and enriched, it becomes a powerful tool for businesses to drive sales and establish enduring relationships in the digital marketplace.

The prep-work before the actual e-commerce journey mapping

To take the most out of your customer journey mapping process, you will need to make some preparations beforehand. Make sure you’ve got all the following things covered before starting with journey mapping.

Set the goal

Start with setting clear and achievable goals before getting down to the mapping part. Here are some examples of the goals you might want to target for your e-commerce project:

• increasing conversion and overall sales of an online store;
• discovering pain points and problems in a given scope of the journey;
• brainstorming the solutions for discovered problems;
• reduce the number of refunds;
• increase the number of reviews.

You can pick one or a combination of them. The bottom line here is you need a goal so it both helps you track progress and define the scope of the journey area you want to map.

Define the scope

Set the scope of the journey you’re going to map out. Covering the entire customer journey in e-commerce will take too much time and effort. Most likely, it won't be feasible to complete such a challenging task in a single sitting.

Instead, you can either start off with the most problematic part that needs immediate attention or focus on the part of the journey you already know too well. This way, you will be able to start mapping without investing in additional research.

Consider starting your mapping exercise with the stages related to one of the crucial elements of an e-commerce website — checkout. Although it’s not the first thing customers face when purchasing online, according to the statistics, around 70% of products added to the cart eventually get abandoned.

This is a powerful argument for taking checkout-related stuff more seriously and analyzing how to improve the customer experience at that particular stage of their journey.

Use personas

If you think mapping out your website page by page is enough, think again. You need to map a customer journey with your customer in mind, differentiating between customer and business goals. That’s where personas come into play.

Speaking scientifically(ish), a buyer persona is a collective image of a particular group of customers that represents their behavioral patterns, goals, expectations, and frustrations.

Creating a journey map without knowing exactly who your customers are is like creating a map for everyone and no one at the same time.

When mapping journeys for an online store , you will find that some buyer personas are more tech-savvy, and some are less. They will also have different goals when interacting with your site, expectations at journey stages, and experiences. As a result, their customer journeys will also differ.

Take all of that into account before you start mapping the journey of a particular customer segment.

Take a look at this buyer persona that we created for an e-commerce customer journey map example in our persona building tool :

Collect the data

Research is an essential step that comes before analyzing the customer journey of an online store. Adding real-world data brings tangibility to your journey maps and helps you identify the most problematic stages of the journey.

For instance, you will need to know how many visitors made it to the checkout page, how many eventually completed the purchase, becoming new customers, and the percentage of those who dropped out. If you have a multipage checkout, it would be useful to know which product pages cause your visitors to abandon their cart.

Web analytics is an excellent source of data. And by the way, you can combine that data with journey maps using our customer journey mapping tool . It supports the integration with Mixpanel and Google Analytics , which will let you display real-time analytics data on your e-commerce customer journey maps in the form of a marketing funnel.

That way, you will have some hard data to back up your journey maps.

Here are other data sources that can be used to learn about your customer journey before putting it on the map:

• HotJar uses interactive heatmaps of customer clicks and actions to help you visualize how they engage with particular online store pages and where they need help.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) ranges from 0 to 10 and shows the willingness of your customer to recommend your product to others. This provides a simplified, yet highly effective vision of a brand’s popularity and customer loyalty .
• Teammates who can share knowledge about the actual customer journey and its particular stages. For example, if you decided to focus on improving the delivery stage, it would be reasonable to invite the stakeholders from the delivery department, from the head of the department to couriers who deal face-to-face with your customers.

E-commerce customer journey stages

What are typical e-commerce customer journey stages? We’ll explore them through a fictional example.

Imagine Sarah, an avid fitness enthusiast, scrolling through her social media feed. As she leisurely swipes through photos of scenic landscapes and adorable pets, she stumbles upon an eye-catching sponsored post showcasing a new line of high-performance activewear. It serves as the trigger, sparking the first phase of her e-commerce user journey: Awareness .

Intrigued, Sarah clicks on the post, delving into the brand's profile. She explores product images, reads captions, and clicks on a link leading her to the brand's website. Now, at the Interest stage, Sarah is on a quest for more information. She navigates through the site, exploring product descriptions and customer reviews, and perhaps watching a video highlighting the durability and style of the activewear.

The brand cleverly captures her interest, offering a 10% discount for first-time customers. Tempted by the offer and convinced by positive reviews, Sarah adds a few items to her virtual shopping cart. Now, she's transitioning to the Consideration stage, weighing the pros and cons of her selections.

As Sarah contemplates her choices, the brand doesn't let her enthusiasm wane. An automated email promptly lands in her inbox, acknowledging her cart activity and offering personalized recommendations based on her preferences. This thoughtful touch moves Sarah into the Decision-making stage, subtly nudging her closer to making a purchase decision.

Encouraged by the seamless online experience and the brand's customer-centric approach, Sarah confidently clicks the "Checkout" button. The purchase is complete, marking the Conversion stage. The brand doesn't stop there — they send a thank-you email, including a discount code for her next purchase and inviting her to join their loyalty program.

Sarah is now at the post-purchase, Delivery , stage. She eagerly awaits the delivery of her activewear, and the brand, through strategically timed follow-up emails, keeps her engaged by sharing fitness tips, styling ideas, and sneak peeks of upcoming collections. This not only ensures customer retention but also plants the seeds for Sarah's potential advocacy as a satisfied customer.

In this narrative, we've traced Sarah's e-commerce customer journey from awareness to post-purchase engagement, highlighting the importance of a seamless, personalized, and customer-centric experience throughout each step.

Let's now work together to create an e-commerce customer journey map example.

Creating an e-commerce customer journey map

It’s time to get down to actual mapping. First, you will need to draft the backbone (or skeleton) of the customer journey map. These are the stages a customer persona goes through while interacting with your online store.

Draft the backbone

Let’s continue with our delivery e-commerce customer journey map example and try to identify the substages of the delivery stage.

• Requesting the delivery. At this substage, customers complete the purchase and type in their delivery information. Usually, it is done at the checkout page, so it may be considered a major customer touchpoint to pay attention to at this substage.
• Confirmation call or email. Possible touchpoints of the substage: getting a confirmation email and communicating with a customer service agent.
• Waiting for the delivery. This might be the most irritating part of the delivery journey stage for many customers, so it’s a good idea to keep them updated on the delivery information while the item is on its way. Touchpoints may be the same as at the previous substage. Others could include, for example, getting email updates on the delivery status.
• Receiving the items. Contrary to the previous substage, it is the most joyful moment of the whole shopping process, so take your time to think about making it even more memorable. Touchpoints: courier, package.
• Signing the docs. Although this formality is kind of irrelevant for a customer at this point, make sure not to make it too complicated. Touchpoints: meeting a courier, signing delivery documentation.

Here is what the backbone of the e-commerce customer journey map will look like.

In the same way, you can divide the purchasing process into “Review cart”, “Checkout”, “Payment”, and other stages and analyze them in your map.

Add some meat

Let’s briefly look at other steps of creating a customer journey map.

• Customer goals and expectations

Adding customer goals and expectations will let everyone see what your customers pursue at each stage and how it aligns with the goals of your business. At the Search stage, this could be “finding the necessary product with minimum effort”; at the Waiting for the delivery substage, this is definitely “getting the product ASAP”, etc.

• Touchpoints

Identify the interactions happening between your business and customers at each stage: when visiting the homepage or the checkout page, during communication with the customer service agent, etc. This will help you determine the ones that need improvement and eliminate those that encourage your customers to move straight to your competitors.

• Processes & channels

Specify the channels the persona uses and what processes look like during their customer journey. Here are some channel examples: website, advertisement, social media, phone call, mobile app, email, etc. Make sure that the experience you deliver the same positive experience across all the channels.

• Problems & Ideas

Find the pain points the customer encounters while purchasing on your website. It can be a page that loads for years, poor website navigation, low-res images, slow and confusing checkout, lack of support, etc. After that, come up with ideas for solving these problems.

• Moments of truth

Moments of truth (MoTs) are the moments when a customer either stays with your business or leaves forever. For an e-commerce website, a site structure and design, the checkout page, communication with support, and the help center are the most common MoTs. So it's worth paying extra attention to such moments and ensuring everything about them is as customer-friendly as possible.

And that’s what you will see after you map out all these points and add some visual touch to your customer journey map:

How online stores can improve their user journey?

With a finished map in front of you, you will be able to determine problems your customers have to deal with at different parts of the journey. And, certainly, you will start thinking about the ways to solve them.

Online stores can enhance their user journey through a combination of intuitive design, personalized customer experiences, and customer-centric strategies.

Below are some practical ways online stores can improve their user journey experience, illustrated with examples.

Streamlined navigation

Consider the ease with which customers can navigate through the website. Implement clear and intuitive menus, categorize products logically, and provide a search bar for quick access.

For instance, the online store of a well-known electronics brand organizes products by category and features a prominent search bar, allowing visitors to find what they need effortlessly.

Personalization

Leverage data to personalize your online shopping experience. An online clothing company, for instance, could use past purchase history to recommend complementary products or offer exclusive discounts based on customer preferences.

Amazon's personalized product recommendations serve as an excellent example of how tailored suggestions can enhance user engagement.

Mobile optimization

Recognize the prevalence of mobile users. Ensure the online store is optimized for various devices, particularly mobile phones. A fast, responsive, and mobile-friendly design enhances the overall customer experience. Launching a mobile app is also a bright idea.

The mobile app of a popular food delivery service is a prime example of seamless mobile optimization, allowing visitors to browse menus and place orders effortlessly on their smartphones.

Transparent product information

Provide detailed product information, including specifications, sizing charts, and customer reviews. This transparency builds trust.

The online store of a cosmetics company, for instance, not only showcases product features but also includes video tutorials demonstrating the application of the products, enhancing the customer's understanding of what they look like on real people and confidence in their purchase.

Efficient checkout process

Simplify the checkout process to minimize friction.

A well-known online marketplace incorporates a one-click purchase option for registered users, reducing the steps required to complete a transaction. This streamlined approach saves time and reduces the likelihood of cart abandonment. 

Some of the customers will also value a guest checkout option.

Responsive customer support team

Prioritize responsive and accessible customer support. Live chat features, chatbots, and clear contact information contribute to a positive user experience. And make sure to respond to your customer emails.

An online tech company, for instance, utilizes a chatbot for instant assistance, guiding users through common troubleshooting issues and product inquiries.

Post-purchase engagement

Continue engaging with customers at post-purchase stages. Send order confirmations, shipping updates, and request feedback.

An online bookstore, for example, sends personalized book recommendations based on a customer's purchase history, encouraging ongoing engagement and future purchases.

Social proof and trust signals

Incorporate social proof elements, such as customer testimonials, ratings, and trust badges into your website pages. A popular travel booking website prominently displays user reviews and satisfaction ratings, influencing potential customers' decisions and fostering trust in the platform.

By integrating these strategies and learning from successful examples, online stores can create a user journey experience that, besides being efficient and enjoyable, also establishes a strong connection between the business and its customers.

What to do next

Creating a CJM is a good chunk of work, but it doesn't end there. Maximize its value by articulating a clear plan for implementing ideas and passing it on to the responsible individuals. 

Doing all that is so much easier with UXPressia as it allows collaboration with all the teammates simultaneously and has exporting and sharing capabilities.

In addition to that, we have created e-commerce customer journey map examples (and many more customer journey map examples) that already include some general stages and touchpoints.

SEE E-COMMERCE TEMPLATES

This is the updated article originally published in March 2019.

Rate this post

Hey Dan! Great article, can you please share with us high-quality pictures that we can read the details on the picture “complete customer journey map”? thanks!

Hey Netanel!

Adding analytics to a customer journey map in ecommerce is very powerful, great feature. It also means you have to regularly revisit and update the map with new data, which means you can track implementation progress and discover new areas for improvement. Thanks for the post

A nice customer journey ecommerce example, but I think what might be missing here is retention. We try to include it as the final stage for all our maps. At the very least, it helps us keep in mind that the ultimate goal is not only for the customer to have a good experience, but for them to actually come back to shop with us.

I couldn’t agree more! Creating a CJM is a vital step in the process of providing an exceptional user experience, but it’s equally important to have a clear plan for the implementation of the ideas generated from it. Also, thank you for the ecommerce customer journey map example. I’m gonna try and build my own map, using it as a reference. It’s always a headstart and offers a solid foundation. I’m looking forward to exploring UXPressia and leveraging its capabilities to create an outstanding CJM for our customers.

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't forget to share this post!

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

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

• Jun 3, 2022
• 10 min read

The eCommerce customer journey and how to map it

Think about the last purchase you made.

How long did it take you to click ‘buy’? How many different sites, ads, emails, and stores did you check out before finally fetching your wallet?

Suffice to say that the typical buyer journey is anything but linear. Few shoppers convert right away, and every brand is challenged with adjusting their eCommerce marketing strategy to anticipate buyer movements both online and offline.

So, what can you do to stay ahead? Let’s talk more about what the eCommerce customer journey entails, and how to map your customer’s path to purchase when starting your business .

What is the eCommerce customer journey?

5 stages of the ecommerce customer journey, what factors affect the customer journey, customer journey mapping: why it’s a must, how to map the buyer journey for your business, example of a journey map.

Every so often, a buyer will take a relatively straight path to purchase. They'll search for a product, find your item, and within the same sitting, they'll complete the purchase.

But much more often, customers will be “pinballed” between various touchpoints. They’ll see between 6,000 to 10,000 ads in a day as they’re scrolling through their phones, checking their emails, or listening to Spotify. Then, once they decide to do some shopping, they’ll likely hop between Amazon, your site, and a competitor’s shop.

The eCommerce customer journey is the sum of all of these interactions (see our guide on what is eCommerce ). It begins with the moment a customer becomes aware of your brand to when he or she finally makes a purchase.

Some buyers will convert within mere days—while others may take several months or years. Tipping the scale towards the former outcome will require understanding the core stages and touchpoints of the customer journey and knowing how to make the best impact on your buyers.

Your customers’ overall journey can be broken down into five key stages.

01. Awareness

Your customer stumbles across your brand for the first time. Be it through an ad, social media, word of mouth, or SEO–they are now aware of your products. However, as noted earlier, many will not convert right away. Some may not even be looking to purchase anything at all.

At this stage, you’ll want to make sure you understand how people are finding your brand and who they are. Are they the buyer personas you expected to reach? How do demographics, acquisition source, and other factors affect what action your audience takes next?

While many visitors at this stage may just be “window browsing,” you’ve at least built some sort of brand recognition. Now it’s time to do something with it: retarget people, learn more about their interests, and guide them towards products that are most relevant to them.

02. Consideration

At this point, your buyer shows actual interest in your product. They’ve got their eyes on a particular product or set of products, and are deciding which one is worth buying.

Some may be trying to decide whether your item is a need versus a want. Others may be checking out product specs to make sure that your item is worth the price. Still others may be deal hunting or checking out options on competitive sites.

In any case, you’ll want to track which product pages people are spending the most time on, which products they’re comparing, and what other brands are on their radar. How can you convince them that your product is better? What can you do to build their confidence in your brand or incentivize a purchase?

03. Decision

Alas, your buyer makes a purchase on your site—assuming that the checkout process is easy and buyer friendly.

Your number one goal here is to make sure that the checkout process is seamless. Create a simple checkout flow, offer multiple (and secure) payment options, communicate your return policy, and provide all the information buyers need to feel supported by your brand.

Buyers should know when to expect their packages and any fees associated with their purchase. Don’t let any unwelcome surprises or lack of information lead to customers canceling their orders early.

04. Retention

Once a buyer makes their first purchase with your brand, they’ll ideally become a repeat customer . A positive customer experience—including excellent customer service, on-time delivery, and a multichannel marketing strategy—can work together to build customer loyalty .

Note that even though you’ve won the first sale, you’ll need to continuously earn a buyer’s patronage time and time again. Be consistent in your messaging. Engage buyers frequently. Offer incentives or employ strategies for upselling and cross-selling .

05. Advocacy

Happy customers have the potential to attract other happy customers. Buyers at this final leg of the customer journey are (hopefully) so happy with your product and/or service that they’re eager to spread the word to their friends and family.

Of course, this isn’t a passive activity. You’ll want to proactively nurture brand ambassadors by creating a customer loyalty program , hosting giveaways, showing appreciation, and taking other steps to inspire advocacy.

Your customers are a moving target. Between their unique preferences and backgrounds—plus their prior experiences with brands—there are tons of factors that shape the way they make their purchases.

As you track the various ways that customers interact with your brand, consider how trends like the ones below can make a big impact on the buyer journey.

Social and economic changes - e.g., the recent pandemic. These events tend to spur shifts in buying behaviors and expectations, as many types of businesses and buyers alike adapt to new realities. With each shift, consumers tend to get smarter and potentially pickier on what defines a good value and how to spend their money.

Convergence of online and offline shopping - Omnichannel retail isn’t just a concept anymore. Today, the lines between the offline and online worlds are increasingly blurred—with digital native brands like Warby Parker opening physical showrooms, and longtime retailers like T.J. Maxx investing more in online commerce. Curbside pickup, BOPIS, and in-store returns are just the beginning of what’s to come; brands should expect the customer journey to entail a greater mix of online and offline touchpoints, regardless of whether a customer originated online or not.

Corporate responsibility - Brands today are expected to do good. Inactivity or a difference in values could shape a customer’s engagement with your brand at any point of the buyer’s journey.

Choice paralysis - The proliferation of brands and products online have the ability to frustrate consumers. Make sure that your website is organized in such a way that customers know exactly where to find what they’re looking for. Make it easier for them to filter out noise and/or compare similar options. The last thing you want is for an overabundance of options—or poor site design—to deter your customers from buying. Learn more about combatting choice paralysis .

While customer journey mapping is an imperfect science, the benefits are undeniable.

In fact, 30% of surveyed retailers reported significant improvements in customer lifetime value and customer advocacy after investing in digital customer experience (CX). Roughly 23% reported an increase in average order size as well.

This exercise can help you to achieve multiple goal including:

Getting more clarity over how buyers interact with you - By carefully mapping your customer journey, you can gain a clear understanding of your buyers and their habits. A map helps you to see things from the buyer's perspective rather than your business’s perspective.

Improving customer retention rates - A map helps you to identify when and why prospective buyers are dropping. For example, an ill-worded message or one displayed in the wrong place at the wrong time could be all that’s causing buyers to regress in their journey. By making strategic changes and reducing friction in the customer experience, you can enjoy an easier time attracting and retaining buyers.

Sharpening your focus and organization - This exercise will force you to lay everything on the table–from all of your marketing campaigns to all the possible interactions a customer may have with your brand. From there, you can determine the health of each channel, who owns which touchpoint, and realistic goals for each event.

Increasing revenue - When you understand how buyers interact with your business in detail, you can more accurately cater your communications, offers, content, and promotions to influence sales. It’s all too easy to rely on assumptions or old habits when engaging customers. A journey map helps to shed light on biases and pain points that you may not have known were there before.

So how do you actually map the customer journey? Here are five steps to get you started.

Step 1. Describe your buyer personas

Before building a map, you must clearly define your target customer types. Are you looking to engage parents, young adults, or consumers with specific hobbies?

Your personas should include as much detail as possible. Make sure to base them around real data—not made-up, fake, or idealistic data. Talk to various stakeholders, interview your customers, consult social media, or perform user testing.

In other words, don't build a buyer profile based on what you think a customer should look like. Create your buyer personas using actual data you gathered from the places where they hang out and from talking directly to your target audience.

Step 2. Define the main character of your map

Now, you can decide which set of customers you’d like to analyze as part of the journey mapping process. The map will look different for each type of buyer you target, and trying to address all of them at once will only muddy the data.

To start, pick the most common persona (i.e., the most valuable or largest cohort). You’ll have an easier time collecting data this way, plus taking meaningful action from your journey map.

Step 3. Analyze on-site behaviors

As an initial step, check out the behaviors on your website and jot down the top pages that people enter your site from, where they exit or bounce, and which ones are the highest converting. Tools like Google Analytics and Wix Analytics can help to fill in these blanks.

To get more specific, make sure to filter your data according to criteria that’s most relevant to your buyer persona: geo, new versus returning users, and device (to name a few).

You may already start to see areas where people drop off and opportunities to optimize your site. You can additionally gain insight into what your buyer is more interested in buying based on where they linger on your site (though note that this could be heavily influenced by how accessible a page is from other areas of your site).

Step 4. List all other customer touchpoints

List out all the ways that your target buyer can interact with your company, both on and off your site. Include things like:

Social media

Review sites

Publications

Popup stores

Onsite banners

Physical stores

Marketplaces that you sell on

Help center

Loyalty program

Seasonal promotions

From here, you’ll want to list out all the possible actions someone could take from each channel. For instance, when someone interacts with a blog, he or she may subscribe to your newsletter, download a piece of content that you promote, click to another blog—or even request a demo. Alternatively, your visitor may bounce.

The purpose of this exercise is to audit all the CTAs you include on a single page, as well as links and other messaging that may influence a visitor’s behaviors. You’ll moreover want to look into whether reality aligns with expectations.

When you compare your list of expected behaviors with the data you gathered from Google Analytics, Wix Analytics, and other sources—do the results align? How can you better define the purpose of each channel, and match your goals with a visitor intent?

Step 5. Visualize the journey

Finally, you can document all of your findings into one easy-to-reference map. The scope of your journey map can vary depending on your goal. For instance, you could show the complete customer journey (as shown below) or hone in on just a part of it where you see the most room for improvement.

A map may cover everything from a buyer’s emotions, to their actions, to roles and responsibilities on your team at each stage. It can serve as both a tool for predicting buyer behaviors and keeping your team organized.

That said, there are several types of journey maps you can create:

Current state map - This shows how customers interact with your brand today. You could use it to compare behaviors between two different segments of buyers, or to uncover how customer emotions and behaviors vary depending on how they find your products (as an example).

Future state map - This illustrates the ideal journey that you want your customers to take. It helps your team rally around specific goals and identify critical points of a customer’s journey.

Day in the life map - This is similar to a current state map, except that it doesn’t start and end with a buyers’ interaction with your brand. It aims to understand all of their daily activities and lifestyles, with the goal of developing new, meaningful touchpoints.

Service blueprints - This takes a simplified version of one of the maps above, then adds in details about the various people, technologies, and processes that take place behind the scenes. The purpose is to audit and optimize how your team functions in the background to support the customer journey.

Let’s imagine that you own an online shop for pet supplies. You want to create a current state map in order to see how your core customers (new dog owners) are interacting with your brand. Your map may look something like this.

This helps your team keep track of the most effective campaigns, products, and channels. You’ll likely look to expand upon this map soon, as you get even more granular in your research or launch new campaigns.

There is no right or wrong way to create an eCommerce journey map. The framework outlined here is just meant to provide a good starting point. Once you have a baseline, you can continue to modify and rework your journey map to fit your unique business.

Remember that the customer journey is constantly evolving. Re-evaluate your eCommerce journey map once a quarter or at least once every six months. Aim to reduce friction in the customer journey and put assumptions to the test.

Allison Lee

Editor, Wix eCommerce

Allison is the editor for the Wix eCommerce blog, with several years of experience reporting on eCommerce news, strategies, and founder stories.

• Sell Online

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What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map template, the customer journey mapping process, data inputs for your customer journey map, why should you use customer journey maps, the uses of customer journey mapping, how to improve a customer journey, tools to help you with your journey mapping, see how xm for customer frontlines works, customer journey mapping 101: definition, template & tips.

22 min read Find out about how to start customer journey mapping, and how to improve it for the benefit of your customers and the business.

If you want to improve your customer experience you need to be able to understand and adapt the customer journey you offer when someone interacts with your organization. Whether their journey is entirely online , offline, or a blend of both, there are multiple journeys a customer might undergo.

Understanding the customer journey in depth helps you identify and take action on customer pain points and repeat what’s working. By doing this, you will improve the overall experience that your customers have, which will have better outcomes for your business.

Outlining the potential customer journeys your audience might go through requires a process called customer journey mapping.

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Creating a customer journey map is the process of forming a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs , and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organization. It helps you understand the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business.

It enables you to assess:

• Insights – from your existing customer journey, how to understand it better
• Impact – how to optimize budgets and effort for changes we want to make to the customer experiences
• Issues/opportunities – Diagnose the existing customer journey
• Innovation – where you might want to completely change the existing customer experience

A customer journey map gives you deeper insight into the customer, so you can go beyond what you already know. Many brands see the customer journey as something that is visible – where the customer interacts with the brand. But in reality, this is not true, and only accounts for a percentage of the entire customer journey. Creating a customer journey map gets you thinking about the aspects of the journey you don’t see, but have equal weight and importance to the entire experience.

When mapping out the customer journey, you are looking for the moments that matter – where there is the greatest emotional load.

If you’re buying a car, then the greatest moment of emotional load is when you go to pick the car up because it’s yours , after picking the color, choosing the model, and waiting for it to be ready.

Ensuring these moments match your customers’ expectations of your product, brand and service teams are key to helping you reach your business goals. But you can only do that by understanding the journey your customers go on in order to get there, what they’re thinking and needing from you at that time. Developing a customer journey map puts you in their shoes so you can understand them better than ever before.

Getting started when creating a customer journey map template doesn’t have to be difficult. However, your customer journey map template will need to cover several elements in order to be effective.

There are several ingredients that make up the anatomy of a customer journey, all of which should be looked at carefully so that you can find out where the customer journey runs smoothly and meets customer needs at that moment in time – and where the experience does not, and needs some improvement.

Understanding their behaviors and attitudes also means you can fix bad experiences more effectively too because you know why you haven’t met your customers’ expectations and what you need to do to make amends. There may be times when things go wrong, but it’s how you adapt and what you do to fix these experiences that separates the best. Knowing how the customer will be feeling makes taking that decisive action much easier.

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

• Customer behavior What is your customer trying to do?
• Customer attitudes What is your customer feeling/saying?
• The on-stage experience Who/what is your customer directly interacting with? (This includes various channels, such as TV ads or social media)
• The off-stage experience Who/what needs to be in place but which your customer is NOT directly aware of?

So what could the customer journey map examples look like when starting the process of buying a car?

Customer journey vs process flow

Understanding customer perspective, behavior, attitudes, and the on-stage and off-stage is essential to successfully create a customer journey map – otherwise, all you have is a process flow. If you just write down the touchpoints where the customer is interacting with your brand, you’re typically missing up to 40% of the entire customer journey.

There is no single customer journey. In fact, there are multiple. The best experiences combine multiple journeys in a seamless way to create a continuous customer lifecycle as outlined below.

Getting started with customer journey map templates

To begin, start by choosing a journey that you would like to create a customer journey map for and outline the first step that customers will take.

You can use this customer journey map template below to work out the customer behaviors, attitudes, the on-stage and off-stage processes – and the KPIs attached to measuring the success of this experience.

Download our free journey mapping template here

The step-by-step process of mapping the customer journey begins with the buyer persona .

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

In order to effectively understand the customer journey, you need to understand the customer – and this is where creating a persona really helps. You may base this around the most common or regular customers, big spend, or new customers you haven’t worked with before. This persona is beyond a marketing segment , but that can be a great place to begin if you’re just starting out on the mapping process for your organization.

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

These personas help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and can be derived from insights and demographic data , or even customer interviews . This works for both B2B and B2C business models, but in B2B especially you’ll have multiple customers for each opportunity so it’s recommended you build out multiple personas.

To begin, start with no more than three personas to keep things simple.

Create a diverse team

When creating a customer journey map, you also need to build out a diverse mapping team to represent the whole business. Include frontline staff , day-to-day management, corporate teams, HR, and business support functions. They will give you vital feedback, advice, and perspectives you hadn’t thought of.

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

Select a customer journey map to construct, then build a behavior line. This might be a new customer journey, renewal, or fixing a product issue. You might also choose this based on the most frequent customer journeys taken, or the most profitable.

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

• Who are the people involved in this journey? E.g. if you’re in a car dealership, that might be the customer, the sales rep, and front-of-house staff.
• What are the processes or the things that happen during this journey?
• What are the customer attitudes ? What are they feeling at this time? Go beyond excitement or frustration. Bring these feelings to life. This car is my dream come true!
• What is the moment that matters? Identify the greatest moment of emotional load. The make or break where everything could be good up until that point, but if you get that moment of maximum impact wrong, then all that’s good is forgotten. The best experience brands get this moment right and identifying it is an important first step to achieving that. In that moment, ask yourself what are the things/people/processes involved? Think about this for the whole business – across your product , brand , and service teams.
• But beyond identifying this moment, you need to establish what your customers’ needs are. What are they getting out of this moment? How do their needs change if this experience goes badly? Knowing the answer to these questions can help you deliver experiences that will resonate , and respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances or issues.
• And finally, how do you measure how effectively you are meeting customer needs throughout the journey? Set KPIs to put benchmarks in place for your customer journey map and customer experience and track your progress.

Step 4 – Innovate

When you are mapping out your customer journey, brainstorm ideas for how to improve that moment that really matters . These ideas don’t need to be practical, but by putting together a diverse mapping team from around the business you can begin to filter through these ideas.

Then, test it.

Ask yourself: Is it feasible? Is it viable? Is it desirable? Don’t ask can we do it, ask should we do it? Then you can start to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Step 5 – Measure

Use the customer journey map to decide on your measurement framework.

Who are you measuring? What are you measuring? When on the journey are you measuring it? And why? And finally, what metrics and KPI’s are in place to measure this?

Your customer journey map process will require you to use several different data inputs to get an accurate picture of how your customers behave and where you can improve their experience.

A customer journey map is often developed using data gleaned from customer feedback you’ve requested . While this type of market research is useful, your research process needs to be deeper to gain a richer, more accurate understanding of your customer’s behavior.

To create a customer journey map that accurately reflects the truth of customer actions and intentions, you need to take into account both solicited and unsolicited data.

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

Solicited data includes the customer feedback you gain when you conduct research through surveys such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or ask customers for feedback on social media. This approach can be very useful for understanding your customer’s point of view , rather than just making assumptions about how they think and behave.

However, your target audiences won’t tell you everything about what they plan to do when undergoing their customer journey. Though they might tell you that they’ve had a great experience in a particular part of their customer journey, this type of feedback presents a few issues:

• You have to know when to ask for feedback : You might already have a customer journey in mind when asking for feedback – but do you know all the routes a customer might take in your customer journey map?
• It’s a snapshot: When you survey customers, you’ll likely only get insights into their experience at that particular moment about a specific touchpoint
• It’s what customers say they think/will do, not what they actually think/will do: You’re relying on your customers to accurately reflect their sentiment and intentions in their responses, which isn’t always the case. For your customer journey map to be effective, you need to find the truth
• Your sample size might be too small : If you’re trying to understand how a relatively niche customer journey is doing, you might find that the number of customers who have not only taken the customer journey but are willing to respond with feedback is very limited. You can’t risk survey fatigue by polling the same audience several times, so your insights are limited
• You’re only getting part of the picture : You will likely have several types of useful customer data on file, but these are often not considered as part of the process when creating a customer journey design because solicited data takes precedence

You’ll need to infer how customers feel to be able to accurately predict the actions a customer takes. To do so, you’ll need to look at unsolicited data.

Unsolicited data

Unsolicited data covers everything your customers aren’t telling you directly when you ask them and contextual data that you likely already collect on them, such as purchase history. It can be taken from various sources, such as your website and social channels, third-party sites, customer calls, chat transcripts, frontline employee feedback , operational sources, and more.

This type of data is nuanced, but it allows you to establish the truth of your customers’ experience. The ability to gather unsolicited customer feedback from every channel enables you to see more than just what a customer tells you directly. Using real-time feedback gathering and natural language understanding (NLU) models that can detect emotion, intent, and effort, you’ll be able to understand your customers’ actions in a more profound way. Unsolicited data offers you a 100% response rate that better indicates what your customers actually think of each step in their customer journey.

Rather than be limited to a small sample size of customers who respond to surveys, you’ll be able to build an accurate picture of the average customer on each step of the customer journey map by using this richer insight data with your own operational data.

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

With solicited data, you don’t always see why a customer behaves or thinks as they do. For example, a customer might tell you that they would recommend you to a friend or family – but they don’t renew their subscription with you. A customer might be an ideal candidate for a particular journey, but they abandon their basket when prompted to give their personal details. Understanding the why behind customer actions is key for designing a great customer journey, and that’s why both solicited and unsolicited data collection and evaluation are necessary for creating great customer journey maps.

Of course, knowing how customers will actually respond to your customer touchpoints is only part of the process. You may need to develop more than one customer journey map and create sub-audiences for your customer personas to accurately see where you can rectify pain points and improve outcomes. You will need to collect and analyze contextual data across all customer journey touchpoints and develop a highly detailed journey map that can unveil routes your customers might be taking without your knowledge.

Qualtrics’ Experience ID platform can overlay solicited and unsolicited data to provide an all-encompassing picture of your customer journey map, no matter how complex. Creating an effective customer journey map is easier with all your data collated and analyzed together, with actionable insights created automatically.

A customer journey map creates a common understanding for the organization of how a customer interacts during different stages of the customer lifecycle, and the roles and responsibilities of the different teams in charge of fulfilling that experience.

It will also bring an organization together, and foster empathy and collaboration between teams because people will know what is required from everyone in the business to deliver the experiences that customers expect. This will help you to develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship, which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture . With everyone working towards a common goal, communication of what you learn about the customer and the journey they go through is vital in order to drive best practices throughout the organization.

Creating an accurate customer journey map will help your customer service team to focus on more specific issues, rather than handling problems generated by a less-tailored customer journey. Your customer experience will be improved with a customer journey that’s personalized to the specific personas you have generated. You’ll have put yourself in your customer’s shoes and adapted your strategy to reflect your customer’s perspective – which in turn will create more memorable experiences.

Creating a customer journey map will influence your journey analytics across the business. So for example, it will determine what you ask, who you ask, when you ask, why you ask it and how you ask questions in your Voice of the Customer Program .

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

• Assess the current state of your customer journey Understand and diagnose the specific issues in current experiences
• Understand what the future state of your customer journey should look like Design, redesign and create new experiences
• Blueprints For implementing change
• Communication Bringing teams together to train and scale up best practices.

Take stock and take action

To improve the customer journey you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve and you need to make a distinction between the present and the future.

• What is your customer journey right now?
• What does the future state of your customer journey look like?

This is why organizations blueprint their customer journey because they can see what works and act accordingly. By understanding your customers’ attitudes and needs at critical times in the journey, you can make amends to better meet them – and develop contingencies to cope when these needs aren’t or can’t be met. For example, during a sudden, unexpected surge in demand.

Orchestrate your customer journey

To offer your customers truly optimized experiences, you’ll need to go further than just creating a customer journey map. You’ll also need to orchestrate journeys using real-time customer behavior to adapt your strategy as your customers make choices. Orchestrating a journey means taking dynamic action towards optimizing your customer’s experience, using real-time customer behavior as informative data.

Improve your employee experience

Use your diverse mapping team to come up with ideas that incorporate experience from all aspects of the business to improve the customer journey – and remember that this has a significant payoff for your employees too. Improving the employee journey – by giving teams the tools to make a difference – can have a positive knock-on effect for the customer and improve their experience in those key moments. This is because employees have the autonomy and motivation in their roles to help their customers, and realize their own potential.

Your customer journey map isn’t just designed to improve the customer experience. Creating an accurate customer journey map can help you to improve your business outcomes.

Being able to link operational data to key touchpoints in a customer journey is transformative for organizations. This is because improving segments of the customer journey will see a direct impact on your business. The Qualtrics Journey Optimizer helps you do just that. By analyzing areas for improvement as outlined by your customer journey map, organizations can take actions that will have maximum benefit for their customers, and the business too.

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

• Create a common understanding throughout your workforce of how a customer interacts with your organization, and you’ll know the roles and responsibilities of your different teams
• Develop empathy and collaboration between teams, working together to achieve the same outcome
• Develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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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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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

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

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

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

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

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

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

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

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

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

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

1. Awareness

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

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

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

2. Consideration

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

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

3. Purchase

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

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

4. Retention

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

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

5. Advocacy

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

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

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

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

Customer journey touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

1. Create buyer personas

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

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

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

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

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

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

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

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

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

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

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

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

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

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

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

Getting started with customer journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Make Sense of the Ecommerce Customer Journey

No one can deny how big the ecommerce market is. Global ecommerce sales are projected to nearly double to $6.5 trillion by 2023. Its share of total retail sales is also growing, particularly in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

So we know the sector is massive, but how complicated is it? Surely it is just a simple matter of finding the product you want, buying it, then waiting for delivery. Or is there far more to the ecommerce customer journey? There are multiple factors, from lead times to customer service, that makes an ecommerce business a good ecommerce business (or not). 

Modern business, especially ecommerce , is about identifying and utilizing the best tools available. And that covers everything from live video conference software to good CRM management systems. 

Smaller businesses need to find such tools without breaking the bank. Fortunately, they can choose from the best free business apps that will provide great service without denting the budget. Having the ability to be agile and to adapt to changes can be a major positive for your business. 

If you look at a successful online retailer such as Larq , you will see a well-constructed site that is easy to navigate and that also offers links to their various social media platforms. This is a good example of how an ecommerce site should look. It shows they have looked at the customer journey and optimized their site to make it a positive one. 

You need to know each stage of that journey, how those stages affect customer experiences and their relationship with you, and how you can improve the journey at every level and customer touchpoint . Let’s look at how the customer journey unfolds and what factors of customer journey mapping that are important for you to understand.

What is the Ecommerce Customer Journey?

That quote about life from Ralph Waldo Emerson can also be applied to ecommerce businesses. While it is easy to think about the destination—that purchase arriving in the customer’s hands—it is also very much about the journey and what happens en route to that final destination. Just as with life’s journey, every stage of the ecommerce journey has its own features and qualities. 

Our customers no longer buy just a product, they buy the whole experience of being a customer, they buy your brand qualities, your mission and values, and more. They buy into the ease of your processes, the information you provide, the convenience, the quality of your aftersales (and presales if needed) customer service. In short, they look at the whole package you offer.

We all do process mapping for our businesses as a matter of course, so we should be doing the same for the customer experience. You need to understand every aspect of how your business operates, from dealing with logistics to ensuring your customers are happy. 

And do not be afraid to use shortcuts. The very reason tools such as templates are offered is to make it easier for you to conduct business. They can save you time and money and it can be easy to find one that suits you. 

It is not only the price of something that matters to them, it is everything that surrounds it, including how they access your site or app (and how easy it is to use), how you communicate with them across different channels, possibly even using companies like Slack , and how quickly you respond to their inquiries. In short, it is about providing an ecommerce customer journey map that meets all of their needs. 

Focus not only on your customers’ journeys, but also on their relationship with you; that’s important whether you are a small business or a large international one. Investing in customer relationship management (CRM) software is highly advised, especially when you have a multichannel or omnichannel business. 

There are also other aspects to consider. Many people now ask ‘ what is affiliate marketing ’, as offered by MaxBounty, and what is its place in online retail? If you use a strategy such as affiliate marketing, then you need to make sure that a customer’s journey is consistent across all the options open to them. Whether they find you via your own channels or through an affiliate.  

5 Stages of the Ecommerce Customer Journey

So we recognize that the customer journey is far more than a simple buying process. We also recognize that we need to know how to develop a successful ecommerce fulfillment strategy that helps us win and retain customers. Knowing the main stages of that journey is essential to both mapping it and ensuring that it is as optimized as possible. 

And when a business operates across many channels (omnichannel or multichannel ), you need to recognize that their journey may differ greatly depending on which channel they are using. 

1. Awareness.

Every journey has a starting point, and in the ecommerce business, that starting point is awareness. This is the stage where the customer discovers your product/service and your brand. This is also where you discover how they found you. Did they find you via a search engine (thus validating your SEO strategy)? Did they see an ad on social media or in a more traditional medium? 

You can not only see where they came from but also what behaviors they are showing once they have ‘arrived’. Do they look at particular landing pages that give you an idea of what products they are interested in? You could also describe this as the first learning stage; the customer is learning about your business and you are learning their preferences and needs. 

2. Consideration. 

In this stage, the customer begins to show real interest in particular products or services and move beyond general browsing. For example, with a cosmetics company such as Bliss World , they may start looking at the vegan skincare range, letting you see that this is their specific interest product-wise. 

From your organization’s perspective, this stage of behavior allows you to analyze what works and what doesn’t. Those analytics can help you reduce bounce rates and encourage further investigation by the customer. 

3. Conversion. 

One of the magic words in ecommerce, but this stage is not always a guaranteed sale. In some cases, this stage can include those customers who have added a product to their cart (or to their wishlist) but have not yet proceeded to actually buying it. In most cases, though, we do consider this to be the stage at which a prospective customer becomes an actual customer who adds to your conversion rate. 

It is at this stage that you as a business have to begin delivering on any promises you may have made to get the customer to this point. Part of that delivery is making sure all your processes, such as marketing, sales, customer service, etc., are aligned and are delivering the same message and quality of service. 

4. Retention. 

Another of those magic words. Having a customer make a single purchase is satisfying, but having them return again and again to buy is even more satisfying. This means they are very happy with most or all aspects of their journey and experience to date. From this point they begin to exhibit brand loyalty and may always look at your site before others. 

The thing for businesses to be aware of at this stage is that providing an excellent experience once is fairly easy, but providing it time and time again is where the challenge lies. 

5. Advocacy. 

This stage is the Holy Grail of the customer journey but do not expect to achieve it with every customer. Most companies fall short at stage four, but those who do manage to retain customers are then hoping that those people become advocates and brand ambassadors with a high lifetime value. At this stage, your best customers are not only buying but interacting at a high level. 

They will interact with you across most if not all of your touchpoints, such as your homepage, any blogs, social media, etc. More importantly (from your marketing perspective), they will be sharing information that you post on their own platforms and will actively advocate and talk about your products/services. That can also include recommending you to people and writing reviews. 

Building an Ecommerce Customer Journey Map

An ecommerce customer journey map is a visualization of all the potential experiences a customer may have with your organization. Such a map also highlights the sequences those experiences are most likely to occur in. It can allow you as a business to identify strengths and weaknesses, and thus make improvements where needed. 

That customer journey may consist of all the stages we previously listed or they may only cover some of them, if customers do not move to later stages. What you need to focus on is that a customer journey map will show you all the possible permutations of what the customer experiences, whether only one or two stages or all five.

How Do You Build Ecommerce Customer Journey Maps?

Being able to map the customer journey offers many benefits, but if you have never undertaken this exercise before, where do you start? What things do you need to consider before starting? 

1. Perspective.

The first important thing to note is that you need your map to be from the customer’s perspective. So, detach yourself from your professional role and start the process as if you were an everyday customer. This can also help you understand the overall customer persona. 

To do so, pick a product or service your company offers. Use various terms on search engines to see what results come up. Read any associated material including reviews, articles, and blogs. Then visit your actual site to view the product there. Take notes on how the various customer touchpoints felt and how the experience of visiting the site unfolded. 

2. Research. 

Put together a focus group that consists of your main demographic targets. Ideally, they will not know what company or brand has formed this group. Pick one of your products or services and ask the focus group to find and buy that item online. Observe and record how they find the item, what paths they take, and what outcomes unfold. 

Once the focus group has finished their exercise, take the results and compare them with your experience from part one. By analyzing the two exercises, you can see if you and your customers think in the same way, and will also have a wider overview of touchpoints and interactions.  

3. Understanding.

You now have a better overview of how customers interact with your business and how the various touchpoints perform. You now need to understand what those various actions mean in terms of engagement strategy. Did any touchpoint perform particularly badly? By analyzing the information you have collected, you can see what action you need to take next. 

Your aim is to have your ecommerce site performing at an optimum level at every touchpoint you (and your customers) have identified. Those touchpoints can range from your own site to your social media platforms to search engine rankings. They can also include independent touchpoints such as review sites. 

4. Goals and pain.

You now have some of the foundations of your customer journey map in place. But it is more than just identifying the touchpoints and engagements you have observed. You also need to understand the goals of the customer and the pain points they experience. It can help greatly if you list some of the insights gained from your observation and data collection:

Goals . What is the customer’s ultimate goal(s)? What is it they want to achieve?

Emotional response . What parts of the process make the customer happy? Or what elements make them unhappy or frustrated? 

Pain points . What things cause issues for the customer and would they like to see improved? 

5. Visualization.

Image source  

You should now have enough (likely a lot) of information that tells you what the customer experiences. The problem is that this information is not easy to digest, so you want to simplify it and create a visual that is easy to look at and understand. How you format it will depend very much on your own specific business model. 

You may decide to create more than one visual, especially when you are a larger company and may have different teams working on different areas. For example, if you have a dedicated social media team, you may decide to create a journey map that particularly pertains to social media touchpoints, pain points, experiences, etc. 

Why is the Customer Journey Important?

Do you really need to make a customer journey map? What benefits does it bring you? Knowing why it is important is as crucial as understanding the whole process itself. There are many reasons why it is not only important, but should be an integral part of your ecommerce business. 

Efficiency . It can help you streamline the customer experience and journey by identifying if there are too many steps or touchpoints between the customer starting their journey and ending it. 

Effectiveness . Does the required journey make sense to your customers? Acknowledging that we all do things differently, from how we search to how we navigate a site, creating a process that has a general effectiveness for most is a major benefit of a customer journey map. 

Understanding . Knowing and understanding your customers, how they think, what they need, what they like and don’t like, is another crucial factor in determining how to create the best possible customer journey. In fact, this is an area where many organizations fail as they focus more on creating the perfect journey for them, rather than their customers. 

Setting goals . A good customer journey map can help you identify and set better and more realistic goals. The combination of a human perspective and the hard data you have collected ensures you are more in touch with what makes your business thrive and grow. It also helps you monitor and tweak in real time as you move forward. 

Planning . Every business has one eye on the future; new products and services, expansion, etc. Having an accurate customer journey map, and understanding it, means that you can more accurately focus on those future events. 

Reducing pain . Pain points are the bane of any online stores and can lose you customers if not identified and remedied. You may be surprised by how many pain points exist once you have completed your journey map. Once you have identified them, you can take action to remove them or to reduce their effects. 

How Ecommerce Stores Can Improve Their Customer Journey

For companies looking closely at their customers’ journeys for the first time, it can sometimes be daunting when flaws and gaps are identified that are having a very real effect on your business. Mapping the customer journey is one thing, but knowing how you can act on the data you have identified and improving the customer journey and experience is another. 

1. Create touchpoints at every stage.

Anywhere a customer interacts with your brand is a touchpoint. Seeing an ad, visiting your site, looking at independent reviews, contacting your business to find store locations, and finally making a purchase. All of these are touchpoints. Going back to the five stages of the customer journey we discussed earlier, you need to have touchpoints for each stage. 

Each touchpoint serves a purpose and plays its part in optimizing the overall customer journey. So each touchpoint you create has to fulfil its specific purpose (ad attracting interest, checkout process quick and uncomplicated, etc.) Ensuring you have multiple touchpoints that fit their respective stages and work properly is essential. 

2. Optimize your website for every device.

It is worth remembering that around half of all internet traffic originates from mobile devices . So if your website performs poorly when accessed from a mobile device, you are in effect alienating half your potential customer base. Optimization is key to offering a good experience to all. 

It can help to look at great websites that are well optimized, such as Skullcandy , so you can see what is needed. The screenshot below shows how well you can view their products from a mobile device, making online shopping easier for customers. 

And there are a few factors to take into consideration when optimizing your site:

Test your site . Knowing your site works well on mobile devices is absolutely crucial. You can do this manually at first simply by accessing your site via several different devices. Look especially at loading times and how the site looks on a small screen. For more in-depth testing, use Google’s free testing tool . 

Web host . Make sure your web host offers the speed and resources required to make your site fast and responsive. A slow and unresponsive home page and website will put customers off. You also want a host that guarantees the minimum of downtime. 

Apps . Consider launching an app to complement your website. They are not as expensive as you think and they can help boost both sales and engagement . 

3. Use proactive customer support.

Don’t wait for problems to happen and for customers to contact you. Anticipate the problems or questions most likely to occur and provide answers and solutions that will keep your customers happy. Offering proactive customer support has a number of benefits. 

Better customer retention rates. Being proactive means you’re more likely to have happy, loyal customers.

Less calls to your support team. By solving problems proactively, customers can see the solutions themselves and thus will make less calls to you, freeing up your team to deal with more complicated queries and also reducing waiting times. 

More first time customers. People talk about the good service they receive and that includes proactive support. When satisfied customers share their experiences, that can lead to new first-time customers. 

Increased productivity. Proactivity means better communication. And that means your team has more time to listen to and help customers who call and to collect more information and data.

Communication. You are probably already using video and messaging collaboration tools for sales teams , so why not ensure you also have great tools to communicate with customers. Chatbots and AI are great ways of proactively helping your customers find information. 

4. Personalization is key.

It is neither a secret nor a surprise that people like a personal touch, and that is true whether in ‘real life’ or in online shopping and ecommerce marketing. That means going beyond using their name (which you can do with website automation or in marketing emails) and also recognizing their particular interests and buying habits. 

Using tactics such as dynamic content marketing, which can customize content according to buying preferences, location, age, gender, etc., means you are offering a personalized approach that can lead to increased sales and better customer retention. Automation and analytics can be the two drivers when it comes to personalizing the customer journey, so use them wisely. 

Smaller businesses may feel they could be overwhelmed by these demands, but with so much technology and automation available on a budget, it is not that difficult to do. There are many mobile apps for small business owners that can help with factors such as communications and social media posting, so see what tools can both help you and save money that may be spent elsewhere. 

5. Gather data as much as possible and be flexible.

Data is not a one off exercise. Collect as much data as possible in the early stages, but keep collecting it always. Collect data not only on customer behavior and the customer lifecycle, but also general info via surveys, polls, etc. on your social media platforms and via email. The data you collect is a hugely important resource and offers you several benefits and potential uses.

And it is, of course, not just about collecting data, but about analyzing it and interpreting it efficiently. Consider using one of the many tools, such as Google Analytics, to help you with this. Identify what metrics, such as KPIs, matter most to you. A good KPI helps show your business is healthy. 

Data is not just a collection of information, it offers tangible benefits that can help your business grow by developing strategies for the future . 

Understand the market . Collecting and analyzing consumer data helps you understand how your ideal customers behave online. It helps define and segment particular demographics, understand better what customers want, and see ways to improve the overall experience throughout the customer lifecycle. 

Expand your database . The more information you have on customers, the bigger, and more efficient, your database is. And with detailed data, you can segment your customers (and potential customers) into groups that make more personalized strategies, such as dynamic content marketing, easier to achieve. 

A larger database allows you to use a variety of strategies. For example, instant messaging can be a great way to boost your ecommerce sales.  

Better marketing . By constantly collecting data, you get better insights into which of your marketing strategies and campaigns have worked well. The more data you have, the easier it is to identify which sorts of campaigns are best, and what platforms reach more of your ideal customer base and generate more leads. 

Those campaigns could be via social media or you could identify what sort of email campaigns best drive sales.  

Customer relationship management is perhaps one of the most important factors for ecommerce businesses to consider and it is worth investing in good CRM software to help with this. You may understand the customer journey, but managing that journey on an ongoing basis is a big task. 

Aim to be consistent and to ensure you provide the same positive customer experience throughout every journey. Your online store has to be as accessible and helpful as any physical store would be. And that applies to every channel, platform, and touchpoint where your customers interact with you. 

Ecommerce businesses range from massive multinational corporations to small solo entrepreneurs. Customers range from occasional purchasers of low value items to regular buyers of high value goods. No matter who you are or who they are, you should be aiming for parity so that every journey and experience is positive.

Pohan Lin is the Senior Global Web Marketing Manager at RingCentral, a global UCaaS, VoIP and video conferencing solutions providers. He has over 18 years variety experience in web marketing, online SaaS business and ecommerce growth. Pohan has a passion for innovation and communicating the impact that technology has in marketing.

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E-commerce Customer Journey: Stages + How to Improve

The world of E-commerce is constantly changing, and businesses must adapt to keep up with the competition. One of the most essential elements of this change is understanding the E-commerce Customer Journey.

Attracting and retaining customers is more important than ever before. Businesses are always looking for ways to improve the customer experience and drive long-term profitability. To do so successfully, businesses need to take a strategic strategy across the entire customer lifecycle, from discovery to post-purchase interaction.

In this blog, we will explore the key stages of the E-commerce customer journey and techniques and insights to improve each stage.

What is E-commerce Customer Journey?

The E-commerce customer journey refers to the set of steps and interactions that a customer goes through when making a purchase from an online store or website. It includes every stage of the customer’s experience, from initial product or service awareness and consideration to post-purchase follow-up and future repurchase.

Online searches, website visits, product browsing, adding products to the cart, making a transaction, receiving order updates, and dealing with customer care are common customer journey touchpoints. Businesses can identify pain areas, improve processes, and boost customer satisfaction, conversions, and loyalty by evaluating the customer journey.

You may also check out this guide to learn how to build your own  Customer Journey Map .

5 Stages of the E-commerce Customer Journey and Ways to Improve Them

The E-commerce customer journey comprises five key stages that customers go through when interacting with an online store. These stages are essential for organizations to understand and optimize to provide their customers with a seamless, satisfying experience. Businesses can improve customer engagement, conversions, and long-term loyalty by strategically optimizing each stage.

Stage 01: Awareness

Awareness is the first customer journey stage of your e-commerce site. Customers become aware of your brand, products, or services at this point. They may find you through numerous methods, such as social media, search engines, online ads, etc.

During the customer awareness stage of the journey, customers look for answers and come into contact with various brands and products. If you want to make an excellent first impression, now is the moment to shine.

For example, A customer is browsing social media and sees an interesting ad for a new online clothing store. The ad attracts customers with stylish clothes and a limited-time discount code.

• Awareness Stage’s Touchpoints: Social media platforms, search engine results, online ads, influencer marketing, content marketing (blogs, videos, infographics), and word-of-mouth recommendations.
• Key Focus: The goal is to increase customer awareness of your company’s brand, products, or services. The touchpoints are designed to attract their attention, spark their interest, and encourage them to explore more.

How to improve

• Enhance your online presence: Optimize your website, develop compelling content, and use SEO tactics to increase visibility in search engines. Use social media platforms, influencer collaborations, and online advertising to expand your reach and target the correct audience.
• Engaging content: Create compelling and relevant content, such as blog articles, videos, or infographics, to educate and attract your target audience. Focus on resolving their problems and showcasing the value of your products or services.

Stage 02: Consideration

Consideration occurs when an interested customer considers all of the options accessible in your e-commerce store and expresses an actual interest in purchasing from you.

At this stage, customers directly connect with your brand, and your goal should be to keep the customer engaged with your business for the next phase in the customer journey.

For example, after learning about the new online clothing store, the customer checks the store’s website to learn more about their product options. They look through different product categories, read user reviews, and compare prices to determine the quality and value of the items they want to buy.

• Consideration Stage’s Touchpoints: Website, product pages, customer feedback and ratings, comparative websites, social media platforms, online forums, and communities.
• Key Focus: Customers actively research and compare different possibilities. The touchpoints provide specific information, social proo f, and an opportunity for customers to explore, evaluate, and judge the value and acceptability of your offerings.
• Detailed product information: Provide clear and accurate product descriptions, photos, and specifications. Include customer feedback and ratings to increase trust and transparency.
• Comparison tools: Provide tools like comparison charts that allow customers to compare your products to competitors. Highlight unique characteristics, benefits, and value offerings to help customers make informed judgments.
• Customer Testimonials: Display positive customer reviews and testimonials on your e-commerce website to build trust in your business and products. Consider employing case studies or success stories to demonstrate real-world effects.

Stage 03: Conversion

Conversion is one of the most important words in the e-commerce industry. This stage encourages visitors to do a particular action.

The buy or transactional activity stage is frequently related to the conversion stage, where the customer purchases or takes a specific action contributing to the business’s objectives.

At this stage, you have the opportunity to convince the visitor that your product is the best solution to their problem. However, a sale at this stage is not always guaranteed.

For example, The customer adds the clothing items they want to buy to their shopping cart on the online store’s website. Customers move to the checkout page, where customers can review their order, choose a payment option, and enter their shipping information.

• Conversion stage’s Touchpoints: Shopping cart, checkout process, payment options, shipping information, product availability, and customer support.
• Key Focus: Customers are prepared to make purchases. The touchpoints are designed to provide a smooth and secure shopping experience, as well as clear pricing and delivery information and efficient customer service.
• Streamlined Checkout Process: Reducing the number of processes, removing unnecessary fields, and allowing for guest checkouts can reduce cart abandonment and boost conversion rates.
• Clear Pricing and Shipping Information: Providing transparent pricing, shipping fees, and delivery schedules helps develop trust and eliminates any surprises during checkout.
• Multiple Payment Options: Allowing customers to pay using a number of methods, such as credit/debit cards, digital wallets, or other payment options, satisfies their preferences and improves convenience.
• Trust Signals: Displaying trust symbols, security badges, and customer testimonials may improve customer confidence and ease concerns about the security of their personal and financial information.
• Abandoned Cart Recovery: Sending reminder emails or giving incentives to customers who have left items in their shopping carts can help recover lost sales and encourage customers to complete their purchases.

Stage 04: Retention

Congratulations, now you have a new customer! Your customer has completed the conversion stage, but the effort does not end there. The goal now is to keep them coming back.

During this phase, your business works to keep existing customers satisfied through relationship management and customer success efforts. Retention strategies are designed to provide a great customer experience, foster long-term connections, and improve the lifetime value of customers.

For example, the store gives customers customized email newsletters with recommendations based on their previous purchases and browsing history. The emails also feature exclusive discounts or early access to upcoming sales as a thank-you for their gratitude.

• Retention Stage’s Touchpoints: Personalized emails, loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and targeted marketing campaigns.
• Key Focus: The goal is to maintain continuous communication, deliver value-added services, and exceed customer requirements in order to generate loyalty and repeat purchases.
• Enhance Customer Support: Provide excellent customer support by ensuring quick response times, addressing customer inquiries and concerns promptly, and offering multiple channels for communication, such as live chat, email, or phone support. 
• Personalized Communication: Make use of customer data to personalize communication and offerings. Segment the customer base based on demographics, buying history, and preferences, and then personalize marketing communications, promotions, and suggestions to each segment.
• Remarketing and Re-engagement: Use remarketing methods to re-engage with customers who have previously expressed interest in or purchased your products. Display targeted advertising on social media or other relevant channels to remind people about your business and to highlight new products or specials.
• Collect and Act on Customer Feedback: Use surveys, customer reviews, and social media listening to obtain feedback from your customers on a regular basis in order to understand their needs, pain spots, and levels of satisfaction. Respond to feedback by addressing issues, improving your products or services, and showing customers their thoughts are valued.

Stage 05: Advocacy

The ultimate goal of the customer journey is reaching this stage. However, it’s important to keep in mind that not every customer can accomplish it. The advocacy stage of the E-commerce customer journey indicates the point at which customers become brand advocates and actively promote the business to others.

It happens when a customer has had a positive experience with a brand and built a strong attachment to it. Customer advocacy is a key stage since it can improve brand visibility, customer acquisition, and overall business success.

After a customer has made repeated purchases and demonstrated loyalty to the online clothing store, the company focuses on converting them into brand advocates who recommend the brand to others.

For example, the online clothing store rewards customers for referring friends and relatives. Customers obtain a unique referral link to distribute, and when someone makes a purchase using their link, both parties gain a discount or store credit.

• Touchpoints: Customers’ experience in social media platforms, reviews & ratings on review platforms, referral programs, community forums, discussion boards, etc.
• Key Focus: The goal is to motivate satisfied customers to spread the word about their positive experiences and actively advocate the brand to their social circles.
• Encourage and Incentivize Advocacy: Develop strategies to encourage and motivate customers to advocate for your business actively. Provide referral programs, unique bonuses, or early access to new items to highly engaged and loyal customers that demonstrate advocacy.
• Leverage User-Generated Content: Run contests, campaigns, or challenges that encourage customers to share their advocacy via videos, images, or social media posts. Share and highlight the greatest user-generated content to increase its effect and provide social proof to potential customers.
• Engage and Cultivate Brand Ambassadors: Identify and engage with customers who are active advocates for your company on social media. Develop relationships with highly engaged and loyal customers by offering exclusive rewards and offerings.

LEARN ABOUT: Perfect Customer-First Strategy

How Can eCommerce Customer Journey Help Your Business?

The eCommerce customer journey is important for the success and growth of your organization. Here are a few ways how the customer journey might help your business:

Improved Customer Experience

Understanding the customer journey stages allows you to carefully develop and optimize each touchpoint to provide an amazing customer experience. You can boost consumer satisfaction and loyalty by offering seamless navigation, personalized suggestions, user-friendly interfaces, and responsive customer care.

Increased Conversion Rates

Using the eCommerce customer journey, you can discover any challenges or difficulties that may slow conversions. You can remove obstacles, speed up the buying procedure, and provide convincing information and incentives to encourage customers to complete their purchases by optimizing each journey stage. This results in increased conversion rates and revenue creation.

Data-Driven Decision Making

The eCommerce customer journey reveals important customer behavior and preferences information. You can better understand your customer’s needs, preferences, and pain points by analyzing customer data at each stage. With this data-driven approach, you can make informed judgments about product offerings, marketing initiatives, and consumer interaction approaches.

Improved Marketing Strategies

Understanding the customer journey allows you to create targeted and customized marketing campaigns. You can offer relevant material and offers to customers by adjusting your messaging and promotions to each point of the journey. This results in more engagement, higher click-through rates, and higher marketing ROI.

Positive Brand Perception and Advocacy

A well-designed eCommerce customer journey creates pleasant brand experiences at all stages. Customers are more likely to establish a good image of your business if their experience is smooth and entertaining. Satisfied customers are also more likely to become brand ambassadors, generating positive word of mouth and driving new customer acquisition.

Competitive Advantage

Streamlining the eCommerce customer journey can set your company apart from competitors. Giving your customers a great experience throughout their journey differentiates your business and establishes a reputation for quality and dependability. This competitive advantage can help you attract new customers, keep existing ones, and establish your company as an industry leader.

LEARN ABOUT:  Customer Journey Mapping Tools

How Can QuestionPro CX Help You Create and Improve Customer Journey?

QuestionPro CX can help businesses learn more about the customer journey and make data-driven choices to improve the customer experience. QuestionPro CX is software for managing the customer experience. It can help online businesses create an e-commerce customer journey by giving features like:

• Surveys & Questionnaires
• Data Collection
• Visualization
• Analytics and Reporting
• Metrics tracking

QuestionPro CX allows you to collect feedback, evaluate customer sentiment, and make data-driven decisions to improve the customer journey at all stages. You may improve customer satisfaction, generate conversions, increase retention, and create brand advocacy by utilizing the platform’s features.

01. Awareness Stage

QuestionPro CX enables you to conduct surveys to gather insights into customer awareness and perception of your brand.

• Survey Design: QuestionPro CX allows you to design personalized surveys to get valuable insights from potential consumers during the awareness stage. You can leverage brand awareness, perception, and customer needs effectively to create your advertising campaigns.
• Market Research: You can use QuestionPro CX features to conduct competitor analysis, research industry trends, and successfully uncover opportunities to establish your brand in the market.

02. Consideration Stage

QuestionPro CX has several features and functions to improve the consideration phase of the customer journey. It helps:

• Feedback Collection: Gather feedback from customers who are actively considering your products or services. Surveys, internet reviews, and sentiment analysis can be used to learn more about their preferences, pain areas, and expectations.
• Customer Segmentation: You may segment your customers based on their comments and demographic information with QuestionPro CX. You can personalize your messaging and services to certain customer groups, improving their likelihood of conversion.

03. Conversion Stage

Here’s how QuestionPro CX features and capabilities can help you improve the customer journey:

• Customer Satisfaction Surveys: you can use QuestionPro CX to conduct customer satisfaction surveys after purchase to learn more about the factors that influence customer happiness and to find areas for improvement in the conversion process.
• Purchase Experience Analysis: You can use the analytics features of QuestionPro CX to examine the purchase experience and discover any bottlenecks or roadblocks that may be affecting conversions. This analysis helps in the optimization of the checkout process, payment options, and overall purchasing experience.

04. Retention Stage

QuestionPro CX has various retention-stage features and functionalities.  Here’s how QuestionPro CX can help:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys: QuestionPro CX offers NPS surveys to measure customer loyalty and advocacy. These surveys recognize customer emotion, identify boosters and detractors, and take proactive measures to keep loyal customers.
• Customer Journey Mapping: SuiteCX by QuestionPro is the only customizable and secure customer experience, journey mapping, and journey analytics platform. You can utilize this customer journey mapping tool to help view and understand the customer experience at each touchpoint. You can identify areas where customers may experience dissatisfaction and implement changes to promote customer retention.

05. Advocacy Stage

QuestionPro CX has a number of features and capabilities that can assist you in improving the customer journey throughout the advocacy stage, such as:

• Testimonial and Review Management: The platform allows you to collect and manage customer testimonials and reviews. You can create surveys to collect customer testimonies, success stories, and positive evaluations. This helps you acquire original, valuable material for your website, social media, and other marketing channels to promote brand advocacy.
• Advocacy Campaign Tracking: You can build and deploy advocacy campaigns using QuestionPro CX to encourage customers to share their good experiences with your brand. You may use the platform to track the performance of these campaigns, monitor customer responses, and evaluate the reach and impact of your advocacy efforts.

Learn more about why understanding your Customer Journey transforms your CX program. 

The E-commerce customer journey is essential for your online business’s success. Understanding and optimizing the customer journey at each stage becomes vital for acquiring, converting, and retaining customers.

QuestionPro CX delivers essential tools and insights to help you optimize the customer journey and create business success at each stage of the customer journey. It lets you collect customer feedback, analyze data, and make informed decisions at every customer journey touchpoint.

Transform your e-commerce customer journey with QuestionPro CX. Get a free trial and use data-driven insights to optimize the customer journey.

LEARN MORE         FREE TRIAL

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Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

• E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

• E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

• E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

• E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

• Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
• Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
• Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
• Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

• Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
• Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
• Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
• Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

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Shared understanding

Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

Proof of concept

Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

Service teams.

Team members are skilled at  understanding , empathizing and  resolving  requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.

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The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

In business, as in life, it's the customer's journey that makes the company's destination worth all the trouble. No customer wants to jump through several different hoops to get to your product: they want it fast and they want it now.

Following certain customer journey mapping stages helps you improve your user's experience (UX) to create a product they love interacting with, ensures you stay ahead of key workflow tasks, and keeps stakeholders aligned. But a misaligned map can derail your plans—leading to dissatisfied users who don’t stick around long enough to convert or become loyal customers.

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This article walks you through the eight key stages of great customer journey mapping, and shows you how to adapt each to your unique business and product to optimize the customer experience from start to finish. 

Learn how customers interact with your product and website

Hotjar's Observe and Ask tools let you go ‘behind the scenes’ to understand your users’ product experiences and improve their customer journey.

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visualization of every point of interaction a user has with your company and product.

Mapping out the customer journey gives you insights into your buyers’ behavior to help you make changes that improve your website and the user flow between touchpoints. This helps you increase online sales and turn users into loyal customers and brand advocates.

Follow these eight proven steps to understand—and enhance—the customer experience.

Note: every business is distinct, so be sure to adapt these steps to your particular user and business needs. 

1. Define your purpose

The first step to creating a successful customer journey map is to define your product's vision or purpose. Without a clear purpose, your actions will be misguided and you won’t know what you want users to achieve during their journey on your website, product page, or web app. 

To define your purpose, consider your company’s mission statement and incorporate your specific user pain points as much as possible. 

Make your purpose specific to your company’s needs and goals—for example, the purpose of an ecommerce brand looking to help users navigate several different products and make multiple purchases will differ from that of a SaaS company selling subscriptions for one core product.

2. Make sure your team is aligned and roles are clear

Cross-functional collaboration is essential when mapping out your brand's or product’s user journey. Get insights from different teams within your organization to find out exactly how users engage with key touchpoints to derive a holistic sense of the user experience (UX), which will help you improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Lisa Schuck , marketing lead at Airship , emphasizes the importance of keeping “anybody that has a touchpoint with a customer” involved. She advises teams to “figure out how to align your external marketing and sales with your internal operations and service.”

Although sales, product, and marketing departments are often the key players in customer journey mapping, also involve your operations and design teams that are responsible for creating the user flow. 

If you have a SaaS company, for example, marketing creatives, sales teams, product owners and designers, and your customer experience department all need to participate in the process. Clearly define who’s responsible for different aspects of the map, and regularly check in to make sure your final map isn’t missing any important perspectives.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Highlights feature to collect and organize key product experience (PX) insights and data on user behavior from teams across your organization to help you build your customer journey map. Then use Hotjar’s Slack integration to quickly share learnings with your relevant stakeholders to get buy-in and ensure everyone is aligned.

Hotjar’s Slack integration Slack lets teams discuss insights in the moment, so they’re up to date with critical issues 

3. Create user personas

Once you’ve defined your purpose and involved all relevant stakeholders, it’s time to design your user personas . Use resources like UXPressia and HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to help you design various product personas . 

Create a range of user personas to understand what each type of buyer needs to curate a journey that’s easy and enjoyable for every customer. This is an important early step in the customer journey mapping process—because if you don’t understand your users, you won’t be able to fully comprehend how they interact with your brand to better it.

Create user personas for all your product’s possible buyers—for example, to map out a B2B customer journey for a company in the hospitality business means developing personas for a range of different customers, from large chain hotel managers to small vacation rental owners. 

4. Understand your user goals

Once you’ve designed your user personas, it’s time to define their jobs to be done . What do your users hope to accomplish when they search for your product or service? What do they want to do when they click on your website? Address and answer these questions to build a deep understanding of your users’ goals and pain points to inform your customer journey.

In a SaaS customer journey , perhaps users are looking for helpful comparisons of product features on your website, or want to easily sign up for a trial account in the hopes that your product will solve their problems. But you won’t know until you ask . 

Once you have users or test users, get direct insights from them with Hotjar's Feedback tools and Surveys to ask buyers exactly what their goals are as they browse different pages of your website or interact with product features.

Since user goals are at the center of your customer journey map, define them early on—but keep speaking to your users throughout the entire process to make sure you’re up to date with their needs.

5. Identify customer touchpoints

After you understand your users and what their goals are, it’s time to identify the ways they interact with your company and your product. 

"Touchpoints are the moments the customer interacts with your brand, be it through social media channels, your product, or customer support. The quality of these experiences affects the overall customer experience, which is why it’s important to be aware of them. Consider what happens before, during, and after a customer makes a purchase or uses your product."

Key customer journey touchpoints for a website or product include your homepage, landing pages, product pages, CTA buttons, sign-up forms, social media accounts, and paid ads. 

Collaboration is key to identifying touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. Include insights from different teams and stakeholders —your marketing and sales teams will have a strong understanding of the touchpoints involved pre-purchase, while the customer experience department can shed light on post-purchase touchpoints. 

Post-purchase touchpoints can help turn users into loyal customers and even advocates for your brand. 

In the words of Lisa Schuck, "When you create a raving fan, or a brand advocate, who goes out and tells the world how wonderful you are, you get social credibility and validity. It’s becoming more and more important to have advocates."

Pro tip : speak with your users regularly to get direct voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights on what they love and what frustrates them on their journey. Place Hotjar Feedback widgets and Surveys at key website touchpoints like your homepage and landing pages to get valuable user insights on what you can improve. Use Hotjar’s survey templates to get inspiration for your survey questions. 

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

Once your user and product research are complete and all roles are distributed, it’s time to map out the full customer journey.

First, map out an overarching customer journey by putting your key touchpoints in order and identifying how your various user personas interact with them. Then, home in on the details, looking at how customers engage with specific aspects of your website, product, or social media accounts. 

Breaking down the mapping process into smaller phases will ensure you don’t miss any key interactions. 

Here’s how an ecommerce brand could lay out general touchpoints, then narrow each down into more specific actions:

Pro tip : it’s helpful to think of the user journey in terms of different functions when mapping it out, like:

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

Serve: how are you serving customers when they want to purchase?

Retain: how are you promoting brand advocacy and customer retention ?

7. Test the customer journey

Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey, it’s time to take it for a spin. You can’t understand how your users move through customer touchpoints unless you test out the user flow yourself. 

Start with an informational Google search, then visit your website, check out your social media pages, and simulate the purchase process. This will help you get a better sense of how users interact with each touchpoint and how easy it is to move between them. 

Be sure to try out the journey from the standpoint of every relevant user persona. For an enterprise software company, this could mean looking at how decision-makers move through the user flow vs. the employees who’ll use your software day to day. 

By walking through the customer journey yourself, you can identify issues and difficulties that users may have to address them proactively. 

Try out the user flow with test users to get a realistic perspective of the user experience. Be sure to use focus groups that represent every one of your user personas. 

8. Use continuous research to refine your map 

Continuously map out, analyze, and evaluate the customer journey by observing users and getting their feedback. Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings help you understand how your users are experiencing the customer journey on your website: create heatmaps to see whether users are clicking on CTAs or key buttons, and watch recordings to find out how they navigate once they reach your homepage.

Then, use Google Analytics to get an overview of your website traffic and understand how customers from different channels move through the user journey. 

Finally, once you have these combined user insights, use them to make changes on your website and create a user journey that is more intuitive and enjoyable.

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , says companies should avoid these three common mistakes when mapping out the customer journey:

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

Start by mapping out the overall journey, and only drill down into more detail once you have a broader, higher-level overview of the customer journey

Factor in every way that customers interact with your brand, even the ones you don’t have as much visibility on, like ‘dark social’ communications about your brand shared in private channels. Talk to your users to find out what they’ve heard about your brand outside of public channels , and use sticky share buttons to keep track of when your content’s shared through email or social media messengers.

Take a data-informed approach: don’t assume you already know your users —test out your hypotheses with real users and qualitative and quantitative data. 

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey 

Take the time to understand your business goals and users, involve the right teams, and test frequently to consistently improve your customer journey and make the decisions that will help you map out an experience that will get you happy and loyal customers.

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping helps you visualize how users interact with your business and product, from the moment they find it until long after they make their first purchase. 

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into the buyer's journey to create a more enjoyable, streamlined, and intuitive experience for your customers.

What are the benefits of following a customer journey mapping process?

The main benefits of a customer journey mapping process are: : 

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map 

Improving user experience

What happens if you don’t follow key steps in customer journey mapping?

If you don’t follow key steps when mapping out the customer journey, your map likely won’t give you the insights you need to enhance the experience users have with your most important touchpoints —like your homepage, landing pages, CTAs, and product pages. 

This can result in high bounce rates, low conversion, and unsatisfied users who fail to become loyal customers.

CJM benefits

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Conversion Optimization | 16 min read

Understanding the eCommerce Customer Journey

Of all the things that people do online, online shopping is one of the most popular. Sales through eCommerce have continued to rise with no sign of slowing down. Since the industry is only projected to increase in the coming years, it's clear that those who invest in creating online shops are making the right choice.

As an eCommerce store owner, it's important that you appeal to your target audience to rise above the vast amount of competition that you have. Understanding the eCommerce customer journey is a huge part of making sure this happens.

Read on to learn what this means, the stages of this journey, and how you can track and increase your shop's success!

What Is the eCommerce Customer Journey?

The "eCommerce customer journey" is a term used to refer to the stages of your customer's experience with your online business. The journey begins the moment that the customer learns about the product's existence and continues beyond the first time they make a purchase. The journey then continues assuming that you establish a relationship with the client and inspire brand loyalty.

This journey is important because it causes your customers to form opinions of your business. These opinions can be positive or negative and are based on their interactions with your eCommerce shop. If you view these interactions as a "journey" made of several stages, you can spend more time and effort perfecting each step. This will help you make the final entire journey better.

There are four main steps to the eCommerce customer journey . Each of these steps can be imagined as a gear in the larger machine. Each step should be considered the outcome of you solving a specific business challenge that eCommerce shops face. Mapping it out can help you build an effective strategy that will help your customers progress towards each succeeding stage with relative ease.

The "reach" stage involves attracting customers to your website. This can be organic or paid web traffic. Organic traffic consists of visitors who found your site on a search engine or linked on another site. Paid traffic refers to advertising.

There are several challenges involved in the reach stage of the journey. You might find that you're not getting enough web traffic. You can't bring people through the rest of the customer journey if you don't reach them in the first place.

To improve traffic (and therefore, reach), you should:

• Make sure your SEO is up to date. SEO (search engine optimization) is crucial. Most online shopping today begins with a Google search. A well-optimized website is more likely to appear higher in search results, leading to more traffic.
• Promote your business on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms are packed with users who might be looking for products just like yours. Create a profile for your business and publish news and other content regularly. Interact with customers who contact you through your profiles. Promotion on social media doesn't need to include advertising, as your presence alone will help. But later, you can look into paid ads as well.
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Most customers today shop on their smartphones or tablets. Any website that isn't compatible with these devices is going to miss out. Unfortunately, sites that look fantastic on desktop computers can be painful to navigate on a mobile device. The preferred method to make your site mobile-friendly is responsive design. Responsive websites alter their layout automatically depending on the visitor's device. Shift4Shop's eCommerce website templates are great examples of responsive design. Google also favors responsive sites, so you'll get a boost to your SEO.
• Publish content that will attract visitors. Most eCommerce shoppers are looking for a product that will help them solve a problem. Many are only doing research as they plan to shop at a later time. If you publish informative, valuable content on your website, visitors will take notice. This content can be detailed product pages and other information on your site. But most importantly, your site should have a blog. Post unique, useful articles that help customers solve their problems and learn more about your products. This will help with engagement as well (the next step in the customer journey).

Once visitors make it to your website, you need to engage them. This is the second stage of the eCommerce customer journey. Engagement involves the actions customers take on your website, and how they interact with it.

Just like reach, engagement has its challenges as well. Visitors might leave your site quickly ("bounce") or they might only look at a couple of pages. They may not add anything to their carts, or even make it to your products at all. They may find that, once they get to your website, they don't like it as much as they thought they would.

To engage your customers, you should:

• Improve the loading speed of your website. Internet users are notoriously impatient, especially online shoppers. Website visitors on mobile are an even tougher audience. If your site doesn't load within a few seconds, visitors are likely to bounce. Aim for as fast a load speed as possible so they'll give your site a chance. Unfortunately, your ability to improve load speeds can be limited by your technical knowledge. The eCommerce software you use can also either help or hinder your load speed. We'll discuss this a bit more in depth later.
• Encourage visitors to explore. How easily can customers browse your categories? Can they find the products they're looking for within a few clicks? Build a navigation structure that lets them view by category, manufacturer, new arrivals, or other filters. Make it easy and interesting for them to browse your site. If they arrive at your front page and don't know what to do next, you have a serious problem.
• Catch the customer's eye. Get visitor attention immediately with a rotating carousel banner on your site's front page. Make sure your other links are easy to spot — and ensure nothing looks like a link unless it is one. The last thing you want is for a visitor to be confused.
• Encourage customers to make a purchase. You want the shopping experience to be as easy as possible. Give customers information that will help them decide to buy. Showcase product reviews and Q&A sections on your product pages. List related products like accessories that a customer might want to add to their purchase. You can also provide a wish list feature for customers who aren't ready to buy just yet. Allow customers to save their cart for later if they so desire.

So you've engaged your customers — great! It's time to convert that engagement into doing actionable things that benefit your business. Usually this means making a purchase, but we'll cover more later.

Many businesses struggle with their conversion rates. Some shoppers might spend time on your site, but never buy anything. Other customers might place low-value orders, or abandon their cart altogether. Cart abandonment is a huge problem in eCommerce, with over 75% of carts never completing checkout. To improve conversions, you need to target all three of these issues. Visitors who never buy, customers with low order amounts, and abandoned carts.

To increase conversions, you should:

• Offer better prices. This isn't to say you should simply lower every price across the board. However, market research can tell you if you might be charging too much for some of your products. A permanent decrease in price might be warranted in this case. Otherwise, you can hold special promotions like limited-time sales, BOGO (buy one, get one free) deals, and more. Customers often get excited about big sales, and you can see a substantial increase in conversions during these events.
• Encourage larger orders. It can be hard to convince customers to add more to an order, especially if they're budget-conscious. But sometimes a customer just needs to be informed that they have more options. Related products come in handy again here, as do extras you can offer at checkout. A customer might be happy to add an accessory or product bundle to their order, as long as you make sure they see that it's available.
• Simplify the checkout process. Some customers abandon their cart if they find checkout to be too unwieldy. This is especially problematic on mobile devices, where the customer is trying to go through the process on a smaller screen. There are several ways to make checkout more convenient. You could offer a one-touch payment method like Apple Pay or other digital wallets. Another way to streamline checkout is to reduce the information the customer needs to enter, such as allowing them to check a box stating that their shipping and billing information are the same. You can also consider changing to a single-page checkout .
• Give the customer real-time shipping costs. "Shipping shock" refers to situations where a customer is about to place an order, but gets an unpleasant surprise in the form of unexpectedly high shipping costs. This is one of the leading causes of cart abandonment. Displaying accurate, real-time shipping rates will help avoid this. If your eCommerce platform supports it, you can even show the shipping cost in the customer's View Cart page. The point is to make it available to them before checkout, so it doesn't surprise them.

You've reached out to customers, engaged them, and converted them. But the customer journey still isn't over. Now you need to nurture your relationship.

Many businesses have a problem with customers never returning. Others see too many guest checkouts (people who don't make accounts with you). Some struggle with a lack of reviews being posted online. These are all issues because they harm your ability to earn long-term customer loyalty. While new customers are always great, it's the existing customer base that will truly help you flourish.

The nurturing stage involves communicating with customers after their purchase. Your goal is to encourage them to remember your business. You want them to love your brand, and even become your advocate by recommending you to family and friends.

To nurture customer relationships, you should:

• Communicate with customers. Don't let the interaction end after thanking them for their order. Send a follow-up email later to request a product review (just make sure enough time has passed for them to use the product). Send another email later, with a coupon code, to encourage them to come back to your website. Create an email newsletter and allow customers to opt in to receive news about new products and upcoming promotions.
• Encourage customers to register on your website. While offering guest checkout can increase conversions, you still want customers to sign up. It's much easier to nurture relationships with registered users. You can offer incentives like a reward points-based loyalty program to make signing up more appealing. It also helps to let customers create an account at the end of the checkout process. Since they've already decided to buy from you at that point, they're more likely to decide to make an account to save the information they've already entered.
• Improve customer satisfaction. This is a big one, and takes a lot of attention. But if you put enough effort into satisfying your customers, it's the most effective way to gain loyalty, period. Your goal is to show your customers you care about them as individuals, rather than numbers. Keep communication open and provide customer service promptly. If you already have existing complaints from customers, you'll have a great starting point as to what you can improve. For example, you may need to review your return policy to ensure it's fair.
• Increase referrals to your business. Word-of-mouth advertising is extremely valuable, as people are more likely to trust recommendations from family and friends. It's also cost-effective, since customers are doing the work for you. Wish lists and gift certificates are great for helping spread the word, or you could take it further and create an affiliate program .

Now that we've covered the steps of the customer journey, let's take a closer look at some of the tools and techniques you can use to keep improving.

Metrics for Tracking Progress

In order to improve the customer journey for your clients, you will need to know what you're doing right vs what you should improve on. This will let you see what areas of your webpage need to be updated and changed. Your goal would be to make them more like the pages that get more clicks. To figure this out in a methodical way, you will need to track metrics on your website.

To track metrics, you will need a service like Google Analytics. This versatile software allows you to see complete information on your website and helps you connect this information with strategies to boost your ROI. You can see almost every part of the eCommerce customer journey on this platform.

Track Your Visitors

The first thing that you should look at is how many overall visitors your web page gets. You should look at the number of visitors, but also the ways that they found your site.

Did they find it on social media or from an inbound link that another website posted on their page? Did they find it via a Google search? What keywords did they enter into the search engine? This will help you understand your traffic and show you whether or not you need to invest in more social media services. It will also show you whether you should use different keywords on your page.

Recognize Your Bounce Rate

When you see the overall number of people visiting your site, you will want to assess how many of them are actually sticking around to look at your products. Load speed isn't everything: you still have a time limit for catching a visitor's attention. Since you only have about 15 seconds to engage your audience, a high bounce rate may indicate that you need to update your homepage or optimize your navigation system.

You also should look into what pages people usually look at before they choose to bounce. This will help you discover which of your products or other pages are less interesting to customers. You can make these a lower priority.

Look Into Conversions

Conversion rate is a metric that tracks the amount of time that someone does something productive after interacting with your off-page content. Basically, when someone interacts with an ad or free product listing that you have posted, it can be said to have "converted" if they take an action that you have previously defined as valuable to your business.

For eCommerce shops, this usually means making an online purchase. However, valuable action can also include following you on social media, contacting you via your landing page, or signing up for your shop's newsletter.

Discover Average Orders Per Customer

Because nurturing loyalty and drawing in repeat customers is an essential part of the eCommerce customer journey, it's important that you track the average amount of purchases that each person makes. You can do this without any external analytics software — simply check how many purchases were made by one customer account.

This will let you find out how good you are at customer retention. Because you can also track where the customers that make purchases found your page from (ads, social media, search engines, etc), you can figure out what marketing efforts have the greatest ROI.

How Can You Improve Your Customer's Experience?

Perform Social Media Outreach (Reach)

One thing you can do to reach out to customers is to use social media appropriately. Since 3.8 billion people worldwide use social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you will be more successful at engaging users here than anywhere else. Create a page on each of these platforms and upload information about your business to them. Make sure that you keep your DMs open so that customers can reach out and ask questions.

Use services like Facebook Ads to find the right audience. You will enter a budget and the demographics (age, gender, occupation) of your eCommerce shop's target audience. The PPC ad that you want to show off will be displayed to the most relevant users who will click it and be redirected to your website. On Twitter, you can pin properly tagged posts to get the word of your shop out there.

As for your page, keep it up-to-date. Like pages similar to yours without being your direct competitors to foster relationships with shops that might help promote your business. Post frequent images, videos, promotions, and links to your official website to remind your followers about your business frequently.

Create High-Quality, SEO-Optimized Content (Reach & Engage)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of creating content to your page that's rich in high-traffic keywords and links to relevant websites. At the same time, populate your pages with relevant information. Initiate focused and insightful meetings with your customer-facing colleagues to know what your customers’ pain points are.

The goal of SEO is to make your page more appealing for search engine crawlers.

These crawlers will see keywords and associate you with relevant searches. They also will see the links to reputable sources that are incorporated in your post and believe you to be reputable as well. This leads to them boosting you to the top of Google.

Since 92% of people don't go past the first page in Google, this is a surefire way to reach your audience. It also segues them into the "engage" stage of the eCommerce customer journey because they can see engaging content the moment that they click on your site.

Enhance Your Website's Navigation (Engage)

We brushed on the idea of encouraging site exploration, but only as a vague concept. It can be achieved specifically by making sure that the page has a good navigation system. This means including sections for different types of products and tabs under each section so that each buyer can find exactly what they're looking for. It also means including a search bar for those who know exactly what they want (because they saw it on your site earlier.)

A good navigation page saves customers time and makes them less likely to get frustrated. This lowers your bounce rate substantially.

Ensure Fast Load Speeds (Engage)

Like poor navigation pages, slow-to-load sites are incredibly frustrating for consumers. Luckily, this can be easily fixed so that customers have the opportunity to further engage with your website. Combining files and minimizing HTTP requirements are two simple and highly effective ways to make your site load faster.

Don't Overlook Video Content (Engage & Convert)

Did you know that 73% of consumers are more likely to invest in a service after viewing a video about it?

Well, it's true. This means that video content isn't only essential to engagement- it's necessary for conversion. Embed videos showcasing new or popular products on the home page of your eCommerce shop. Make sure that you show these products from multiple angles and provide some facts and figures on how they're the best on the market.

You may also want to use animated infographics if you have numeric or textual data to showcase. This will be much more memorable to customers than simply reading a paragraph about your store.

Nurture Customer Relations Post-Purchasing (Nurture)

There are a variety of ways to ensure that customers get the most out of the 'nurture' stage of their journey. These strategies include:

• Encouraging customers to leave reviews
• Making those reviews visible on your website's home page
• Sending direct emails to your previous customers asking for feedback
• Sending those same customers coupon codes and exclusive promotions for future services
• Continuing to engage with old and new clients alike on social media
• Displaying PPC ads to those who have already shopped with you

This will help you nurture client relationships well into the future and inspire brand loyalty.

Start Engaging Consumers Today

Learning about the eCommerce customer journey is a crucial step in your growth as an online business owner. Let's recap:

• The eCommerce customer journey consists of 4 steps: Reach, Engage, Convert, and Nurture.
• Each of these steps describes a different set of goals.
• Reach is about growing traffic.
• Engage is about getting customers interested.
• Convert is about convincing them to buy.
• Nurture is about building loyalty.
• Each step in the customer journey also presents its own set of challenges.
• You can apply the guidance in this article to help meet these challenges.
• You can also use Google Analytics and other tools to give you the information you need.
• Always look for more creative and effective ways to improve the customer journey.

Shift4Shop includes a wide variety of tools to help you every step of the way, and you can get them all in our unlimited free eCommerce plan . However, keep in mind that the information in this article holds true no matter what software you use. The customer journey is a well-established aspect of eCommerce, and the better you understand it, the more successful your business can be.

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How to Create Effective Journey Maps: Learnings from the IxDF Course

A low conversion rate (below 2%) usually means a website struggles to keep visitors interested. Journey mapping helps identify why visitors leave quickly and tracks every step of a user's interaction with a website. The goal is simple: to create a smooth, enjoyable journey to make users return. Learn the secrets of journey maps with the IxDF course, Journey mapping . This course shows you how to pinpoint improvement areas effectively and how to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

Have you ever found yourself lost on a website, unsure where to click next? Frustrating digital experiences make us want to give up and leave. This is why journey mapping is so important. It's a strategic approach in UX design that lays out a user's path through a product or service. When you understand each step a user takes, you can create more intuitive and enjoyable experiences. 

In journey mapping, you plot a course to guide users from one point to another. This method reveals the pain points and moments of delight in a user's product interaction. When you smooth out these critical junctures, you can craft solutions that meet and exceed user expectations. 

“ Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.”    - Joe Sparano 

Journey mapping equips us with the insights needed to refine the user experience and create first encounters with your product, both positive and memorable. Since 94% of first impressions relate to a website's design, it’s critical to make an excellent first impression through a well-mapped user journey. A solid understanding of journey mapping principles can transform a confusing or mediocre user experience into one that’s engaging and seamless.  

To create seamless user journeys, you must understand the journey mapping process in detail. Look at the fundamental aspects you should explore to craft better digital experiences. 

Journey Mapping: The Essentials

Journey mapping enables teams to visualize the user's experience from initial contact through various interactions to the final goal. Let’s run through the basics.  

What is Journey Mapping?

Journey mapping creates a detailed visualization of a user's experience with a product or service. It maps out each step a user takes. It highlights their feelings, motivations and challenges. This process helps you identify pain points and opportunities to enhance the user experience. 

Watch Matt Snyder, Head of Product & Design at Hivewire, discuss journey mapping in UX. 

• Transcript loading…

Why Journey Mapping Matters

Journey mapping matters because it shows where users face struggles and frustrations. If you understand these issues, you can make your websites or services better. This means happier customers who are more likely to return and recommend the product/service to others. 

Consider the process users follow to book a flight online. The user's journey begins with the search for flights. Here, they might encounter their first obstacle: a confusing interface. This moment could lead to frustration. It may push them towards a competitor's website. Journey mapping would reveal this pain point and allow you to simplify the search process. 

Next, the user selects a flight. If the site bombards them with too many upsell options, like seat upgrades or extra baggage, it might overwhelm them. A well-designed journey map would highlight this issue. It may suggest a more streamlined and helpful upsell process, not pushy. 

Finally, the user reaches the payment section. A complex checkout process with unclear pricing and surprise charges can deter them from completing the purchase. Journey mapping pinpoints this critical moment. You may have to recommend a clearer, more concise checkout flow. 

If you map out this journey, your design team can: 

Simplify the flight search interface to reduce initial frustration. 

Streamline the upsell process to enhance the user experience without overwhelming them. 

Revise the checkout process for clarity and ease. You must encourage the completion of the purchase. 

Watch this quick video that explains the power of mapping. 

How Journey Mapping Improves UX

Journey mapping provides a clear framework to analyze and optimize each touchpoint in the user's journey. It allows you to: 

Identify and eliminate barriers that cause frustration or abandonment. 

Enhance features that users find valuable. 

Design with a holistic understanding of the user's experience. 

Journey Mapping Variations

Journey mapping comes in different forms. Each one offers unique insights into the user experience. These variations can help you apply the right approach to your UX challenges. You’ll learn about these variations in detail in our journey mapping course.  

Experience Maps

Experience maps are the broadest form of journey maps. They map out the overall human experience in different situations. You can use these maps for more than product or service interactions. Their goal is to get a broad understanding of human behaviors and feelings.  

For example, consider mapping the common experience of commuting. This could include various methods like walking or biking to public transport. Experience maps can help you spot common issues and chances for improvement. They prepare you for more detailed studies. 

Example of an Experience map for ordering a car through an app. It shows the actions, problems, emotions, quotes and opportunities that relate to the user.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps narrow the focus. They focus on how a person interacts with a specific product or service. These maps help us understand a customer's experience with a business. 

A customer journey map includes the following elements.  

Customer persona : This defines a typical customer. You create a character that represents a part of your customer base. 

Phases : Stages of the customer journey. It typically includes Awareness, Research, Consideration, Purchase and Support. 

Touchpoints : These are all interaction points between the customer and your brand across different phases. This interaction may happen through marketing materials, digital presence, staff interactions, purchase process and post-purchase follow-up. 

Customer thoughts, actions and emotions : Detail what customers think, do and feel at each touchpoint. Use surveys and direct feedback for accuracy. 

Opportunities : You list the chances to improve the customer's experience, solve any issues they face and make their journey smoother. 

For instance, with a music streaming app like Spotify, a customer journey map would show how a user finds, chooses and uses the app. It would point out their main steps and where they might have problems. 

An example of a customer journey map for a music streaming app. It tracks interactions from the initial visit to the response. It also highlights emotions and thoughts at each stage.

© Draft.io, Fair Use

Service Blueprints

Service blueprints build on what we learn from customer journey maps . Unlike journey maps, which focus on the customer's experience, service blueprints give us a peek into how the service works behind the scenes. They show how different parts of the service work together to support the customer's journey. 

The anatomy of a service blueprint showing all the key processes in different phases. (described below)

A service blueprint maps out five key areas: 

Physical evidence: This is anything the customer can see, touch or interact with, like a website or a product. It includes all the physical parts of the service. 

Customer's actions: These are the steps customers take when they use the service. The service needs these actions to meet the customer's needs. 

Frontstage: This area is all about what the customer interacts with directly. It's the part of the service the customer sees and uses. 

Backstage: These are the parts of the service that happen out of the customer's view. They support the frontstage but remain hidden to the customer. 

Supporting actions: These are the behind-the-scenes processes that make sure the service operates smoothly.    

The Role of Research in Effective Journey Mapping

You need comprehensive data—both qualitative and quantitative—to create an accurate and useful journey map. This process involves understanding the problems your users face and the potential solutions. Here’s an overview of key steps to collect the necessary information. 

Research Problems and Solutions

Identify the problems and opportunities within the user experience. You must look at the issue from two angles: the problem space and the solution space.  

In the problem space, you aim to understand the user's challenges, needs and pain points. You typically do this through qualitative user research , such as user observation and interviews. Quantitative methods like surveys can also contribute. You don’t need to consider the existing solutions.  

A straightforward perspective grid for a person aiming to become an expert drummer. This individual needs a clear path, access to drums and some instruction. 

In the solution space, you ideate potential solutions to problems you identified. This shift requires a creative approach. You aim to explore various ideas that effectively address users’ needs and evaluate those in usability sessions or A/B testing. 

A simple perspective grid for a Rhythm Road customer. This customer is between coaching sessions. They need help from Rhythm Road to remember to practice. 

Organize Your Research

A perspective grid helps you organize and synthesize the data collected from your research. You can use it to ensure the remainder of the journey mapping process proceeds smoothly. It allows you to categorize insights based on different user perspectives or personas . This step helps you understand the experiences and expectations of your user base. 

To create a perspective grid, list your user personas along one axis and the stages of their journey along the other. Fill in each cell with the Gaps/Barriers/Pain/Risks relevant to that persona at each stage. This visualization helps you identify commonalities and differences across the journey.  

How to Create Journey Map Variations

Each journey map variation helps you achieve specific goals. Let's explore how to create experience maps, customer journey maps and service design blueprints. 

How to Create an Experience Map

An Experience Map involves a five-step approach.  

Plan your experience map : Determine the scope. Decide who needs to participate in the workshop. Consider a cross-disciplinary team for better insights. 

Customer research : Gather factual data along with user stories and analytics. This step helps you fill knowledge gaps. 

Run the workshop : An all-day event where diverse voices collaborate. You must plan the event for productive outcomes. 

Create your experience map : Turn the workshop findings into a visual map. This map should outline general common experiences related to your field. 

Use your experience map : Apply what you learned to make decisions and improvements in your organization. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Follow these seven steps to map out the detailed interactions users have with your organization: 

Define your objectives : Determine what you aim to achieve with the map. 

Gather Information : Understand your customers’ behaviors, needs and how they interact with your product. 

Identify customer touchpoints : Note how customers interact with your product. Then, understand how these touchpoints affect their experience. 

Outline key stages of customer experience : From the customer's perspective, map the sequence of events. Document all events from initial contact to post-purchase support. 

Start mapping : Use diagrams or digital tools to visualize the journey. Include touchpoints, emotional responses and any other relevant factors. 

Validate your results : Get feedback from customers and internal teams to ensure accuracy. 

Analyze your map : Compare it against your goals to see if it meets customer expectations. 

How to Create a Service Design Blueprint

Service design focuses on the internal workings of a service. It outlines frontstage and backstage actions. Here’s how to develop a Service Design Blueprint:

Find support : Assemble a cross-disciplinary team and secure stakeholder buy-in. 

Define the goal : Set a clear scope and business objective for the blueprint. 

Gather research : Unlike customer journey mapping, a blueprint requires more internal research. It includes direct observations and employee interviews. 

Map the blueprint : Organize a workshop to determine the five elements encountered throughout the service delivery. 

Refine and distribute : Enhance the blueprint with contextual details. Then, distribute it to stakeholders to communicate the internal processes.  

The Role of a Journey Mapping Workshop (and How to Do It Right)

The effectiveness of journey mapping hinges on a detailed and well-organized journey mapping workshop. This is when teams work together to understand and improve customer experiences.

Here’s how to navigate the pre-workshop preparation and conduct the workshop. 

Before the Journey -Mapping Workshop

Preparation is key. Assemble a diverse team to bring a wide range of views. Prioritize the customer personas and scenarios you'll focus on to maintain a clear focus. Share existing research with all participants to get everyone on the same page. They should understand the journey's context. 

Build a Collaborative Team

Journey mapping thrives on collaboration. Include people from various departments to ensure a holistic view of the customer journey. Don’t forget to invite stakeholders who will decide on the final approach. This team will help you create the map and implement its findings. 

Prioritize Actors and Scenarios

Focus on specific customer personas and how they interact with your service. It helps you create a more targeted and actionable journey map. If you cover multiple personas or scenarios, plan how to manage this complexity. 

Share and Analyze Existing Research

Compile and review all data related to the journey. This may include user experience studies, marketing analysis and customer feedback. Share information before the workshop to help everyone understand the starting point. 

Assign Pre-Workshop Tasks

Assign homework to make the participants well-prepared. It includes background reading and key questions related to the journey. This pre-engagement makes the workshop more effective.  

During the Journey-Mapping Workshop

The workshop should be an active and engaging process. It starts with building a basic understanding. Then, you map the customer's experience and brainstorm ways to improve it. 

Establish the Foundation

You bring everyone on the same page to begin. Everyone should understand journey mapping principles, existing research and input methods. Use engaging activities like trivia to refresh key concepts and energize the group. 

Map the Current State

The team would create an assumption-based map of the current journey. This should reflect the team’s collective understanding. Offer attendees a template to identify pain points with ease: 

"   requires ______ to achieve ______." 

"   requires ______, allowing them to ______." 

For instance: "Bob requires an easier method to compare choices, allowing him to avoid feeling swamped."  

Note : It’s important to avoid using the first person , like "As a I want...". This format can be repetitive and time-consuming in documents full of user stories. It also shifts important information into sentences that make them harder to scan and understand. More importantly, you must not assume the user's perspective as that can lead developers to project their own experiences and biases onto users. 

Make the map open to revisions. Use customer interviews for this phase to validate assumptions and gain fresh insights. 

Vision the Future State

Use the identified pain points to brainstorm ideas to improve the customer journey. Encourage teams to think big and use metaphors in their ideas. This prevents them from focusing too early on specific solutions, like features. Sketch and critique potential future interactions to translate these ideas into tangible designs. 

You need the positive aspects on green sticky notes. You can mark areas for improvement on yellow ones. The critiques help refine the ideas.  

Now, merge the best elements from these individual sketches into a unified future-state flow. You can then share this consolidated journey with the whole workshop team. It will help you paint a picture of what the improved customer experience could look like. 

After the Journey -Mapping Workshop

The work doesn’t end when the workshop does. Quickly share the outcomes and next steps to maintain momentum. Further test and refine the ideas generated during the workshop. It’ll bring meaningful changes to the customer journey. 

Share Workshop Insights

Document and distribute the workshop's findings to all participants and stakeholders. This includes:  

The journey maps created 

Identified pain points 

Future state designs 

Keep everyone informed for continued engagement and support in implementing changes. 

Bring Ideas to Life

Translate the workshop's conceptual ideas into prototypes for user testing . This iterative design and feedback process helps refine the solutions into actionable improvements to the customer journey. 

Continuously Refine the Process

With each workshop, gather feedback on what worked and what didn’t to improve future sessions. This continuous improvement ensures that journey mapping remains a productive and insightful tool for your organization. 

This might seem like a lot, but if you want to learn about how to set up workshops, the journey mapping course can help you. You’ll learn how to:  

Increase understanding 

Create visions 

Guide evaluations 

Plan experiments 

Build a workshop plan 

About the Journey Mapping Course

Journey mapping is a 7-week course that will help you solve complex design problems with simple, user-friendly solutions. You’ll learn the right journey-mapping process for your goals and master data collection and analysis with a perspective grid. Create key journey maps: experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints. Gain skills to run a journey mapping workshop and turn insights into real solutions. 

This course will help you if you want to design smooth shopping experiences, easy signup flows or engaging apps. Start with journey mapping basics. Understand its power and role in UX design. Learn to identify, read and use various journey maps. Gain data gathering and analysis skills. Then, finish with the ability to create journey maps and lead workshops. 

Make sure to benefit from practical techniques and downloadable templates. Participate in three hands-on exercises in the " Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project. " These activities solidify your learning. They also offer an option to create a case study for your portfolio. 

Learn from four industry experts: 

Indi Young , founder of Adaptive Path, brings her deep understanding of data gathering in journey mapping. She wrote two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models . 

Kai Wang shares insights from his experiences at CarMax and CapitalOne. She emphasizes journey mapping's organizational impact. 

Head of Product & Design at Hivewire , Matt Snyder, presents journey mapping as an effective product development tool. He teaches the application of a perspective grid for smoother data-rich processes. 

Christian Briggs , Senior Product Designer and Design Educator, guides you through this course with his extensive experience in digital product design and journey mapping.  

This course caters to budding and intermediate designers eager to refine complex user experiences. It's ideal for:  

Aspiring UX/ UI designers seeking foundational design skills. 

Junior to mid-level designers aiming for advanced challenges and strategic team roles. 

Product managers focused on crafting intricate experiences. 

Join a global design community that shares knowledge. Collaborate, learn and grow with peers to enhance your design skills and career prospects. 

Course Overview 

Weekly lessons : We release each week with no deadlines. 

Learning time : Approximately 9 hours and 54 minutes over the span of 7 weeks. 

Where to Learn More

Enrollment for the Journey Mapping course is now open. It’s included in an  IxDF membership. 

To become a member, sign up here . 

Read our article Customer Journey Maps — Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes . 

Learn more about website conversion rates .  

Read web design statistics from WebFX . 

Journey Mapping

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How the Right Mobile App Enhances the Customer Journey

David J. Brin - Guest Contributor

What are the types of mobile application technologies?

Types of mobile apps for different industries, how to choose the right app type for your business, land on a mobile app format that will support your goals.

Deciding whether to support your business’s digital real estate by investing in the development and launch of a digital application takes extensive market research to determine which type of mobile app best suits your customers—and your company.

While a mobile app is generally designed to run primarily on laptops, smartphones, tablets, or any other mobile electronic device, they can be built very differently depending upon the goals of your company.

Whether you build your mobile app as a web app, a native app, or a hybrid mobile app depends on what goals you’re trying to achieve and how much of a balance you are looking to strike between accessibility and functionality. Follow along as we break down the advantages and disadvantages of each framework, and show how each is best leveraged in industries where mobile applications are frequently used to support customers’ digital journeys.

Customer-facing mobile applications are purpose-built tools focused around supporting a limited scope of activities. Depending on how accessible you want your application to be, you’ll have a choice of several different frameworks to pick from.

Web-based apps

Cross-platform mobile web applications are built using HTML, CSS, and some form of a framework based on JavaScript. They are different from apps using other frameworks in that web-based apps are websites designed to be accessed and used through a web browser on mobile devices. While the app might be accessed through an icon on the device home screen, that icon is actually directing the user to the experience through a URL like a website. The app is not downloaded to the device.

Examples of popular web-based applications include:

Microsoft Office Suite

Web-based apps provide some unique advantages over traditional mobile applications.

Lower development time and costs: Because they aren’t tied to a specific codebase and don’t require customized builds to work on different devices, web-based applications keep development times and costs low.

Highly adaptive : They are designed to naturally work within the user interface (UI) of the devices through which they are being accessed because they are web-based and benefit from being accessed through a web browser that has already been optimized to adapt to the device and operating system they are being used upon.

No downloads needed: Users aren’t required to download a resource-heavy mobile application in order to access the experience. As such, they also don’t need to constantly update the app, as web-based applications are updated and maintained outside of the user experience.

Disadvantages

As with any development process, there are disadvantages that must be considered when using this approach.

Internet access required: As a web-based experience, access to the internet is required for web-based mobile applications to properly function.

Quality could vary: User experience (UX) and UI could vary greatly depending on the browser being used. Indirectly, this also makes the experience tied to the device and operating system upon which it’s being used.

Native apps

Native mobile apps are usually what we think about when we think about mobile apps. They are developed to run on certain devices with a specific operating system in mind. In order to customize the mobile app to work within operating system (OS) environments, developers use platform-specific software development kits (SDKs) and programming languages.

While this gives them access to the full scope of features and functionality each operating system allows, it does limit each build of the app to that specific platform. Keeping in mind that large IPs will have invested in developing apps across multiple platforms, popular examples of native applications include:

The customization and benefits to the user experience made possible by native apps makes this framework easy for developers to embrace.

Device-specific features that enhance functionality : Optimized for the platforms they are built for, native apps can take advantage of their hardware to improve functionality.

Faster load time: Native apps operate faster and more consistently than apps built with other frameworks.

Superior, seamless UX/UI: Operating systems dictate how users navigate applications, so building an application natively allows your app to mimic the UX/UI for all of the other apps being used on the device, providing a seamless experience for the user.

The primary disadvantage of building native mobile apps is that in order to reach a wider audience, the development team will have to design, develop, and launch the app multiple times. They will need a version that works on iOS, Android, and any other platform their audience uses. This can drastically increase the cost of the app and impact future costs of maintenance and updates.

Hybrid apps

Hybrid mobile applications bridge the gap between web-based and native apps, often by taking advantage of app-embedded web browsers or other methods for gaining access to the web. Hybrid apps are built with web technologies, and then encapsulated in a framework that is OS specific.

The web technologies allow for cross-platform compatibility, while the surrounding framework ensures the app can be installed and run on a device like a native application. Popular examples of a hybrid development approach include:

The Amazon app store

X (formerly Twitter)

Google Gmail

Hybrid mobile apps bring in the best elements of web-based apps and native apps, allowing them a degree of flexibility in design and deployment.

Compatible with several types of devices : Encapsulating the web-based functionality within the native-compatible allows cross-device compatibility.

Limits the number of times the app has to be developed for different platforms : Cross-compatibility removes the need for multiple development cycles and reduces the overall cost of development.

Does not necessarily require internet: Useful for businesses operating in countries with slow or unstable internet connectivity.

As a mix of frameworks, hybrid applications also carry some of the drawbacks from each of the other frameworks. While they may behave like a native application, they don’t necessarily offer the same speed and performance as one. Another thing to consider is that while they are built as web applications that adapt to the operating system upon which they are installed, the user experience can vary greatly across devices and operating systems.

Mobile applications are characterized by the fact that they are built to address very specific user requirements or help users address a gap in their personal or professional lives.

Lifestyle apps

These apps are designed to enhance or support various aspects of users’ personal lives that define their day-to-day activities. The U.S. lifestyle mobile app market is anticipated to grow from $2.14 billion to $3.33 billion by 2027, an annual growth rate of roughly 10%. [ 1 ]

Lifestyle applications can help users with:

Music, movies, entertainment

Food and dining

Social media platforms

Productivity apps

Mobile applications focused on productivity help users to produce audio, text, and video content, as well as graphs, databases, documents, and presentations. Most often leveraged for business, productivity applications not only provide users with business solutions, but also provide businesses with monetization opportunities.

Productivity applications can be grouped into several general categories:

Communication and collaboration tools

Workflow and automation tools

Documentation tools

Time, task, and project tracking tools

Entertainment apps

Mobile applications in the entertainment market allow users to view video content, listen to audio content, and share their favorite content across other platforms. Data gathered through the application allows it to create lists of trending content and make recommendations to users based on their activity. Games and other media consumption applications also fall under this market segment.

Entertainment applications dominate the U.S. application market when we look at revenue generated in 2023, with Candy Crush Saga, as an example, generating $485 million. [ 2 ]

Financial apps

Financial applications are largely the purview of banking institutions providing mobile banking solutions to account holders. According to the American Bankers Association, 48% of banking customers use applications or web apps on their mobile devices to manage their bank account. [ 3 ]

In recent years, the scope of finance applications have expanded to allow users to perform a variety of financial tasks, such as stock trading, managing digital wallets, creating and managing budgets, engaging with insurance vendors, and making or receiving payments. Finance-focused mobile app installations and session lengths increased throughout 2023, showing users are becoming more comfortable managing their financial needs with digital tools. [ 4 ]

Financial applications, aside from those developed by major banking institutions, include:

Educational apps

Mobile applications focused on education facilitate learning in an accessible and meaningful way. Educational apps cross industry lines and aren’t only intended for students. They are also able to provide a powerful training platform for employers to educate their staff, and give professionals access to self-improvement and learning tools to improve their professional opportunities.

Some examples of learning applications include:

Khan Academy

Health and wellness apps

Health and wellness applications allow users to track personal information and their progress toward personal wellness or fitness goals. Goals can include nutrition, sleep health, fitness levels, and stress management. When built natively or as a hybrid, health and wellness apps can sync with biometric data gathered by mobile devices in order to provide users with actionable insights.

Driven by 379 million downloads and 311 million active users, health and wellness applications generated $3.43 billion in 2023. [ 5 ]

Business apps

While productivity apps land squarely within this category, business mobile apps also include any bespoke mobile app a business has custom-built to support a business process. Custom-built mobile apps provide employees with improved productivity tools, better collaboration and communication tools, and strategic planning platforms. Some of the most prevalent types of business-focused mobile applications not covered above include:

Messaging and communications apps allow teams to securely communicate and share business resources. They can also be designed to allow customers to directly contact your team in order to improve the customer service experience.

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools allow your team to track and document customer interactions in the field and seamlessly ensure the customer experience between departments, even if your teams are widely distributed geographically.

Consumers prefer the transparency and convenience of online payment processing, so it’s important to provide customers with access to an online payment processing application to allow them to make payments for goods and services.

eCommerce and retail shopping applications support launching of new products and services and provide a scalable platform for future growth.

No one mobile app development approach is best for any of the major industries as a whole, as each of the above types of apps are leveraged by companies across industries. 

Each of the mobile app types we’ve outlined at the top of the article come with their own benefits and limitations, so choosing what approach you should take in application development will be dependent upon what your priorities are and what goals you expect the app to help you achieve.

Web-based mobile applications are easy to develop, but provide limited functionality

Low-resource and maximum compatibility, web apps are a great way to provide content-focused experiences, as long as the user experience isn’t dependent upon mobile device features. This approach will provide a fast time to market and a low-cost solution that can be deployed across multiple platforms and devices. However, because they can’t be found or downloaded from the app store, you will need to ensure you’ve laid the groundwork for distribution ahead of launch.

Hybrid mobile apps strike a balance between cost and compatibility

Hybrid mobile applications have the benefit of feeling like a native app to users of multiple devices and platforms. This single codebase makes hybrid apps a viable and affordable way to improve your distribution options and provide users with an improved experience, but at a cost that doesn’t crush your budget.

Hybrid mobile applications have an additional benefit. Agencies and developers can leverage hybrid applications as a minimum viable product (MVP) to show functionality of an application before moving on to building a fully native option, if that is the goal.

Native applications take full advantage of mobile devices

Native mobile applications allow you to provide users with robust and dynamic experiences while taking full advantage of all of the benefits and features of specific mobile platforms. From push notifications to swiping gestures, native applications are able to fully access features and functionality and can be updated through the associated mobile app store easily. 

This approach ensures your product operates at a high level and is feature-rich and functional from launch, ensuring that your mobile app makes the best impression possible.

Mobile application software and services

Unless you’re operating an agency or already maintaining the staff and resources necessary to build a robust mobile app from start to finish, you likely will need assistance building out the mobile app you’ve chosen to support your brand. You can explore the Capterra mobile application development directories and discover a professional capable of supporting your efforts at bringing your plans for a mobile application from planning through to launch:

Mobile App Development Companies  

Application Development Software

Deciding which style of mobile application best suits the goals of your business is a complex undertaking that requires an understanding of the advantages and limitations of the technologies used to build the app. It also requires an understanding of how mobile applications are leveraged in different industries and what business processes are best folded into the mobile experience of users. 

Using Capterra’s directories to identify a skilled agency with which to partner can ensure your mobile application has the scope, reach, and functionality necessary to support not only your internal business goals, but also the journey your customers are looking for through the resulting mobile application. To learn more about this process and how to find the right partner, you can explore some of the resources provided by experts in mobile app development and entrepreneurship:

Learn How To Develop a Mobile App From a Startup Owner’s Journey

What Is a Native App?

Mobile App Development Company Hiring Guide

Lifestyle - United States | Statista Market Forecast , Statista

US App Market Statistics (2024) , Business of Apps

Consumer Survey Banking Methods 2023 , American Bankers Association

Finance app usage continues to grow in 2023 , Adjust

Health App Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024) , Business of Apps

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About the author.

David is the Managing Partner for the Code Ninjas franchise responsible for the Baton Rouge, LA market, where he facilitates the education of youth in programming, game design, and STEM education fundamentals. A lifelong learner, David combines a passion for strong business practices and solid marketing strategies honed throughout his 20-year career in the food and beverage industry with his desire to share those best practices with other business owners as a contracted writer for UpCity. When he's not helping his daughter build her digital art-focused social media brand, he's creating content focused on digital marketing trends, B2B best practices, and IT and cybersecurity managed services.

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From bricks to clicks: how to succeed at omnichannel retail

These days, many retailers have both an online and bricks-and-mortar presence. But how can they ensure these sales channels work together in a way that delivers a seamless experience to customers? Get it right and you’ll have a stronger brand, better sales, and happier customers. Read on to discover our tips for building a successful omnichannel retail strategy.

As digital commerce catches up with bricks-and-mortar retail, the customer journey has become increasingly complex. These days, the typical customer path to purchase is likely to involve several different channels – consider the customer who discovers a new product on social media; visits the brand’s website to find out more; goes to a physical store to see the product in person; and is incentivised to complete the purchase online after a nudge from a targeted ad. As we can see, the omnichannel journey is complex, unpredictable and often difficult to track.

The challenge for brands is to ensure these different touchpoints work together. 87% of shoppers want a personalized and consistent experience across touchpoints 1 , yet research suggests retailers are falling short, with 84% of consumers saying they believe they should be doing more to integrate their online and offline channels 2 .

Building a solid omnichannel strategy for your business that shares customer data and feedback across all channels will prevent disconnects in the buyer experience. You’ll be able to map out the customer journey, understand their behaviors and motivations, and use these insights to deliver a personalized level of service at every sales touchpoint. 

So, how can your business create a truly seamless customer journey across online and in store? Read on for our top tips. 

Switch to a unified commerce platform to harness the omnichannel customer journey

It’s no secret that customer data is the most valuable asset to any retailer. Many rely on a patchwork of software systems collecting data at different touchpoints, from their e-commerce site to loyalty programs and beyond. However, often these systems work independently, unable to communicate seamlessly with each other, which is a lost opportunity for retailers.

This is why a unified commerce platform is invaluable, combining e-commerce, m-commerce, order fulfillment, inventory management, customer relationship management and Point of Sale capabilities in one place. Retailers can access, in real time, a 360-degree of customer behavior – what they’re buying, where from, and why. This data can be used to build a better customer experience, from more personalized product recommendations, to more flexible purchasing pathways that allow customers to start, stop, divert and finish their shopping across different channels, seamlessly.  

A unified commerce platform will also help you reduce mistakes, such as advertising a product you no longer have in stock – mistakes which can lose you customers. Jump online and do some research on what unified commerce platform is the best fit for your business.

Think mobile to take advantage of showrooming

Customers are never without their smartphones, and they often inform their purchasing decisions in store. “Showrooming” is when a customer visits a store so that they can see and feel a product in person, but wait to complete the purchase online where they think they’ll be able to find a better price for it. Thanks to smartphones, this price research can be done there and then, in store. Addressing showrooming, therefore, is vital to keeping a potential customer within your sales ecosystem.

To avoid losing these customers to the Amazons and eBays of the online world, you’ll have to be prepared to be flexible with your in-store pricing. Consider a price-match policy to win these sales – it may cut into your profit margins slightly, but the alternative is losing the sale altogether.

Building a dedicated shopping app for your brand is also a good idea. Customers browsing your products in store will be able to quickly access extra product information, or even arrange for their in-store purchase to be delivered to their home. You can tap into proximity marketing to deliver discounts and sales alerts to customers when they’re close to your store, which will incentivize them to visit.

Offer Click & Collect

Buy online pick-up in store  (BOPIS) grew rapidly during the pandemic and is forecast to continue. Offering your customers the convenience of BOPIS will win your business brownie points, and just as importantly, once they’re in your store to collect their purchase they’ll likely browse the aisles and pick up a few impulse purchases. In fact, 75% of shoppers using click and collect services end up buying extra items 3 .

Ensure the BOPIS option is clearly shown on your e-commerce website, via an intuitive and simple checkout process. Customers’ orders should be ready for pick-up quickly – ideally, on the same day. A strong inventory management system will ensure there are no disappointments – the customer who turns up to collect their item only to discover it’s out of stock won’t return.

Allow returns in store

Unfortunately, returns are an inevitable part of e-commerce – and an expensive one at that, with consumers expecting retailers to cover the costs. Yet, you can make them work to your benefit. Encourage your online customers to return their items in store. For some, this will be more convenient than visiting a returns stations, and once they’re in store, they may end up buying something else – after all, if their initial purchase didn’t work out, it’s likely they’ll be looking for an alternative and you want to make sure it’s with your business.

Introduce a loyalty scheme

A loyalty scheme is a great way to build a relationship with your customers, and should work seamlessly across online commerce and in store. For example, an email marketing campaign that sends offers to customers that can be redeemed both online and in store will be appreciated.   

Offer alternative payment methods

Did you know that shoppers are 70% more likely to finalize a purchase if their preferred payment method is displayed as an option?4 Whether they’re buying online or in store, they want options – from digital wallets to ‘buy now pay later’ to credit cards. If you fail to meet this demand, you’ll have abandoned carts and unhappy customers. Check out our guide to the new ways to pay to get started.

And finally…

The customer journey is not over once they finalize their purchase. After the sale is your opportunity to send a thank you email or a discount code for future purchases. This is easier to do with online customers who will have provided you with an email address during the checkout process. For in-store customers, asking for an email address at the till to send them their receipt and special offers ensures they’re not left out.

1 -  The Need for Unified Commerce ,  Kibo , 2019

2 -  Invoca blog , July 2021

3 -  Whiplash , August 2021

4 -  2Checkout blog , June 2020

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Neuro Journey: Simple Habits 4+

Easy tools for a better mind‪.‬, affirmedyou llc, designed for iphone.

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Neuro Journey puts easy-to-use, everyday tools at your fingertips to build habits for a clearer, healthier and better mind. Use Neuro Journey to easily make improving your mental fitness and health a daily habit. Neuro Journey’s tools harness the power of science. At the click of a button, you will find tools that can effectively help you: *Reduce stress and anxiety *Find greater clarity and focus *Put yourself in a more relaxed, focused or creative state *Develop self-awareness and resilience *Enhance emotional regulation *Boost your mind through daily learning *Prepare your mind navigate challenges DAILY REFLECTIONS Be guided daily to think and develop mindfulness, self-awareness and a proactive mindset. MENTAL PRIMING EXERCISES Get activities designed to cut down stress and anxiety while boosting your brain’s performance. Regularly engaging in these exercises can lead to neuroplasticity, making your brain healthier and more adaptable. HEART RATE TESTS Measure your heart rate and get real-time insight into your stress levels and mental state. By tracking these metrics, individuals can identify patterns, adapt strategies, better manage stress and enhance cognitive function. BREATHING EXERCISES Focused breathing exercises are a powerful tool to prime the mind. They promoting a state of calm and reducing stress, which in turn improve thinking. GOAL-SETTING Dream big and make your goals achievable. Research shows that setting clear goals can improve your focus, productivity, and improve self-esteem. AFFIRMATIONS Listen to affirmations aligned with your goals and program your mind for success. It’s a technique rooted in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, aiming to overcome obstacles and keep your motivation high. MEDITATIONS Repetitive practice of meditations will effectively prime the mind, and foster a positive and focused mental state that enhances overall well-being and performance for various challenges. DAILY LEARNING Keep your brain engaged with new information and ideas. This promotes cognitive flexibility and sharpens problem-solving skills. BRAIN WAVE FREQUENCIES Use Neuro Journey’s Alpha, Theta, Gamma, and Delta Brainwave Frequencies to help you prime your mind on demand for any task. Subscription pricing and terms: All Neuro Journey users enjoy free access to the following features: *Daily Reflections *Daily Learning Subscribers to Neuro Journey enjoy unlimited access to the following premium features for stress-relief, well-being and mental fitness: *Mental Priming and Performance Exercises *Heart Rate Testing *Meditations and Affirmations *Brainwave Frequencies *Goal-setting and tracking for different areas of your life And more Neuro Journey offers new users a 7-day free trial where users enjoy unlimited use of all of Neuro Journey’s premium features for 7 days, after which they will be charged a subscription fee. Neuro Journey offers an auto-renewing monthly subscription at $4.99/month and an auto-renewing annual subscription at $29.99/year. Payments are charged to the credit card or payment method connected to your iTunes Account when you confirm your initial subscription purchase. Subscriptions automatically renew unless your subscription is canceled before the end of the current subscription period. You may cancel your subscription at anytime by going to Subscription in the app menu. Read more about our terms and conditions here: https://www.neurojourneyapp.com/terms-of-use Support URL: https://www.neurojourneyapp.com/contact-us Marketing URL: https://www.neurojourneyapp.com/

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Discovery Consulting: Setting the foundation for an expanding business with cloud ERP

Explore discovery consulting’s journey with sap.

Discovery Consulting had outgrown its systems and processes. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, it has improved employee and customer experiences and set the stage for growth. And its clients benefit from the best practices and continuous innovation enabled by cloud ERP.

reduction in time to issue sales invoices, from 18 to two days.

reduction in time for financial closing, from 20 to four days.

of bank reconciliation processes now automated.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition has allowed our organization to improve employee and customer experiences and establish a foundation for future expansion. Now that we’ve embraced it, we can help our clients grasp these extensive benefits for themselves.

Alistair Elliott Managing Partner, Discovery Consulting Group Pty Ltd.

Implementing an ERP solution fit for a growing business

With a focus on SAP solutions that help transform HR, finance, and workplace safety, SAP partner Discovery Consulting Group Pty Ltd. wants to equip clients to advance in a rapidly changing business environment. It meets these clients’ needs from the outset, supporting them throughout the lifecycle of cloud adoption and staying with them while they innovate and build a sustainable business.

However, the organization found it had outgrown its own systems and processes. Disparate, bespoke systems across time, expense, project, and accounting management led to manual work and a lack of visibility, hindering processes such as financial closing and sales invoicing. More important, employee and customer experiences were affected.

With expansion in mind, the organization needed to modernize its systems and processes with a new ERP solution.Discovery Consulting’s managing partner, Alistair Elliott, explains, “We needed a solution that could support our business and enable employees to produce the right results for our customers.”

Adopting leading practices in the cloud

As an SAP partner, Discovery Consulting had already implemented multiple SAP solutions across its business. For instance, it used SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur solutions for employee engagement and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to help integrate its IT landscape. The firm knew SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition could help simplify its IT environment and streamline processes with best practices.

The professional services firm adopted SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition smoothly without extensions and with limited customization. Errol D’Mello, national practice lead for SAP S/4HANA at the firm, praises the solution’s speedy implementation: “The limited need for configuration and customization enables rapid implementation time frames, enhancing a client’s time to value. A moderately complex business could implement the suite in 12 weeks, compared to 18 months for a single entity implementing on-premise ERP software.”

Simplifying the employee experience to aid a focus on customers

Integrating time, expense, project, and accounting management has enabled significant efficiencies and improvements across Discovery Consulting’s operations. For instance, sending out customer invoices now takes two days instead of 18. The firm expects to slash another day from this process by further automating the sales invoicing process. And increased transparency and automation mean customers have better visibility of their projects and engagements.

Automated scheduling and time sheets boost efficiency further. SAP Project and Resource Management – a real-time, mobile-enabled, and cloud-based solution on SAP BTP – replaces manual resource management processes. It allows the firm to drill down by day and more easily track and manage multiple projects simultaneously. As Discovery Consulting grows, it plans to use this capability to replace direct project staffing with automatic assignment based on skills and availability.

On the finance side, month-end close is now completed on workday four, compared to more than 20 days previously.As each invoice is generated, the firm runs revenue recognition that allocates the costs generated for the month, automatically reallocating accrued expenses and accruing purchase orders. Bank reconciliation, which used to be done manually, is automated too, with only 10% of transactions now needing human intervention.

Having implemented SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition successfully, the firm can now guide clients through similar projects. Errol D’Mello gives the example of a recent update involving automatic conversion of time sheets to service entry sheets. He explains, “I can see this being a massive benefit for customers with multiple contractors, where the effort of getting an approved time sheet to put into a service order would be hours per person per month. From an FTE savings perspective, automating that alone is quite a compelling argument we can make to a customer.”

Tapping into the full potential of a next-generation ERP solution

Discovery Consulting now plans to explore more intelligent capabilities of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. It wants to take advantage of regular software updates to create even more value in its ERP workflows and those of customers.

As Errol D’Mello says, “We’re live and using the functionality, but we need to continue to take steps to fully utilize automation. Getting to know the solution intimately and understanding what best-practice content is coming out are next for us. And this will also enable us to put the best foot forward for our customers.”

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