In a brick-and-mortar store, observing your customer’s behavior and adapting to their needs in real time is easy. Store associates can take cues from what a person is wearing and how they act and know the exact route they’ll take through the store.
With ecommerce, it’s a different story.
“You can’t see what somebody looks like behind the screen,” says marketing agency owner Nik Sharma on the Shopify Masters podcast. “But you can understand the type of person you’re going after, and then build a pathway for them to come into.”
This process is known as customer journey mapping, and it’s a must for anyone who sells online. You can easily create your own using Shopify’s customer journey mapping template.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a timeline of a hypothetical customer’s experience with your business from the moment they become aware of your brand through post-purchase interactions like leaving a review.
Customer journeys are based on real customer data but follow made-up customers known as buyer personas. The personas’ emotions and motivations provide context for otherwise dry data, like the number of times the average user visits your site before making a purchase.
Customer journey vs. buyer journey
The terms buyer journey and customer journey are often used interchangeably, but some marketers see the customer journey as part of a larger buyer journey.
A buyer can be anyone, but once they start to interact with your business, they become a customer. By this logic, a buyer journey might include steps taken before someone becomes aware of your business, like the moment they experience a pain point or learn of your product’s category.
Customer journey vs. user journey
A user journey, also known as a user experience (UX) journey, follows a user as they attempt to complete a goal on a website, app, or other digital interface. If their goal is to make a purchase, there may be some overlap between the user journey and the customer journey. Customer journey maps are used primarily by sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, while user journey maps are used by UX developers and product teams.
Types of customer journey maps
Your customer journey maps should be unique, but there are three general types you can adapt to your needs:
- Current state. These maps depict the customer journey under your current system. They’re often used to illustrate gaps or points of friction, and include suggestions for fixing the problems that arise throughout the journey.
- Future state. Future state customer journey maps show the ideal customer journey. They are often paired with current state maps to show how a change or fix can improve the customer journey.
- Service blueprint. Instead of mapping the entire customer journey, a service blueprint shows only customer service touchpoints, which can be useful for customer service teams.
Benefits of using customer journey maps
A customer journey map is an opportunity to keep all the most important insights about your customer in a single place. It’s one thing to gather data and develop hypotheses about the customer journey, but seeing this information presented visually can really make things click for your team.
A customer journey map can help you:
Meet customers’ needs
Customer journey mapping involves uncovering what your customers care most about at each stage, so you can tailor your offerings to their needs at a particular moment in time.
For example, you might find offering a discount code the moment customers land on your site doesn’t actually lead to more conversions because they’re not yet ready to make a purchase. That same discount code, however, might be highly successful when served to returning visitors.
These are the kinds of insights that come from exploring your customers’ experiences over time and seeking to understand how their actions stem from their motivations and emotions. The more you can hone in on which stage of the journey your customers are in, the easier it is to align your offerings with their needs.
Identify gaps
The customer journey isn’t always linear, but it should be smooth. Because a customer journey map illustrates how your customers move from one touchpoint to another, it makes it easier to see any bumps or gaps along the way.
For example, your social media post receives a lot of engagement but doesn’t lead to more sales. Instead of immediately switching up your social media marketing strategy, take a minute to map the customer journey. If there are too many steps between seeing a product on social media and buying it, your customer might get frustrated and give up.
Improve alignment
Customer journey mapping helps improve alignment across teams in a few different ways:
- Collaboration. By creating a customer journey map, you’ll need to work with different departments, which can open the lines of communication and increase data transparency.
- Clarity. Once the journey is mapped out, any gaps between departments will become clearer. The solutions to these gaps will involve communication across teams and better-defined ownership of customer touchpoints.
- Alignment. A shared customer journey map ensures your entire team has the same vision and goals when it comes to customer satisfaction.
What to include in customer journey maps
A typical customer journey map takes the form of a table, with columns representing the different stages of the customer’s journey and the rows representing elements associated with each stage, such as touchpoints, customer emotions, and which team or department is involved.
Your map can take whatever form makes sense for your business, but here are some common elements:
Stages
In a standard customer journey map, each column represents a different stage in the customer journey. These five stages are common, but depending on the type of map you’d like to create, you may use different stages:
1. Awareness. Also known as “inquiry,” this is the stage at which a potential customer first learns of your brand, product, or service.
2. Consideration. In the consideration or comparison stage, the customer knows about you, but hasn’t yet decided how they feel about your brand, or they might be evaluating your product against another.
3. Acquisition. When the customer makes a purchase decision, they enter the acquisition or customer success stage, but the journey doesn’t end there.
4. Service. Also known as customer retention or installation, this phase involves everything that happens post-purchase—including customer service.
5. Loyalty. Not everyone will make it to the customer loyalty or advocacy stage, but those who do are so happy with their purchase that they recommend it to others and continue to buy from you in the future.
Emotions
A good customer journey map doesn’t just show how your customer moves from one stage to another, it also provides context for why.
Most customer journey maps start by identifying an actor or buyer persona (the hypothetical customer whose journey you are mapping). This provides a backstory, such as their age, profession, location, shopping preferences, and motivation or pain points. This information usually goes above the main table.
You’ll also have a row for emotions. For each stage in the customer journey, you should provide a brief description of possible emotions and motivations for moving to the next stage.
For example, a customer might feel frustrated during the service stage if the returns process is complex. You can illustrate their feelings with a few descriptive words (frustrated, annoyed, confused), an emoji (😠), an inner thought (“I’m too busy to deal with this right now!”), or all of the above.
Touchpoints
The touchpoints are the concrete ways in which a customer interacts with your brand. These include:
- Owned properties. Such as your website, mobile app, blog, newsletter, and social media accounts.
- Advertisements. Including digital ads, social media ads, and outdoor advertising.
- Third-party marketplaces. Like Amazon and eBay.
- Review sites. Such as Google Maps and Yelp.
- Customer service touchpoints. Like chatbots, phone calls, and emails with customer service representatives.
- Physical touchpoints. Including brick-and-mortar stores and product packaging.
At each stage of their journey, customers will interact with different touchpoints. For example, a customer in the awareness stage might see your ads on Instagram, while a customer in the consideration stage might view your ecommerce store’s FAQ page.
Touchpoints also get their own row in the customer journey table. It can be helpful to add an additional row or color coding to show which teams are responsible for each touchpoint.
Customer journey map template
Why start from scratch, when you can use a template to create your own customer journey map? Download this free customer journey map template, which can be used to map out your business’s current or future states.
How to create your own customer journey map
The customer journey mapping process will differ depending on your business and goals, but the general steps are:
1. Develop hypotheses
Customer journey maps tend to follow the same general format, but within that, there are endless possibilities. How do you decide what type of customer to follow and which metrics to focus on?
You could open up your preferred ecommerce analytics tool and stare at the data until a pattern emerges, but Neil Hoyne, chief strategist for data and measurement at Google, recommends an alternative strategy.
“Far too often I see entrepreneurs go in and say, ‘Here’s my Google Analytics report. Let’s see what’s in it,’” Neil says on the Shopify Masters podcast. Yet with so much data available, this can be a frustrating and fruitless endeavor.
“Instead, what I encourage you to do is take a step back before you go into that data and write down your hypotheses,” Neil says. “When you start with what you think you should do differently or where you think there’s an opportunity, then all those reports work to support that, as opposed to the other way around.”
For example, you might hypothesize that people who buy your product as a gift for someone else have higher customer lifetime value. The opportunity could be to promote your product’s giftability, and your customer journey map might follow a persona looking to buy a gift.
2. Gather data
Once you have your list of hypotheses, it will be easier to determine what data you need to fill out your customer journey map. A good customer journey map includes a combination of quantitative data (email opens, purchase history, and traffic from different channels) and qualitative data (customer interviews and post-purchase surveys).
Think about the data you need to support the hypotheses or questions you came up with in step one. You may need to compile customer service transcripts or create custom reports in Google Analytics to better answer your questions.
In the gifting example above, you’ll want to ensure you have a way to track those customers who select the “This is a gift” box on your checkout page.
3. Create customer personas
Customer personas, also known as buyer personas, are short, fictionalized profiles of your customers based on real data. To create a buyer persona for your journey map, you’ll distill all the data you gathered in step two into one made-up individual.
Customer journey maps are told from the customer’s perspective, so the more lifelike your persona is, the easier it will be to imagine yourself in their shoes. In the gift-giving example, your persona is a person in your target demographic looking for a gift, but you’ll use a combination of analytics reports and qualitative data to add details like their favorite social media channels and the person the gift is for.
4. Map out stages
Now that you have a hypothesis, relevant data, and a customer persona, it’s time to put everything together. Customer journey map templates can be super helpful at this step.
For each of the five stages of the customer journey—awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, and loyalty—you will fill out the rows in your template with the details of your persona’s journey:
- Time frame. The number of days the user spends in each stage of the journey. For example, they might spend two days in the consideration stage.
- Action. What the persona did during each stage, such as clicking on an ad or researching competitors. If they took multiple actions in the same stage (such as visiting competitors’ sites and asking a friend about your product), list each as a separate bullet point.
- Touchpoints. The platforms or pages the customer interacted with to complete each action, such as a blog post on your website or a search engine query.
- Emotions. How your customer feels at each stage. Customer feedback from post-purchase surveys, reviews, and customer service transcripts is a great source to pull from when filling out the emotions row.
- Owner. The person, team(s), or department(s) responsible for the customer experience at each stage. If a stage has multiple touchpoints, it may have multiple owners.
- Opportunities. Ideas for improving the customer experience at each stage.
5. Update
As your strategy evolves, you’ll need to update your customer journey maps to reflect the current customer experience. Ideally, you will update your customer journey maps after every adjustment to a customer touchpoint, but you should aim to review them at least quarterly.
Customer journey map FAQ
What is customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of how buyers interact with your business, from awareness through post-purchase.
What are the key components of a customer journey map?
The key components of a customer journey map include:
- The buyer persona who “takes” the journey
- The stages of the journey, such as awareness and consideration
- The touchpoints associated with each stage of the journey
- The emotions associated with each stage of the journey
What is the customer journey and its stages?
The customer journey is the path an individual takes to make a purchase. Although not always linear, it follows these general stages: awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, and loyalty.
