How to Create a Customer Journey Map (& Convert MORE at Each Step)

You’ve created a great product, and your digital marketing efforts are starting to get noticed. But how do you turn more of those leads into loyal customers? A customer journey map can help you understand how to move leads through your sales funnel.

Here at OptinMonster, we’ve been helping our customers convert their website traffic into sales and revenue for over 10 years.

Medstar Media, a digital marketing agency, used OptinMonster to increase their clients’ conversions by 500%. As a result, those clients saw millions more in revenue.

Today, I’m going to share what we’ve learned about the customer experience journey, so you can grow your business.

In this guide, I’ll cover the essentials of customer journey mapping, including its benefits and a step-by-step tutorial for creating a customer experience journey map.

• What Is a Customer Journey Map?
• 6 Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
• 7 Steps to Create a Customer Experience Journey Map
  • Step 1: Set Clear Objectives
  • Step 2: Create Buyer Personas
  • Step 3: Define Your Buyer Personas’ Goals in Each Funnel Stage
  • Step 4: Identify Customer Touchpoints & Channels
  • Step 5: Map Your Current Customer Journey & Analyze It
  • Step 6: Create Your New Customer Journey Map
  • Step 7: Take Action and Analyze

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of your customers’ interactions with your brand. It starts with initial awareness and moves through the purchase decision and brand loyalty. By understanding their goals and emotions, you can enhance user experience and drive conversions.

Essentially, customer journey maps help you move your leads through the stages of your sales marketing funnel:

Customer journey maps plan out exactly how each lead interacts with your company during each stage. They typically include key touchpoints, such as website visits, social media interactions, email communications, and customer service engagements. By mapping out these interactions, you can pinpoint areas where customers may encounter obstacles or frustration. Then, you can address them proactively.

Journey mapping takes a lot of time and effort. It involves gathering data from various sources, including customer feedback, analytics, and internal insights. This comprehensive approach helps you fully understand the real experiences of your leads, so you can create targeted strategies to win and retain more customers.

6 Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is more than just an exercise in understanding customer behavior. In fact, it offers tangible benefits that can jumpstart your business’s growth.

1. Improved Customer Understanding

First, the obvious: customer journey mapping helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs, motivations, and pain points at each stage of their journey. By visualizing their experiences, you can identify what drives them and tailor your marketing strategies to better meet their expectations.

2. Enhanced Customer Experience

By identifying and addressing potential obstacles or frustrations within the customer journey, you can create a smoother, more enjoyable experience for your customers. This proactive approach can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Increased Conversions and Sales

With a clear map of the customer experience, you can optimize each touchpoint. In doing so, you can guide leads more effectively through your sales funnel. This targeted approach helps you convert more prospects into paying customers.

4. Better Resource Allocation

When you understand your leads’ pain points, you can allocate resources more efficiently. For instance, you might decide to redesign your website’s user interface (UI), provide more training for your customer support team, or refine your marketing messages. In short, journey mapping helps you focus your efforts where they are needed most.

5. Alignment Across Teams

Once you have an accurate map of your customer experience, you can share it across your organization. When your entire team understands your customers’ journey, you can work together towards the same goals and deliver a more consistent message to your prospects.

6. Data-Driven Decisions

As I’ll cover later, journey mapping is based on in-depth research. With this information, you’ll be able to make informed, data-driven decisions. This comprehensive approach helps you identify trends, measure performance, and adjust your strategies based on real customer interactions.

7 Steps to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map involves several detailed steps, each requiring careful thought and data collection. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create an effective customer journey map to enhance your customer experience and drive sales.

Step 1: Set Clear Objectives

Before you start mapping, you need to define what you aim to achieve. Clear objectives will guide your efforts and ensure your journey map serves your business goals.

To set clear objectives, you’ll need to do the following:

• Identify Your Goals
• Define Success Metrics

I’ll explore each part more closely.

Identify Your Goals

Start by defining why you are creating the customer journey map. Here are a few common objectives:

• Increase Sales and Conversions: Pinpoint where potential customers drop off and implement strategies to keep them moving through the sales funnel.
  • Example: An eCommerce site may see high cart abandonment rates. A journey map can help identify why and suggest solutions like email remarketing or simplifying the online checkout process.
• Improve Customer Satisfaction: Identify pain points and positive experiences within the customer journey, so you can enhance overall satisfaction.
  • Example: A brick-and-mortar business might discover that customers have trouble finding the products they want. By mapping the customer journey, they can find ways to better organize their store.
• Enhance User Experience: Reduce friction points and ensure customers can easily find information.
  • Example: A software company might find that users struggle to navigate their online help center. Improving the layout can enhance the user experience.

Define Success Metrics

A goal is only useful if it’s measurable. That’s why you need to define which metrics you’re going to track to measure success. Gather your current data for these metrics, so you can monitor your progress as you develop and implement your journey map.

These metrics may come from the analytics for your website or marketing platforms, or they might come directly from your customer feedback. Here are just a few examples of metrics you might use:

• Conversion Rates: Track the percentage of visitors who convert to leads or customers.
• Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT): Measure customer satisfaction at various touchpoints.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS is the score customers give to the question “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”
• Customer Effort Score (CES): CES measures how easy it is for customers to complete key actions, such as making a purchase, using your product, or getting help from customer support.
• Customer Retention Rate: Monitor how well you retain customers over time. This could be a measurement of customers who maintain a subscription or who make repeat purchases from your brand.
• Email Unsubscribe Rate: Work to lower the number of email marketing subscribers who opt out of getting emails from you.
• Email List Growth Rate: How many of your website visitors sign up for your email marketing newsletter?

By setting clear, actionable objectives, you ensure that your customer journey mapping efforts are focused, effective, and aligned with your overall business goals.

Step 2: Create Buyer Personas

Understanding your customers is essential. Buyer personas represent your target customers and help you understand their behaviors, needs, preferences, and goals.

To build an accurate persona, you need a lot of data. You’ll need both quantitative metrics and qualitative data, so you can understand your customers’ motivations. Here are a few ways to gather this information:

• Customer Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups
• Website Analytics
• Email Marketing Analytics
• Customer Support Data
• Sales Team Insights

Once you have collected sufficient data, you can start building your buyer personas. Each persona should include the following elements:

• Demographic Information: Age, gender, income, education level, job title, and location.
  • Example: Jane is a 39-year-old marketing manager living in Chicago with an annual income of $95,000.
• Behavioral Traits: Purchasing habits, brand loyalty, product usage, and online behavior.
  • Example: Jane frequently shops online, values convenience, and regularly reads product reviews before making a purchase.
• Pain Points and Challenges: Specific problems or frustrations that your product or service can solve.
  • Example: Jane struggles with finding reliable tools to streamline her marketing efforts and often faces time constraints.
• Goals and Motivations: What your persona hopes to achieve and why they might be interested in your product or service.
  • Example: Jane aims to improve her team’s efficiency and is motivated by tools that offer easy integration and user-friendly interfaces.
• Preferred Channels: Where your persona is most likely to interact with your brand, such as social media, email, or in-person.
  • Example: Jane prefers receiving updates via email and engages with brands on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Step 3: Define Your Buyer Personas’ Goals In Each Funnel Stage

Now that you have personas for your ideal customers, the next step is to break down their goals for each stage of your customer journey. Here’s an example:

• Awareness: What would make the persona discover your brand?
  • Example: Jane needs content that highlights common marketing inefficiencies and introduces potential solutions.
• Consideration: What criteria will the persona use to compare different solutions?
  • Example: Jane looks for case studies, product reviews, and detailed feature comparisons.
• Decision: What final push does the persona need to make a decision about a product?
  • Example: Jane requires a demo or free trial to see the product in action.
• Purchase: What convinces the persona to take action to complete their purchase?
  • Example: Jane will make a purchase when she’s certain she’s getting the best price available.
• Loyalty: What will encourage your persona to continue being a customer?
  • Example: Jane will remain a customer if the product successfully helps her reach her goals. She may need effective onboarding or responsive customer support

This information will help you determine how to nurture your leads through each stage of your customer journey map.

Step 4: Identify Customer Touchpoints & Channels

Customer touchpoints are the specific interactions between your company and your leads and customers. Your customer journey map will plan out the strategy for these touchpoints, so you can be more effective in nurturing your leads.

Here are the 3 main types of touchpoints, with examples of each:

1. Awareness Touchpoints:
   • Social Media: Where potential customers discover your brand through posts, ads, and influencer partnerships.
   • Content Marketing: Blog posts, videos, and articles that provide valuable information and establish your brand as an authority.
   • Paid Advertising: Online ads, such as PPC campaigns, that drive traffic to your website or landing pages.
   • Referrals: Recommendations from existing customers, affiliates, or third-party review sites.
2. Purchase Touchpoints:
   • Website: The main hub where customers browse products, read reviews, and make purchases.
   • Email Marketing: Offers and deals sent to website visitors who were interested enough to subscribe.
   • Product Pages: Detailed pages about each product, including descriptions, specifications, and customer reviews.
   • Checkout Process: The steps customers take to finalize their purchase, including payment and shipping options.
   • Customer Service: Interactions with support staff through live chat, email, or phone to resolve questions or issues before completing a purchase.
3. Post-Purchase Touchpoints:
   • Order Confirmation: Emails or messages confirming the purchase and providing shipping details.
   • Delivery: The experience of receiving the product, including packaging and timeliness.
   • Follow-Up Communication: Emails or messages asking for feedback, offering additional products, or providing customer support.
   • Loyalty Programs: Engagement through rewards programs, exclusive offers, and personalized recommendations.

Step 5: Map Your Current Customer Journey & Analyze It

Next, you’ll use all of the data you’ve gathered to create your current customer journey map. There’s no single best way for your map to look, but here’s one useful format:

Your map should be more detailed, especially in the Touchpoints section. Carefully add every point of contact between you and your lead for each stage. Include your social media campaigns, website popups, coupon offers, email marketing, ads, sales team conversations, customer support interactions, and more.

Once you’ve completed your current journey map, analyze it to find gaps and missing opportunities. Look back at the objectives you set in Step 1 and make a plan for how to get there. Which brings me to the next step.

Step 6: Create Your New Customer Journey Map

You have your current journey map in hand and a thorough analysis of gaps and opportunities. Now, it’s time to create your new, optimized customer journey map. Your new map will refine how you interact with your customers and include more opportunities to convert them.

To accomplish this task, identify areas for improvement throughout your sales funnel. Look for stages in the current journey where customers drop off or express frustration. These are prime opportunities for optimization.

Example: If your data shows high cart abandonment rates, consider implementing strategies like abandoned cart emails and a simplified checkout process.

Or even better, use OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® Technology and Page-Level Targeting to display a popup when visitors try to exit from your cart and checkout pages. Use your popup to offer an extra discount to encourage shoppers to complete their purchase.

With our 700+ templates and easy drag-and-drop builder, you can have a coupon popup running on your site in minutes.

You can then add this popup as a touchpoint in your customer journey map. And if the visitor doesn’t convert the first time, you can use Onsite Retargeting® to offer an even better deal the next time they visit.

Step 7: Take Action and Analyze

The final step is implementing the changes and continuously analyzing their effectiveness:

• Implement Changes: Put your planned improvements into action across relevant touchpoints and channels.
• Monitor Performance: Use the success metrics defined in Step 1 to track the impact of your changes.
• Gather Feedback: Continuously collect customer feedback to understand how the changes are affecting their experience.
• Update the Map: Regularly update your customer journey map based on new data and insights to keep it relevant and effective.

By following these steps, you can create a comprehensive customer journey map that both visualizes the customer experience and provides actionable insights to improve your marketing and sales efforts.

Want even more tips on improving customer journeys? Check out these resources:

• 14 Abandoned Cart Emails Proven to Boost Revenue
• The Ultimate eCommerce Optimization Guide: 13 Steps to Instantly Boost Revenue
• 15 eCommerce UX Best Practices to Explode Your Sales

Are you ready to use popups, floating bars, and other onsite campaigns to optimize your customer journey?

Get Started with OptinMonster Today!