A Guide to Creating a Customer Journey Map for Your Brand

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey describes how your prospects engage with your brand, from the moment they become aware of it to the time they become a customer and beyond.

“The customer journey is essentially the complete experience your customer goes through when interacting with your company,” said Nell Lanman, head of product for property intelligence and AI at Newmark. “Instead of just looking at the transaction itself, it’s looking at the full experience and every touchpoint along the way.”

That means the customer journey starts before they are even aware of your brand and extends well past their first purchase. It includes how you acquire and convert leads and how you retain existing customers.

The 7 steps of a customer journey

To better understand the various phases of a customer journey, it helps to break it down into seven general steps. Think carefully about your unique circumstances and the circumstances of your buyer personas to craft a detailed and effective plan for each stage of the customer journey. Start with these seven steps as a general framework, and then adapt them to the realities of your brand.

According to Lauren Patrick, director of community and customer marketing at Uptycs, the customer journey includes the seven steps below.

1. Introduction: This is the first time a potential customer interacts with your brand. It should be an opportunity to tell your brand story and introduce your company, as well as gather some basic information about the prospect.
2. Discovery: This is where a lead and your brand learn more about each other. Prospects may read blog posts on your website or search for customer reviews of your company on Google or Yelp. Meanwhile, your brand can gather data on customer behavior if you’ve implemented tracking through tools such as cookies and pixels.
3. Purchase: At this stage, a prospect becomes a customer. They have purchased one of your goods or services.
4. Adoption: This stage could also be called “onboarding.” It occurs when a customer is first using your product or service. It includes elements such as implementation assistance or installation guides. A software-as-a-service business, for example, may include a welcome guide covering the major features available on the platform. For more complicated software, a company may offer one-on-one training. It is also an opportunity to solicit feedback on how well your brand supported a customer in their early experience.
5. Engagement: This stage occurs after your customer has spent time with your product or service. You may choose to keep them engaged by extending special offers or discounts, or you may decide to tease upcoming new releases. You want to stay relevant to a customer by providing value at this stage.
6. Renewal or churn: At this stage, you will see which customers renew their subscriptions or make additional purchases and which customers do not. Both types of customers are essential. Consider what the repeat customers liked about your process and product or service. Find out what dissuaded the customers who dropped out. That information will help you build your buyer personas and adapt your customer journey map.
7. Advocacy: Advocacy includes providing great customer service and technical support to customers, as well as supporting the business beyond the immediate product or service. Advocacy is about cultivating and strengthening an emotional tie between the customer and the brand. Offer genuine responses to negative comments or critical reviews online, for example, and do something meaningful to resolve the issue.

Importantly, “purchase” is only the third step on the customer journey. That’s because driving a customer to a sale is only part of the journey, Lanman said.

“You don’t want to forget the customer journey doesn’t end at the initial transaction,” she said. “Stay in front of the customer and nurture them. It’s easy to say you’ve succeeded in reaching the clear objective you’ve set, but that success can happen more than once. In an ideal world, it would.”

The importance of a customer journey

The customer journey is important because understanding how and why a prospect engages with your brand helps you serve them the right information, which, in turn, improves your odds of ultimately making a sale. That usually takes some time, but every step of the customer journey should be tailored to supporting your prospects on their path to becoming paying customers.

To better understand your typical customer journey, and thus how to move prospects through your sales funnel, it is helpful to create a visualization known as a customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visualization that tracks the various ways a customer may encounter your brand and the experience that follows.

“A customer journey map helps you understand all the ways in which your ideal customer can find you or enter your sales funnel,” said Heather Sutton Lodge, owner and chief strategy officer at Werkflow Digital.

These entry points could be an advertisement that a customer clicks through to land on your website, a post you made on Facebook, or an introduction email you sent after a prospect subscribed to your newsletter. Customer journey maps are unique to each business and largely depend on the types of customers being targeted and their specific needs.

“When you think of a customer journey, you should think about something visual,” Lanman said, adding that businesses should literally map their customer journey. “Especially in today’s digital environment, there are so many different channels at the top of the sales funnel. Visualizing it really does help.”

So what should a customer journey map entail? It starts with understanding the seven steps of a customer journey listed above.

How do you create a customer journey map?

If you are creating a customer journey map for the first time, below are five easy steps to get started.

1. Set your objective.

The first step you should take when creating your customer journey map is to determine your objectives, Lanman said.

“Before you even [create a map], set your objectives,” she said. “What is the end goal? What are you trying to accomplish?”

Your goal may be as simple as driving more sales, but a customer journey map can articulate many types of conversions. A conversion could be a phone call to book an appointment, for example, or it could be a response to a survey. Clearly define your goals upfront and allow them to inform the development of your customer journey map.

2. Develop buyer personas.

Next, identify and describe in detail the type of customer you are targeting.

“The process starts with knowing your target customer really well,” Lodge said. “Build out a buyer persona to understand their challenges, pain points, and needs.”

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer or customers. According to Lanman, buyer personas are fictional characters with names, occupations, hobbies, and specific needs. She recommended developing a thorough persona for your single most important type of customer.

3. Identify the touchpoints between the persona and your brand.

Think about how your business first comes into contact with a given persona. Maybe your buyer persona is active on Facebook and saw an advertisement, or maybe they’re most likely to encounter you through a web search. Consider as many channels as possible through which a given persona may find your brand. Once you highlight the ideal persona, you can list the potential touchpoints you think your customer will engage with.

Consider how a customer may continue interacting with your brand from each of these starting points. For example, a potential customer sees your Facebook advertisement with the call to action (CTA) “Shop now.” The potential customer clicks the advertisement and lands on your company’s homepage. Where do they go from there? Was that the best landing page for them to arrive on?

4. Track user behavior in the real world.

The answer lies in data. Maybe you find that the click-through rate of the Facebook ad is high, but so is the bounce rate on your homepage. What would happen if you had users who clicked the ad land in your e-commerce store instead of on your homepage? Would the bounce rate decrease?

Ask these types of questions for each stage of your customer journey map, and realize that the answers may change over time. [Read related article: How to Keep Customers on Your Site and Boost Sales]

“Once you’ve created a buyer persona, you can know a bit about your audience,” Lodge said. “If it’s moms between 35 and 50, you can assume they’re on Facebook. … Take yourself through that process. How might they find you on Facebook? What actions do they take? Once they find you, how do you learn about them? Do you create a chatbot? Do you have an ad they see and fill out their info?”

5. Refine your customer journey map.

In asking these questions, refine your customer journey map over time. Never assume your customer journey map is finished.

“Something that’s very common, even for myself, is you assume too much about your customer,” Lodge said. “An educated assumption about your target audience is fine, [but it’s] important to get feedback from loyal customers or people you know.”

When you receive customer feedback, document it and use it the next time you revisit your customer journey map.

What is an example of a customer journey map?

When you’re considering your customer journey map, it can be helpful to review a case study. Nextiva, a top business phone system provider focused on providing cloud-based communications, maintains more than 150,000 customers. [Learn more in our full review of Nextiva.]

Yaniv Masjedi, chief marketing officer at Nextiva, said the process of mapping the customer journey has been underway since 2009 and has undergone many iterations. Nextiva’s customer journey has seven steps that are unique to the company’s client base and business model:

1. Exploring and engaging
2. Convincing and captivating
3. Buying your product or service
4. Onboarding
5. Using the product
6. Getting help
7. Building brand enthusiasm

Nextiva has five buyer personas, each of which articulates a specific job or task that Nextiva can help a client accomplish. Each buyer persona navigates these seven steps differently, Masjedi said. Determining whether your personas, and the assumptions behind them, are accurate takes time.

“We started to profile customers based on the size of their business, but quickly realized size, location, and industry don’t really tell you what the customer is looking to do with your product,” Masjedi said. “We adjusted our personas to really align with the objective a customer has in working with us. What’s the job they want to accomplish?”

The company continually refines the personas, but Nextiva now has a clearer picture of how its customers approach the company before making a buying decision, Masjedi said, adding that the best way to do that is to put yourself in customers’ shoes.

“We personally go through the customer journey and experience it ourselves,” he said. “We literally shop our own product and go through the experience. That’s something we consistently do — not just at the beginning, but as an ongoing effort to consistently evaluate what the experience is like.”

The company regularly solicits customer feedback to ensure the accuracy of its assumptions and to identify gaps in its model and areas of improvement.

Customer journey map best practices

When creating your customer journey map, adhere to the following best practices to ensure it is useful and reflects the reality of how your customers interact with your business.

• Start with clear objectives. Define the purpose of the customer journey map. Are you trying to improve customer service, increase sales, or streamline processes? Having a clear goal will help you focus on the most important touchpoints and identify gaps that matter to your business.
• Identify your target audience. Understand who your customers are by creating buyer personas. These are fictional profiles representing your typical customers, including their needs, preferences, and pain points. This ensures the map reflects real experiences and behaviors.
• Map out all customer touchpoints. List every interaction a customer has with your business, from discovering your product to post-purchase follow-up. It may include your website, social media, in-store visits, or customer service. Be thorough to ensure you capture the full journey.
• Think from the customers’ perspective. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and walk through their journey. Consider what they may be feeling, thinking, or struggling with at each stage. This helps you identify opportunities to enhance their experience.
• Involve your team. Collaborate with employees who interact with customers, such as salespeople or customer support staff. Their insights can reveal hidden pain points and opportunities for improvement that you may not notice on your own.
• Use visuals to simplify the journey. Create a clear, easy-to-understand visual representation of the journey map. Use timelines, flowcharts, or diagrams to show the steps customers take. This makes it easier to spot patterns and share findings with your team.
• Identify pain points and opportunities. Look for areas where customers may get frustrated or drop off. At the same time, identify chances to surprise and delight them, such as personalized service or faster responses. Addressing these can significantly improve satisfaction and loyalty.
• Keep it dynamic and update regularly. A customer journey map isn’t static — it should evolve as your business and customer behaviors change. Review it periodically and adjust it based on new insights, feedback, or changes in your operations.

Benefits of a customer journey map

Designing a customer journey map provides numerous advantages for small businesses. It allows you to see your business from the customers’ perspective, helping you identify pain points and opportunities to enhance the overall experience. By addressing these issues, you can create a smoother, more enjoyable journey that fosters customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. 

A journey map also provides valuable insights into how customers interact with your business, enabling you to pinpoint what’s working well and where improvements are needed. This deeper understanding allows for more effective marketing and sales strategies, because you can tailor your efforts to align with customer behaviors and expectations, ultimately improving conversion rates. 

Additionally, a journey map helps prioritize resource allocation, ensuring time, money, and effort are invested in areas that matter most to your customers. Sharing the map with your team fosters alignment and a customer-centric culture, because everyone gains a clear understanding of customer needs and expectations.

Finally, customer journey mapping uncovers revenue opportunities by identifying moments to upsell, cross-sell, or surprise customers with added value. These efforts not only boost your bottom line, but also strengthen relationships with your customers, giving your business a competitive edge and paving the way for sustainable growth.

Customer journey map templates and tools

These customer journey map templates and digital marketing tools can improve your visibility into how your customers engage with your brand.

• Funnelytics: This tool has a free plan you can use to map customer journeys and sales funnels with easy-to-use drag-and-drop functionality.
• Google Analytics: You can use this free tool to examine internet users’ search patterns. What are your customers searching for on Google, and how can you use that information to reinforce the customer journey?
• Hotjar: This company offers website heat maps to show which areas of your webpage users view and which elements they are most engaged with. For example, you can see which links are clicked the most and determine whether your CTAs are in the optimal locations.
• Lucidchart: With the free version of this simple visualization tool, teams can use a virtual whiteboard to start mapping.

These tools can inform your decision-making and make it easier to create your customer journey map, but you can also map a customer journey using a physical whiteboard, markers, and sticky notes. Employ a method that works for you and your team. After all, if you want to do it right, you’ll be revisiting and revising your customer journey map time and again.

Skye Schooley and Jacob Bierer-Nielsen contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version.