What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is a series of interactions a customer has with your brand. It includes the following 5 phases:

  1. Awareness: A person discovers and learns more about your brand.
  2. Consideration: A person compares products to see if they are what they need.
  3. Purchase: A person decides to buy from you. 
  4. Retention: A customer makes repeat purchases from your brand.
  5. Advocacy: A customer shares information about your brand with others and recommends your products.

Your goal is to position your brand at each stage of the customer journey with the understanding that it’s never linear. To do that, you need to create a customer journey map that helps you:

  • Understand your audience: Analyse your audience’s behaviours and preferences to offer them the best experience.
  • Identify and optimise touchpoints: See how people interact with your brand and focus on the touchpoints that bring the most engagement.
  • Build your owned lists: Learn more about your subscribers so you can turn them into loyal customers.
  • Make predictions: Use subscriber and customer data to plan ahead and predict behavior.
  • Enhance customer loyalty: Create strategies for a smooth and positive customer journey to boost loyalty and retention.

How to create a customer journey map

Here’s how to create a customer journey map to understand your customers’ experiences and needs across all stages:

1. Define your goals and establish metrics

Define what you want to accomplish with your customer journey map. For example, your goals may be to:

After you’ve identified your goals, match them to an appropriate metric to measure. For example, if your goal is to retain more customers, customer lifetime value may be the metric you focus on.

2. Research your target audience

An efficient customer journey map should be tailored to your target audience and reflect their behaviours, habits, demographics, and preferences. Learn more about your audience by collecting data through:

  • Sign-up forms on your website
  • Social media interactions
  • Market research
  • Competitive research
  • Surveys and quizzes

3. Compare your current and the ideal customer journey

The ideal customer journey meets your customers where they already are, then branches off to trial channels adjacent to current ones. Analysing the current and ideal customer journeys will help you see where the current falls short of the ideal and identify improvement opportunities.

For example, if your brand relies heavily on social media advertising, building a substantial email subscriber base can provide a more direct and controlled communication channel. If you offer exclusive content, early access to sales, or loyalty rewards, you can incentivise people to subscribe and reduce dependency on social media ads.

4. Identify touchpoints

Comprehensive target audience analysis will reveal which marketing channels your customers prefer to interact with your brand on, including:

  • Website and store
  • Email
  • SMS
  • Social media

Analyse the performance of each touchpoint and integrate it into your customer journey map. To identify the most effective channels, compare metrics like:

For example, a high conversion rate from email campaigns might indicate a strong channel for driving sales, while a low CAC on social media could signal an efficient customer acquisition strategy.

By understanding how these metrics influence customer behaviour at different stages of the journey, you can prioritise channels, allocate resources effectively, and optimise your overall marketing strategy.

5. Test the journey

To determine if your customer journey is effective, follow these 4 steps:

  1. Understand your customers: Use customer data analytics to identify trends and patterns in behaviour.
  2. Listen to your customers: Actively seek customer feedback through surveys and reviews.
  3. Experiment and optimise: Conduct A/B tests on key elements of different marketing initiatives, such as email subject lines, call to action (CTA) button placement, and SMS message length to improve performance.
  4. Measure and iterate: Continuously track important metrics across different marketing channels related to customer satisfaction, engagement, and conversion. Analyse the impact of changes made to the customer journey and iterate based on the results.

6. Analyse and update

Your customers needs change over time, so your customer journey map should reflect that. Analyse your map’s performance and make adjustments to offer new and existing customers the best possible experience.

A marketing automation platform like Klaviyo can help you create the ultimate customer journey map and get valuable insights. With Klaviyo, you can: 

  • Research and segment your audience: Identify your audience’s shopping habits, behaviours, and demographics. Segment your audience based on shared characteristics to create personalised customer journeys.
  • Create forms: Use sign-up forms to obtain consent, collect data, and send targeted emails and SMS messages.
  • Craft flows: Set up trigger-based emails, SMS messages, and push notifications to create seamless cross-channel experiences for customers and make their journey even more pleasant.
  • Write compelling messages: Use Klaviyo AI to create engaging content that resonates with your audience.
  • Centralise data: Connect Klaviyo to 350+ apps and platforms to unify data and use it to create unique customer journeys.

Ready to deliver the kinds of marketing experiences your subscribers expect throughout the customer journey? Sign up for Klaviyo today.

Additional resources