In this era of ever-evolving trends, technology and buying preferences, brands need to continuously know and anticipate the needs, motivations and actions of their customers.
And that’s where a customer journey map comes in handy.
By visualizing each step your customer takes from the moment they encounter your brand to when they make a purchase to how they react afterward, you’re able to deliver memorable customer experiences, drive more sales and improve your business processes.
In this article, you’ll learn what a customer journey map is, why you need one and how to build a customer journey map that helps you achieve your goals.
We’ve also included examples and templates along the way so you can easily create a customer journey map for your own business.
Let’s get started.
Ready to build your own customer journey map? Use our infographic maker that comes built-in with professional templates to create a digital customer journey map you can download, share or embed online.
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit customer journey map templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a customer moves through the different stages of interaction with your brand.
The best customer journey maps are detailed and granular, and help you grasp the customer experience each step of the way.
Here’s a customer journey map example for an online course website.
Instead of providing a bird’s eye view of the overall buying process, customer journey maps also take into account how a customer feels, what actions they take and what obstacles they face at each touchpoint.
Below are some elements typically included in a customer journey map:
While the elements above are found in most customer journey maps, there’s no set format you need to follow. Every brand has a unique map with distinct stages and touchpoints, depending on the purpose of the map, target customers and nature of the business.
Also, customer journey maps aren’t always used for visualizing the buying process. You may also want to create journey maps to visualize the sales process or onboarding process, for example.
You can also create more specific maps for processes like returns and refunds, cancellations, creating a support ticket or how a customer navigates through your website.
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Creating a customer journey map can be incredibly useful for any business.
Along with the obvious benefit of providing you with insight into the customer experience in detail, customer journey maps can also improve your business’s profitability, scalability and growth in the long term.
Below are some major benefits of mapping out the customer journey for your business.
First and foremost, customer journey maps help you see things from your customer’s point of view. When you better understand your target buyer, you’ll be able to create and implement more relevant inbound marketing strategies.
This will ultimately result in an influx of inbound leads, and will greatly reduce the costs and resources that go into outbound marketing.
Inbound leads are potential customers who proactively seek out your business because they feel it will solve their problems. Outbound leads, on the other hand, are potential customers that businesses reach out to first, and these people may or may not be interested in buying your products or services.
Pro Tip: A big part of inbound marketing is creating relevant and engaging content. With Visme, you can create, share and analyze all kinds of branded content, from infographics to eBooks to videos to social media graphics — no design skills needed!
Compared to outbound leads, inbound leads offer tons of advantages. These people have actively shown interest in your product, and cost much less to acquire.
Plus, inbound leads are more likely to trust your business as you’re not shoving salesy messages or interruptive ads down their throats.
Bad experiences can cost your business more than you’d think.
According to PwC, 1 in 3 customers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. If you want to retain existing customers as well as acquire new ones, you need to constantly deliver amazing, frictionless customer experiences.
How? With customer journey mapping, of course. Only when you understand the pain points, obstacles, questions and overall journey of your customers will you be able to make the transition from one step to another as seamless as possible.
By visualizing the needs, feelings, actions and buying process of your customers, you’re able to identify gaps and opportunities to improve customer experience at every touchpoint.
Customer journey mapping helps you improve your internal and external business processes, which results in less friction at each customer touchpoint. This results in more customers finishing their purchases as they progress seamlessly through the buyer journey.
For example, you may find that your checkout process is long and cumbersome, and is causing a lot of shoppers to get frustrated and abandon their carts. By implementing a faster checkout process, you’ll be able to reduce the number of abandoned carts and convert more customers.
Think of it like a bridge. The easier you make it for potential customers to progress through the bridge, the more likely they’ll be to reach the other side (i.e. convert into customers.)
However, if there are a lot of obstacles along the way, potential customers may turn back and take another route to get to their final destination (i.e. buy a competitor product.)
A big advantage of creating customer journey maps is you get to identify granular-level problems and frustrations that your customers are experiencing with your product.
This helps you create products or features that actually solve a problem and fit into the customer journey. The result? More successful product launches.
Here’s a customer journey map example from Spotify that helped with adding a new sharing feature to the music streaming app:
Spotify’s customer journey map was used during the research phase, even before the design or development of the sharing feature. It helped the UX designer learn more about the motivations and pain points of Spotify users, and create a feature that they’re likely to adopt.
Customer journey maps aren’t just useful for marketing purposes. They’re also great tools for clarifying the roles and responsibilities of different departments, managers and team members.
For instance, your customers may be getting bounced between the support, marketing and product teams after a complaint. By creating a journey map, you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact problem and streamline the support process so there are no bottlenecks caused by blurred lines of responsibilities.
Building a customer journey map can also help you save costs and direct time, energy and resources into things that actually contribute to the growth of your business.
For example, you may find that most people first spot your brand via Facebook and Instagram. This information will help your marketing manager understand which platforms to focus on most. It will also be useful when you’re planning your annual social media marketing budget.
Last but not least, customer journey maps can help bring all business departments and teams on the same page. Journey maps are usually created in the form of shareable, visual documents, and are typically shared with all employees across the business.
This means that teams from all departments are able to see exactly how customers interact with a brand, what they feel and what their pain points are. From production to marketing to customer service to finance, every team will now be able to set customer-focused goals based on the actual needs and wants of the customers.
This will result in a cohesive business strategy that puts the customer first, with teams in all departments working together to grow and scale the business in the same direction.
Now that you understand the various benefits of creating customer journey maps, it’s time to learn how to actually build one.
Creating a journey map is not difficult if you follow a systematic process. In fact, the more research, time and effort you put into your map, the more accurate it’s going to be.
Below are seven steps to building a customer journey map for your own business.
Before you start creating your customer journey map, you need to know why you’re making one in the first place.
If you don’t, you won’t know which areas to focus on, what problems to look for and how to use your map to its maximum potential.
Even worse, you may not know which customer journey to map out in the first place.
Ask yourself why you are creating this map.
You can jot down your goals using this SMART goals template and share it with your team during the brainstorming session:
The goal of your map will ultimately influence its creation process as well as the elements you choose to add to it. Setting objectives early on will also help you extract the right information from the map and make more focused decisions.
You can’t sketch out the customer journey if you don’t know who your customer is. Creating buyer personas is an essential part of the research phase that you’re now entering.
A customer persona is a document — often visual in nature — that captures the most common characteristics of your ideal customer.
For example, you may find that your most profitable customers are small business owners, male and aged between 30-40 years old.
By conducting more in-depth research, you can find more information on this type of customer, such as their job position, motivations, habits, lifestyle characteristics, income level, frustrations and professional skills.
Then, you’ll put together all of this data and create a profile of your target customer. You may also want to give this ‘person’ a fictitious headshot and name. This document is known as a customer persona.
Here are some user persona templates you can start using right away.
