The What, Why, and How of Customer Journey Mapping for Better Customer Experiences
From awareness to advocacy, here’s a closer look at mapping the customer journey
Meet Laura, a startup founder who needs to scale her sales fast to meet investor expectations. She’s not sure how to do it.
Across the country, Jake, a founder in a similar position, has been researching how AI tools could augment his sales team of one (i.e. him) on a budget.
To an AI SDR, both Laura and Jake fit the same sales persona, but with one key difference – They’re at different stages of their purchasing process (aka customer journey or buyer’s journey).
In the first example, Laura needs to be convinced that she needs a sales tool in the first place. For the second, Jake needs to know why your tool is the best and whether you offer a discount.
In today’s highly competitive market, understanding the customer journey is key to turning both Laura and Jake into satisfied customers.
A significant 39% of customers have become less patient since the pandemic, which means you must act fast to acquire and retain business. Luckily, you can use a simple tool to understand and improve your customers’ experience across the board — the customer journey map.
In this article, we’ll discuss the concept and importance of the customer journey and delve into how customer mapping will help you improve the CX for every lead and buyer.
What is a customer journey?
A customer journey is the series of steps a person follows, from understanding that they need your product to becoming your customer and, finally, an advocate for your company.
A customer journey map helps to visualize and clearly see this path. But what does this visualization do for businesses? Or a more accurate question is:
How does a customer journey map help improve the customer experience?
This map has a few uses for business that help to improve your leads and customers’ experience:
- It defines the main customer touchpoints with your business and content, allowing you to focus your marketing, sales, and support efforts accordingly.
- It helps you understand the main communication channels at each journey stage so you can distribute content more effectively.
- It highlights bottlenecks at each stage, which you can fix to improve your CX.
All these things lead to improved customer experiences, more conversions, and bigger profits.
Stages of the customer journey
Every company and target audience can have their own unique customer journeys. They might use the Customer Empathy Mapping Framework, the AARRR framework, or any other approach. Customer journeys can also differ for inbound and outbound leads within one company.
One of the most popular ones is the Awareness- Consideration-Decision-Retention-Advocacy framework, which we consider here.
Awareness
“Houston, we have a problem” can serve as the motto of the Awareness stage. It’s at this point where every customer starts their journey by realizing something is not right or could be better. They’ll start Googling, asking friends, or looking to influencers for answers. Your main task is to help them find the problem, analyze it, and provide a solution via educational content and unobtrusive recommendations.
At this stage, using different marketing tactics that help people notice your brand is crucial.
Suppose a person is looking for tips on learning a foreign language. If you sell online language courses, awareness-level content will include helpful advice for self-education and convincing but subtle reasons why language courses are effective.
Once you’ve planted the idea about courses in someone’s head, you can set up targeted ads to find your customers on social media and help them move to the next stage.
Of course, this is just one example of how you can attract leads’ attention at the awareness stage, and you will use various tactics to reach the goal.
Consideration
At this customer journey stage, your potential customer closely examines all possible solutions to the problem. They’ll compare you with other brands and alternative solutions, so your job is to convince them to stick with you.
If we continue using the example of language courses, a potential customer will want to know the benefits and drawbacks of buying your course. At the same time, your lead might research such options as hiring a tutor or using free or more affordable self-learning materials, like language learning apps, TV shows, and practice books. So, your task is to use different channels and approaches to convey the benefits of your services to your lead.
Decision
At this stage, a potential customer has a few more steps left to become a customer. They seriously consider using a product or service like the one that you offer but have not yet decided to stick with you. This means you can’t relax, and you’ll need to work even harder to get them across the finish line.
A lead will want to know all the details about your brand and service. If we continue with the learning courses example, they might wonder about your approach to teaching, schedule flexibility, reviews, and, of course, price.
Social media and landing pages can be used to give them a clear description of your services, as well as short videos from lessons, educational posts, and so on. You can also use product tours and guides, product blogs, pages on third-party review sites, and any other resources that help your lead find the necessary information.
Honest product comparisons and tailored pricing plans are both useful here. For language courses, you could offer a free first lesson or a free trial. And, of course, don’t forget about email marketing and any form of customer support.
Other crucial things at this stage are perfect customer-sales manager communication and an easy purchase process, as a lead can easily turn to your competitors if something goes wrong. So, your job is to ensure that a lead makes a decision in your favor, and nothing, like a complicated payment process, can interfere with bringing it to action.
Retention
When your lead is officially a customer, your job is to ensure it stays that way.
At the retention stage, the focus shifts away from customer acquisition to customer success. With 95% of consumers reporting that customer service impacts their brand loyalty, the onboarding and customer experience play an oversized role in retention. This is clear when you see how many details in customer behavior you need to pay attention to react in different scenarios:
- Activation: Once a customer signs up (whether it’s a free trial or paid subscription), your first job is to get them to use the product. This means guiding them through onboarding, answering questions before they even ask, and nudging them to explore the basics. Be proactive here, reach out, and ensure they’re off to a smooth start.
- Engagement: Great, they’ve started! But are they really engaged? Are they using all the key features that could give them the results they’re after? If not, it might be time to step in. Send them personalized tips or reminders about features they may have missed, or ask if they’re running into any issues. The goal is to make sure they’re not just using the product but using it in ways that will make a difference for them.
- Retention: Now comes the big question—are they seeing the value? Here’s where you want to keep an eye on customers’ activity. If they’re not hitting those key benchmarks that lead to long-term habits, it’s time to intervene. Send personalized messages that reinforce the value they’re getting or offer help if they seem stuck. You can do it, as you have collected information about customers’ goals and pains during the decision stage and onboarding. Show them how the product fits into their goals, and make sure they see the results they’re after.
Good retention strategies include sending regular emails with valuable updates and tailored discounts and promotions. For example, you can use AiSDR to help with communication at this stage by writing and sending personalized emails to promote up-sells and cross-sells based on previous customer interactions. And thanks to follow-ups on auto-pilot, no customer goes forgotten.
Advocacy
If you do everything right, your customers will move on to recommending your brand to family, friends, and colleagues. You can encourage this via different channels, such as:
- Providing top-notch customer support for general service and technical issues
- Reinstating the value of your solution to a customer via different channels and approaches, from emailing personalized, helpful materials like use cases to sending notifications with statistics on the users’ achievements with your solution
- Inspiring customers to recommend your product by offering referral program benefits or early access to new features
Remember: You should always find a way to please even your most loyal customers to keep them on their journey with you.
In a nutshell, even when your customers are similar (like Jake and Laura), you need to treat them differently if they’re at different stages.
This is where techniques and tools like personas, ideal customer profiles, and segmentation step in.
Sales personas, segmentation, and the customer journey
Let’s sort out the main concepts first.
Segmentation is the process of dividing your target audience into smaller groups based on common characteristics. These characteristics usually correspond to your sales personas — fictional representations of your ideal customers that describe demographics, interests, pain points, and needs.
Both sales personas and segmentation help you clarify why people would be interested in your product and target marketing and sales efforts to suit.
With the AiSDR sales and marketing tool, targeting is pretty straightforward. Simply add it to your sales persona and it will automatically generate tailored copy for the specified segment. This ensures AiSDR will send content that’s relevant and applicable to their journey stage.
Mapping the customer journey
A customer journey map is a visual description of how a persona interacts with your business from the awareness to the advocacy stage. By accurately mapping this journey, you can visualize every touchpoint and understand how to motivate customers to choose and stick with you.
The mapping process has six main stages.
Business goals: Defining why you need your map
When you don’t understand the reason behind creating a map, you might pay attention to the wrong details and only confuse yourself in the end. So, define your goal, for example, to pinpoint purchasing obstacles or clarify customer touchpoints.
Preparation is key: Researching customer journeys
The data for customer journeys comes from external and internal sources. You can use focus groups, questionnaires, or market research to understand how your audience thinks and acts.
Additionally, analyzing customer feedback from reviews, support tickets, and social media interactions can offer valuable insights into pain points and common questions. By layering this qualitative data with quantitative metrics like website behavior and email engagement rates, you get a clearer picture of how your audience moves through the journey.
Step-by-step journey: Defining key touchpoints
Imagine what your leads do to become your customers, what activities they’re involved in, and how. For example, they might read blogs after googling a particular question, watch social media content on their ‘explore page,’ and interact with support services via email.
Full image on the screen: Compiling your research
When you have all your data, draw the journey on paper or, better yet, build it with customer journey mapping tools to create visuals. Include all the journey stages and touchpoints.
Through customer’s eyes: Walking through the customer journey
Step into your customer’s shoes and go through the mapped journey yourself to identify any obstacles and bottlenecks.
Only facts: Analyzing the journey
Using what you’ve learned in a previous stage, analyze how you can improve your customer journey and refine your map.
By mapping the journey for every buyer persona, you get a clear picture of what works and what stages and touchpoints should be improved.
That’s where metrics start coming into play.
By mapping the journey for every sales persona, you get a clear picture of what works and what stages and touchpoints should be improved.
That’s where metrics start coming into play.
Measuring the customer journey’s effectiveness
Considering that a customer’s journey ends the moment they stop being a customer, the best customer journeys are those that last a long time. That’s why it makes sense to measure the success or failure of your strategies at each stage rather than use an overall metric like customer lifetime to see how you’re doing.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most important metrics for each journey stage.
KPIs for the awareness stage
The Awareness stage is all about how your potential customers find your content and whether it’s useful and interesting enough to push them to consider your brand.
Use these KPIs to measure your success:
- Number of impressions is the number of times your content is displayed to users, which helps you understand if your content is discoverable and seen.
How to measure: Google Analytics or social media analytics
- Cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) helps you to understand if a marketing campaign is worth its cost.
How to measure: CPM = Total cost of campaign / (Total number of impressions) x 1000
- Reach is the number of potential customers who could see your content, and it shows whether a campaign’s results are worth the effort.
How to measure: Google Ads, or Reach = impressions/frequency
- SEO ranking shows how easily potential customers can find your content by simple engine search.
How to measure: Google Analytics or similar tools
- Bounce rate is the number of customers who visit your page but leave without taking any action. It shows whether your content is relevant and properly SEO-optimized.
How to calculate: Bounce rate = Single-page sessions / Total sessions
If these metrics don’t meet your expectations, pay attention to SEO optimization, content quality and relevance, and ad targeting.
Metrics for the consideration stage
At the Consideration stage, people analyze and compare your products or services with your competitors. The following metrics will help you see how you’re doing.
- Clicks show how visitors engage with links, CTAs, media content, and website elements, which helps to see if essential data is easy to reach.
How to measure: Social media analytics and website tracker tools
- The click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio between the number of people who saw certain links (usually CTAs) and those who clicked on them.
How to measure: CTR = (Click-throughs / Impressions) x 100
- Cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount of money you pay for each click, which shows if a campaign is paying off.
How to measure: CPC = Total cost of a campaign element / Number of clicks
- Engagement rate shows the involvement of your visitors with the content and whether it’s relevant and interesting for the target audience.
How to measure: Google Analytics, or Engagement rate = Total number of likes, shares, or comments (or everything together) / Total number of followers
Unsatisfying metrics at this stage usually mean you need to work on your content, website navigation, and/or social media presence.
KPIs for the decision stage
The Decision stage is about helping customers make a final decision. Use these metrics alongside your sales figures to measure your effectiveness:
- Conversion rate is the percentage of leads that become customers, and it can show whether you are targeting the right clients, providing them with relevant information, and offering good sales service.
How to measure: Conversion rate = Number of leads / Number of customers
- Cost per conversion (CPC) shows how much you spend to convert a customer.
How to measure: Total cost of marketing and sales / Number of conversions
Following these metrics helps you see where low customer sales could come from either your sales team or earlier journey stages.
Metrics for the retention stage
The Retention stage is about making customers happy and encouraging repeat purchases. These metrics can help you understand if you’re good at it.
- Customer loyalty measures the likelihood of repeat purchases and shows whether customers are satisfied with your product and service.
How to measure: Customer loyalty = Number of customers with more than four purchases per year / Number of unique customers
- Customer satisfaction shows if your customers are satisfied with the service and quality of a product.
How to measure: Ask customers to rate different aspects of the product and service
- Feedback is a qualitative reflection on customer satisfaction.
How to measure: Collect and analyze reviews via questionnaires or review websites
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the revenue a customer can bring to your business over the lifecycle of their relationship with the company, which shows your business’s profitability.
How to measure: CLV = A customer’s average purchase value x Average number of purchases
Knowing if your customers are satisfied and what they want to improve allows you to push the right button, motivating them to stay.
KPIs for the advocacy stage
During the Advocacy stage, you need to know how many new clients you get from word-of-mouth recommendations from your current customers. So, you need just one metric — the referral rate.
- Referral rate is the number of new customers referred to your company by loyal clients.
How to measure: Add the number of new customers acquired by a referral program (if you have one) and the number of new customers that come to you via recommendation
KPIs on how your customer journey affects bottom-line business results
While it’s important to track each stage of the customer journey, measuring overall success gives you a big-picture view of how your strategies impact your business. These KPIs can help:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost spent on acquiring new customers, including marketing and sales expenses. It shows if your efforts to attract and convert customers are cost-effective.
How to measure: CAC = Total marketing and sales costs / Number of new customers acquired
This formula is a basic version, but if you want to dig deeper, you can use more detailed calculations that factor in different variables like advertising spend, salaries, and operational costs. Here are a few of them:
CAC = (Advertising spend + Sales team salaries + Marketing software costs) / Number of new customers
CAC = (Marketing expenses + Sales expenses + Technology & tools + Overhead costs) / New customers acquired
- Revenue Growth Rate: The rate at which your revenue is increasing over a set period. It indicates overall business health and if your customer journey is effective enough to drive your sales.
How to measure: Revenue Growth Rate = (Current period revenue – Previous period revenue) / Previous period revenue x 100
- Return on Investment (ROI): Measures the profitability of your customer journey strategies by comparing profit to cost.
How to measure: ROI = (Revenue from strategy – Total costs) / Total costs x 100
- Payback Period: The amount of time it takes to recoup the costs of acquiring a customer. This KPI is useful in understanding how quickly your investment in lead nurturing starts generating a return.
How to measure: Payback Period = CAC / Average monthly revenue per customer
- CAC:LTV Ratio: This ratio compares the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC) to the customer’s lifetime value (LTV). A higher ratio indicates better profitability and efficiency of your customer acquisition strategies.
How to measure: CAC Ratio = Customer lifetime value / Customer acquisition cost
- Customer Retention Rate: The percentage of customers who continue to do business with you over a set period. High retention rates indicate the success of your nurturing efforts and the strength of your customer relationships.
How to measure: Retention Rate = ((Number of customers at the end of the period – New customers during the period) / Number of customers at the start of period) x 100
Combining the KPIs for all your journey stages gives you a clear and quantitative picture of what’s working and what needs improvement. You can then use this information to continuously refine and improve your sales strategy, personas, and customer journey map.
Create a customer journey map to discover where the gold lies
A customer journey illustrates all the touchpoints a person has with your company. By illustrating when and where touchpoints are located, you can create and tailor content so that it improves the chances of conversion.
That’s why creating a customer journey map is essential for any business striving to deliver an excellent customer experience. With a clear and accurate map, you can create:
- Personalized marketing campaigns that strike the right chord
- Sales interactions that help your leads overcome objections
- Efficient after-sales service that makes customers fall in love with your brand
With a good journey map in hand, you’ll be able to refine your AiSDR personas so that all content generated is relevant to a customer. AiSDR will then generate tailored copy and messaging according to the needs of your needs.
Book a demo to see how AiSDR tailors content based on where a lead is in their buyer journey.
FAQs
What is the customer journey?
The customer journey is the path a person takes from their first awareness of a need through coming across a product or brand to making a purchase and potentially becoming a loyal customer.
Why is the customer journey important?
The customer journey is important because it helps businesses understand how customers interact with their brand. This knowledge allows them to identify pain points, optimize touchpoints, and tailor their marketing efforts to drive sales and customer loyalty.
How do I map a customer journey?
To map a customer journey, you need to:
- Decide on your mapping objectives
- Collect data and feedback from customers at each stage
- Identify customer touchpoints (interactions with your brand)
- Document the journey
- Take the journey yourself or use a different approach to analysis to pinpoint obstacles and problems
- Analyze the map to find areas for improvement
- Reiterate the process to ensure continuous improvement
As a result, you can implement changes to enhance the customer experience by basing your decisions on data.
