customer journey path to purchase

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Customer Journey Design
Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

Buyer's Journey Template
Future State Template
Day-in-the-Life Template

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The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer’s journey, a day in your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have one, I recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics ready.

Don’t have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started.

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

How did you hear about our company?
What first attracted you to our website?
What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you’ve learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. If you group too many personas into one journey, your map won’t accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

Social channels.
Email marketing.
Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

Customer journey map meeting to improve the customer journey experience

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Path to Purchase: What Is It, Stages & Data Analysis

Your business constantly seeks ways to comprehend and optimize your journey from initial awareness to purchasing. This journey, often called your path to purchase , is an important element of your marketing strategy and sales optimization.

In this blog post, we will dive into what your path to purchase entails, explore its various stages, and emphasize the significance of data analysis in navigating this intricate terrain.

What is the Path to Purchase?

The Path to Purchase , or the Customer Journey or Sales Funnel , is the journey you embark on when purchasing. It takes you through different stages and touchpoints, from the moment you become aware of a product or service to the final purchase and beyond.

Understanding the various touchpoints in the customer journey, from awareness through loyalty, is essential for businesses to strategically implement effective marketing strategies and optimize the path to purchase institute. This journey is crucial for companies to effectively engage, tailor marketing efforts, and optimize the overall customer experience .

The Importance of Tracking the Path to Purchase

Tracking the path to purchase is crucial in any market. Understanding how we move from initial awareness to making a purchase provides valuable insights that can improve marketing strategies and the overall experience to drive business success.

Here are several reasons highlighting the importance of tracking your path to purchase:

Gain Behavioral Insights: Self-awareness of your purchasing behavior allows you to make more conscious decisions and understand your preferences. Recognizing influential touchpoints helps you filter and prioritize information, leading to more efficient decision-making.
Optimize Marketing Strategies: It’s important to carefully consider where you focus your attention and allocate your resources. Knowing which channels speak to you the most is crucial for cutting through the noise and improving on the content that genuinely holds significance.
Personalized Customer Experience: Knowing your buying process stage allows you to appreciate and engage with personalized content and interactions. Recognizing efforts businesses or consumer brand marketers make to tailor experiences fosters a stronger connection and loyalty.
Identify Pain Points : By acknowledging friction points in the shopper journey, you become better equipped to provide feedback and seek solutions. This awareness can contribute to the improvement of overall customer experiences, benefiting both consumers and businesses.
Attribution Modeling: Understanding how you attribute value to different customer touchpoints helps you make more informed decisions about where to focus your attention and resources.
Forecasting and Planning: Recognizing patterns in your purchasing behavior empowers you to plan and budget more effectively. Anticipating future needs based on your past behavior aids in making proactive and strategic decisions.
Customer Retention and Loyalty: As a consumer, recognizing efforts made by businesses for post-sale engagement allows you to appreciate and engage with loyalty programs and recommendations. Acknowledging the value of follow-up communication contributes to a positive cycle of engagement and retention.
Adapting to Changing Trends: Self-awareness of your evolving behavior enables you to stay ahead of trends and adapt to changes in the market. This adaptability positions you as a more informed and agile consumer.

Stages in the Path to Purchase

The path to purchase, or customer journey , involves steps consumers take in deciding to buy. Understanding these stages helps businesses tailor strategies for effective engagement and conversion. The common framework includes:

1. Building Awareness

In the initial stage of your journey, the primary goal is to build awareness among potential customers. This involves making you aware of a brand, product, or service. Key strategies of the awareness stage include:

Content Marketing: Engage with informative content to showcase a brand and address your pain points.
Social Media Presence: Experience brands reaching out on social media platforms to connect with a broader audience, share content, and interact with you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Encounter optimized online content, making it easier to discover specific brands through search engine results.
Advertising: Notice targeted advertising campaigns tailored to reach your demographic and increase brand visibility.

2. Consideration Strategies

Once awareness is established, the focus shifts to providing information to consider a product or service. Strategies for you in this consideration stage include:

Educational Content: Access in-depth content highlighting a product or service’s features, benefits, and unique selling points.
Customer Testimonials: Read testimonials and reviews from satisfied customers to build trust and credibility.
Email Marketing: Receive targeted email campaigns nurturing your interest and providing additional information.
Comparison Guides: Explore content comparing products or services, aiding you in making well-informed decisions.

3. Mastering the Purchase Phase

Now, the focus is on guiding you toward making a transaction. Strategies for you in this final stage include:

Clear Call-to-Action (CTA): Encountering websites and marketing materials featuring clear and compelling CTAs designed to guide you toward making a purchase.
Simplified Checkout Process: Experience a streamlined purchase path process, minimizing friction and making completing transactions easy.
Special Offers and Incentives: Receive discounts, promotions, or exclusive offers tailored to incentivize your immediate purchase.
Trust Signals: Notice trust symbols, secure payment options, and transparent policies to instill confidence in your purchase decision.
Post-Purchase Support: Benefit from excellent customer support, order tracking, and follow-up communication to enhance your buying experience.

Exploring Post-Purchase Stages

Once you make a purchase, you enter the post-purchase stages. Your journey involves navigating through the steps crucial for businesses like yours to build customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and foster positive word-of-mouth. Here, we outline the key post-purchase stages:

1. Retention Tactics

After you’ve made a successful purchase, businesses focus on retaining you as a potential customer and encouraging repeat business. Key strategies in this stage include:

Loyalty Programs: Joining loyalty programs offering rewards, discounts, or exclusive perks for repeat purchases.
Personalized Communication: Receiving personalized communication, such as targeted emails or offers based on your previous interactions and preferences.
Customer Feedback: Providing opportunities to share feedback, helping businesses understand your experience and address concerns.
Continuous Engagement: Ongoing engagement through newsletters, updates, or relevant content aims to keep the brand top-of-mind for you.

2. Cultivating Advocacy

In this stage, businesses aim to turn your satisfaction into advocacy, where you actively promote the brand. Strategies for cultivating advocacy include:

Referral Programs: Encouraging you to refer friends or family with incentives such as discounts or bonuses for both parties.
User-Generated Content: Encouraging you to share your experiences through social media, reviews, or testimonials, showcasing real-life use cases.
Community Building: Creating a community or forum where you can connect, share experiences, and become a brand ambassador.
Social Proof: Social proof showcases satisfied customers’ positive experiences and testimonials to build credibility and trust among potential buyers.

Influential Factors in the Path to Purchase

Recognizing what influences your journey from initial awareness to making a purchase provides you with valuable insights that can shape your buying behavior and guide your decision-making process.

Here are several factors that play a significant role in influencing your path to purchase:

Influence on Your B2C and B2B Purchases

In B2C, impulse buying is a significant factor, while various reasons influence B2B purchases and may involve multiple decision-makers within your organization. The factors impacting B2B purchases are diverse and can affect different decision-makers differently.

Building Reputation and Credibility

Your reputation and credibility are crucial factors for you as a B2B buyer. Pay more for services with a proven track record rather than risking experimentation. You likely research an organization’s reviews, policies, certifications, and compliance with regulations to assess their credibility.

Harnessing Referrals and Word-of-Mouth

Trust is paramount in your B2B decision-making. Referrals play a significant role in influencing your B2B purchases. Positive word-of-mouth recommendations and showcasing case studies and testimonials can enhance credibility in your eyes.

The Role of Presales and Support

Customer support is vital throughout your B2B sales process, both before and after the sale. A robust presales and support system can impact your decision-making process. You prefer to buy from those with strong support systems, as it instills confidence that your needs will be met.

Building Relationships and Retaining You as a Customer

Positive experiences with customer support can lead to favorable reviews and enhance the likelihood of you choosing a product or service. Ongoing communication and assistance through a strong support system can make your path to purchase more predictable and contribute to your satisfaction and retention as a customer.

Crucial Data Points for Tracking the Path to Purchase

Understanding your journey from discovery to purchase is essential for optimizing your business strategy. You can gain valuable insights into your consumer behavior by honing in on specific data points. Here are key elements for you to consider when tracking your path to purchase:

01. Source and Referrer Insights

Examine where your website traffic originates.
Identify the sources and referrers that drive the most conversions.
Understand the effectiveness of various shopper marketing channels in attracting potential customers.

02. Analyzing Your Page Visits and App Interactions

Track your interactions with our website pages and mobile apps.
Identify the pages, ad platforms, review sites, and features that capture your interest.
Analyze the duration of your visits to understand your engagement levels.

03. Identifying Your Entry Points

Determine the entry points through which you first engage with our brand.
Understand which channels and touchpoints contribute most to your initial awareness.
Optimize entry points for maximum impact on your path to purchase.

04. Measuring Your Website Content Engagement

Assess the effectiveness of our website content in keeping you engaged.
Analyze your bounce rates and time spent on key pages.
Optimize content to align with your preferences and expectations.

05. Assessing Your Email Engagement

Track your email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
Evaluate the performance of different email campaigns.
Tailor future email content based on insights gathered from your engagement.

06. Checkpoints for Your Business

Establish specific checkpoints in your customer journey for evaluation.
Monitor your progression through these checkpoints.
Implement strategic adjustments based on the data gathered at each stage.

Challenges in Navigating the Path to Purchase

Getting through the path to purchase isn’t always easy. Your business can face challenges that need smart solutions to make sure your customers have a smooth and good experience. Now, let’s explore the major challenges that lie ahead and explore effective ways to overcome them.

Tackling Long Customer Journeys

Customer journeys can be long and complicated. Path to purchase involves three main steps to turn someone into a customer. At each of these steps, there can be many interactions or touchpoints. It’s tough for your business to keep customers interested from when they first hear about a product to when they decide to buy it.

Knowing and dealing with all the different points along the way is really important to keep your customers happy.

Navigating Omni-Channel Engagement

Customers can engage through different channels, and keeping track of all of them accurately is really hard. With so many digital channels, customers expect a smooth experience wherever they interact.

Navigating omni-channel engagement is a challenge. Your business has to make online and offline interactions work well together. To do this, you need to keep a consistent brand, message, and experience across all the different channels.

If you have a website, then you can easily keep track of everything that happens on your website. By using UTM parameters and referrer data, you can trace activities like emails, social media interactions, and third-party engagements. If social media is crucial for you, consider using a social media tracking solution to monitor engagement.

Unifying Data Sources

Data is super important for your marketing and keeping your customers engaged. But, it can be tough to put together data from different places. When your data is all over the place, it’s hard to really understand your path to purchase.

Your business needs to work on bringing all your data together, breaking down barriers between different sources, and using strong analytics to get useful insights from the whole customer journey.

How to Conduct a Path to Purchase Analysis

Conducting path to purchase analysis is key for understanding your customer journey, from recognizing a need or desire to making that final purchase decision. This research method is your compass, systematically unraveling customer behaviors to illuminate pivotal touchpoints and decision-making processes.

01. Surveying Customers at Key Points

One approach to conducting a path to purchase analysis is through targeted surveys . By reaching out to customers after significant milestones, such as post-purchase or after leaving a review, businesses can glean valuable insights.

These surveys offer a direct channel to understand customer sentiments, preferences, and any challenges faced during their journey.

02. In-Depth Customer Interviews

Interviewing customers adds a valuable qualitative aspect to the analysis. By exploring the customer’s purchase journey through engaging conversations, businesses have the opportunity to discover complex details.

These insights go beyond quantitative metrics, which offer a deeper understanding of the emotional and cognitive factors that shape customer choices.

03. Tracking Brand Awareness Metrics

Understanding the importance of brand awareness is crucial in the journey toward a path to purchase. Keeping an eye on metrics such as website traffic and conversion rates gives you valuable insights into how well your brand is performing and how visible it is to your audience.

Brand awareness metrics are crucial for measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts. It allows businesses to fine-tune their strategies using up-to-date data.

04. Exploring the Potential of Behavior Data

Analytical platforms provide valuable data insights for a path to purchase analysis. Your businesses can identify patterns, preferences, and pain points by analyzing customer behavior data. Insights extracted from platforms contribute to a holistic understanding of the customer journey, which guides strategic decision-making.

05. Essential Metrics to Track

It’s important to keep an eye on a few key metrics when analyzing website performance. These include click-through rates, conversions, bounce rates, and the amount of time visitors spend on the site. These metrics serve as important indicators, pointing out potential areas where customers might lose interest or face challenges.

With this valuable information in hand, your businesses can have the power to enhance their websites and marketing strategies proactively. It leads the way for a more smoother path to purchase.

Maximizing Path to Purchase for Customer Acquisition

People expect a lot from the brands they interact with. Brands need to provide personalized experiences when customers need them. As customers go through different stages in their buying process, they look for all kinds of information, from good to not-so-good reviews.

Smart marketers can use these small moments to teach customers about their products and get them interested in the brand.

Target by Locations

Tailor your approach to reach customers where they are. Take advantage of the increasing popularity of location-based searches. Make sure your brand is well-optimized to offer value and convenience, especially when users are looking for products or services nearby.

Help Customers with More Information

Empower your customers by offering in-depth information about your products and services. Be a valuable resource during their decision-making process. It provides transparent and authentic details that guide them toward informed choices.

Think What Else Could Trigger Interest in Your Products

Consider the various factors that can capture attention and generate interest in your products beyond the initial search. Explore unique factors that can attract potential customers to your brand. Identify connections between your products and related categories to engage a wider audience.

Make Use of Customer Review

Utilize the power of customer reviews in shaping purchasing decisions. Showcase positive feedback and ratings on your website, advertisements, and messaging to build trust. Let the experiences of satisfied customers guide and reassure potential buyers, fostering confidence in your brand and products.

Path to Purchase vs. Customer Journey

When distinguishing between the Path to Purchase and the Customer Journey, it’s vital not to confuse the two.

Path to Purchase: This happens beyond a brand’s control and involves the channels customers use before making a purchase decision.
Customer Journey: Specifically refers to the total experience a customer gets when purchasing a product or using a service from a specific brand. This journey enables the brand to track interactions, measure conversion rates, and provide insights for improving your entire experience.

Tracking the Path to Purchase with QuestionPro

When it comes to understanding how customers make decisions, using the right tools is key. QuestionPro is a handy solution for businesses that can follow and analyze the journey customers take before buying something.

Here’s how QuestionPro makes it easy for you to track this crucial journey:

Customized Surveys for Your Business: You can create surveys that fit each stage of your customer’s buying process. Ask questions that matter, getting insights into your customer’s preferences, challenges, and what drives their decisions.
Keep Tabs on Every Way Your Customers Connect: Your customers can engage with you through various channels, online and offline. QuestionPro helps you track these interactions across different touchpoints, giving you a full picture of how your customers engage with your brand.
Real-time Insights for Quick Decisions: You can get real-time customer journey analytics to see how your customers are behaving as it happens. Act on insights promptly, adjusting your strategies on the fly to keep up with the changing path to purchase.
Seamless Integration with Your Tools: QuestionPro easily fits in with your other business tools and platforms. Consolidate data from various sources, making sure you have a clear understanding of your customer’s entire journey.
Turn Data into Actionable Insights: QuestionPro doesn’t just collect data; it helps you understand what it all means. You can use the insights to make informed decisions at every step of your customer’s path to purchase.

Why QuestionPro is Right for You?

Easy to Use: QuestionPro is made so that anyone can use it easily. Businesses don’t need to be super tech-savvy to make it work.
Scalability: Whether a business is just starting or has been around for a while, QuestionPro can adjust to fit the needs of the business as it grows.
Actionable Insights: QuestionPro doesn’t just collect data – it helps businesses understand what the data means. This way, businesses can make smart choices at every step of the buying journey.

QuestionPro is your partner in understanding and optimizing the path to purchase. It empowers you to gather meaningful information, adapt to your customer’s behaviors, and enhance their journey toward successful conversions.

Try it today to enhance your understanding of customer experiences.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The “path to purchase” refers to the journey that a consumer takes from initial awareness of a product or service to making a purchase decision. It typically involves stages such as awareness, consideration, and decision, reflecting the steps a customer goes through before making a buying choice.

The buyer’s path to purchase, also known as the customer journey, consists of several stages that individuals typically go through before making a purchase. These stages can vary, but a common framework includes: Awareness: The consumer becomes aware of a need or desire for a product or service. Consideration: The individual researches and evaluates different options to fulfill their need. This may involve comparing features, prices, and reviews. Intent: The consumer expresses a clear intention to purchase and may start looking for specific sellers or retailers. Purchase: The actual transaction takes place, and the consumer acquires the chosen product or service. Post-Purchase Evaluation: The consumer assesses their satisfaction with the product or service after the purchase. This stage influences future buying decisions and brand loyalty. Understanding and mapping the buyer’s path to purchase is crucial for businesses to tailor their marketing strategies and provide relevant information at each stage, ultimately guiding the consumer toward making a purchase.

Post-purchase evaluation involves assessing satisfaction with the product or service. It is crucial for understanding customer feedback, addressing issues, and building long-term relationships.

Loyalty often results from positive post-purchase experiences. Repeat purchases, brand advocacy, and positive word-of-mouth contribute to customer loyalty.

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What are Customer Journey Touchpoints and How to Identify Them

Identifying and effectively mapping customer journey touchpoints are crucial steps in enhancing the customer experience and fostering brand loyalty. By understanding every interaction a customer has with your brand, you can create a seamless and personalized journey that not only meets but exceeds their expectations.

In this guide we will look at what are customer journey touchpoints, how to identify and improve them.

What are Customer Journey Touchpoints?

Customer journey touchpoints are the various points of interaction between a customer and your brand throughout their journey. These interactions can occur through multiple channels such as social media, website visits, emails, customer service calls, or in-store experiences. At each touchpoint, customers form impressions, gather information, and evaluate their experiences, ultimately impacting their perception of your brand and influencing their decision-making process.

Each touchpoint is an opportunity to delight, inform, and build trust with your customers. By ensuring consistency, relevance, and excellence across these interactions, you can create a cohesive and memorable customer journey that fosters loyalty and drives positive outcomes for your brand.

Types and roles of customer journey touchpoints

There are various types of touchpoints that customers encounter throughout their journey with a brand.

Digital touchpoints : These include interactions through your website, mobile apps, or social media platforms. For instance, the ease of navigation on your website can leave a lasting impression on a customer’s perception of your brand.
Physical touchpoints : These are the tangible interactions customers have with your brand, such as product packaging or in-store experiences.
Human interactions : Personal interactions, whether they are in-person or over the phone, significantly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty.

How to Identify Customer Journey Touchpoints

Identifying customer touchpoints is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle to see the full picture of how customers interact with your brand. Here’s how to identify these touchpoints:

1. Map out the customer journey

Start by visualizing the journey your customers take when they interact with your brand.

Visualize the customer journey from awareness to post-purchase.
Break it down into stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase.
Understand each phase’s significance in the customer experience.
Identify key touchpoints where customers interact with your brand.
Use insights to enhance the customer experience and drive positive outcomes.

To learn more about how to create a customer journey map refer to our comprehensive guide; Customer Journey Map: Definition with Examples . And get a head start on visualizing customer journeys with these customer journey map templates .

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2. List potential touchpoints

Think about all the places and ways customers might come into contact with your brand during each stage of the journey. This could include your website, social media profiles, physical stores (if applicable), emails, advertisements, customer service interactions, and more.

3. Review existing data

Take a look at the data you already have. Analyze website analytics, social media engagement metrics, email open rates, and any other relevant data points to see where customers are currently interacting with your brand.

4. Seek customer feedback

Reach out to your customers directly to gather insights. Conduct surveys, interviews, or focus groups to understand their experiences and learn about touchpoints that may not be immediately obvious. Ask questions about how they discovered your brand, what influenced their purchase decisions, and how they felt about the overall experience.

5. Walk through the customer journey

Put yourself in your customers' shoes and experience the journey firsthand. Go through the process of finding information about your products or services, making a purchase, and interacting with customer support if needed. Take note of every touchpoint you encounter along the way.

6. Collaborate across departments

Work together with colleagues from different departments, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and product development. Each team may have unique insights into customer touchpoints based on their interactions with customers in their respective areas.

7. Document your findings

Create a comprehensive list or map of all the customer touchpoints you’ve identified. Organize them by stage of the customer journey and channel of interaction. This document will serve as a valuable reference point for understanding the customer experience and identifying areas for improvement.

8. Regularly review and update

Customer touchpoints may evolve over time as technology changes, customer preferences shift, or new channels emerge. Make it a priority to regularly review and update your understanding of touchpoints to make sure that your strategies remain relevant and effective.

Why is it Important to Understand Customer Journey Touchpoints?

Understanding touchpoints is crucial because they provide invaluable insights into the customer experience. Here are a few benefits of identifying customer touchpoints.

Improved customer experience : Understanding touchpoints ensures businesses can tailor experiences to meet customer needs and preferences, leading to greater satisfaction and loyalty.
Spotting pain points : Identifying touchpoints helps businesses find areas where customers might encounter difficulties or friction, allowing for improvements to enhance satisfaction. To learn more about customer pain points refer to the guide on “Customer pain points”
Efficient resource allocation : Knowing where customers interact with the brand enables businesses to focus resources on high-impact touchpoints, maximizing return on investment.
Competitive advantage : Delivering exceptional experiences through optimized touchpoints sets businesses apart from competitors and strengthens their position in the market.
Improved customer retention : Creating smoother, more enjoyable experiences increases the likelihood of customers returning, fostering long-term relationships and driving business growth.

Examples of Customer Touchpoints

Let’s dive into examples of customer touchpoints at various stages of the customer journey to better understand them.

Customer touchpoints on the path to purchase

Before a customer makes a purchase, they embark on a journey of discovery and consideration. This journey involves encountering various touchpoints that shape their perceptions and influence their decisions. Understanding these touchpoints is crucial for businesses to effectively engage with potential customers and guide them towards making a purchase.

Social media ads : Targeted ads on platforms like Facebook or Instagram introduce customers to your brand.
Search engine results : When customers search for products or solutions online, they encounter search engine results pages (SERPs) that feature organic and paid listings.
Blog posts : Informative blog content addresses customer pain points and provides solutions, driving awareness.
Influencer endorsements : Collaborating with influencers who align with your brand exposes your products to their followers.
Online forums : Participating in relevant online communities allows you to engage with potential customers and answer their questions.
Webinars or workshops : Hosting educational events establishes your expertise and introduces your brand to new audiences.
Email marketing campaigns : Email newsletters, promotional offers, and product updates keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage engagement from potential customers.

Customer touchpoints during purchase

The moment a customer decides to make a purchase is a critical juncture in their journey. At this stage, businesses have the opportunity to create a seamless and enjoyable buying experience that encourages customers to complete their transaction.

Product pages : Detailed product descriptions, high-quality images, and customer reviews on product pages provide customers with essential information and reassurance.
Checkout process : A seamless checkout experience, including multiple payment options, guest checkout, and security assurances, ensures a frictionless purchase.
Customer support : Providing responsive and helpful customer support during the purchase process reassures customers and resolves any questions or concerns they may have.
Cross-selling and upselling : Recommending related or complementary products during the checkout process encourages customers to add additional items to their purchase.

Customer touchpoints after purchase

The post-purchase phase is an essential part of the customer journey, where businesses have the opportunity to build lasting relationships and encourage repeat purchases. By providing excellent post-purchase support and engaging customers with valuable content and offers, businesses can enhance satisfaction and loyalty.

Order confirmation : Immediately after a purchase, customers receive order confirmation emails or messages that confirm the transaction and provide essential information, such as order details and tracking numbers.
Shipping notifications : Providing regular updates on the status of customers' orders, including shipping notifications and tracking information, keeps customers informed and engaged.
Product usage guides : Offering instructional guides, tutorials, or how-to videos that help customers get the most out of their purchases enhances satisfaction and encourages product adoption.
Follow-up surveys : Sending post-purchase surveys or feedback requests solicits valuable insights from customers about their purchase experience.
Reorder reminders : Sending personalized reorder reminders or product recommendations based on customers' purchase history and preferences encourages repeat purchases.

Touchpoints in customer service

Customer service plays a crucial role in the overall customer experience, influencing satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. By providing responsive, helpful, and personalized support across various touchpoints, businesses can address customer inquiries, resolve issues, and exceed expectations.

Phone support : Offering toll-free customer service hotlines allows customers to speak with a representative directly for assistance with inquiries, issues, or product support.
Live chat : Providing live chat support on your website allows customers to engage with a representative in real-time for quick assistance or answers to questions.
Email support : Responding promptly and professionally to customer inquiries, complaints, or feedback via email demonstrates your commitment to customer satisfaction.
Social media engagement : Monitoring and responding to customer inquiries, comments, or messages on social media platforms demonstrates your responsiveness and accessibility.
Self-service resources : Offering self-service resources such as knowledge bases, FAQs, or help centers empowers customers to find answers to common questions or issues independently.

Tips for Mapping and Improving Customer Journey Touchpoints

Follow these best practices and tips to create a customer journey that delights and engages your audience at every touchpoint.

Start with the end in mind

Begin by defining your objective for mapping customer touch points. Whether it’s improving customer satisfaction, increasing conversions, or enhancing brand loyalty, clarifying your goals will guide your mapping process.

Identify customer personas

Understand your target audience by creating detailed customer personas . Consider demographics, preferences, behaviors, and pain points to ensure your touchpoint map accurately reflects the needs of different customer segments.

Take a holistic approach

Look at the entire customer journey from end to end rather than focusing on individual touchpoints in isolation. This holistic perspective allows you to understand how touchpoints interact with each other and how they collectively impact the overall customer experience.

Be data-driven

Utilize data and analytics to inform your decision-making process. Analyze customer behavior, website metrics, social media engagement, and customer feedback to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement.

Prioritize key touchpoints

While it’s essential to consider all touchpoints, focus on optimizing the key touchpoints that have the most significant impact on the customer experience and business outcomes. This could include touchpoints that influence purchase decisions, drive customer satisfaction, or impact retention rates.

Personalize the experience

Tailor the customer experience to individual preferences and behaviors whenever possible. Use data-driven personalization techniques to deliver relevant content, offers, and recommendations at each touchpoint, making customers feel valued and understood.

In conclusion, understanding customer journey touchpoints is indispensable for building strong relationships with your audience and delivering exceptional experiences. By identifying, optimizing, and strategizing around these touchpoints, you can foster customer loyalty, drive conversions, and differentiate your brand in a competitive marketplace.

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

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There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us.

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

#How the Hotjar team mapped out the ‘customer using a heatmap’ journey using sticky notes

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you.

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

#A customer journey map example from Airbnb, starting when a user needs to book accommodation and ending after their stay in an Airbnb property

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint .

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

#A visual recap of your 2 and 1/2 days working on a customer journey map

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map, start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant.

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

#Website analytics from tools like Google Analytics are foundational to mapping customer journeys

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

#Get real-time input from your website users with Hotjar Surveys

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok.

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

#Use this empathy map canvas template to kick-start your customer journey mapping workshop

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

#An example of a customer journey map template with different stages and themes

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience.

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll take to successfully use your product or service.

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

Digital customer journey stages exposed: From awareness to purchase and beyond

key takeaways.

Understand the digital customer journey, its five phases and different examples

Learn effective methods to optimize throughout the digital customer journey

Discover how digital experience intelligence tools work and take insights further

What is the digital customer journey?

The digital customer journey captures the five steps a consumer takes on their path to conversion, such as purchase. This includes all customer touchpoints where there is engagement–from interest in the product, to making contact with the brand and the further path down the journey to purchase.

It’s important to know that once the sale is made, the journey continues to the “end”—this is where customer loyalty strategies encourage customers to repeat buying from their company in the future and creating referrals to their business.

All of these customer touchpoints are essential to a brand because most customers need to be exposed to and engage with a brand or product many times before they decide to click “buy.” These touchpoints can include both physical and digital marketing efforts—from physical and online ads, to reviews to word-of-mouth recommendations and more.

It’s also critical to understand that within each user’s journey, there are multiple touchpoints, and they may go back and forth between them, zig-zagging towards a purchase. For instance, 87% start their research online , but they may visit a store to see the product, request product information from your website, and then compare the shop on their mobile device.

The importance of digital customer journeys in today’s world

In the traditional world of marketing, organizations started off with a product, did some TV or radio ads, and then customers went to brick and mortar shops to choose among brands and buy a product.

Today’s digital customer experience is vastly different. There are many more touch points to connect with consumers. They are exposed to digital media channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and an array of online platforms (websites, forums, blogs, etc.).

There are also many more ways to buy the product, including through a website, mobile app, in the physical store–or even a combination of these with the rise of click and collect. Now we’re even ordering with our voice via our voice-assisted devices.

The average household today has more than 22 connected devices . Our customer journey—from awareness to purchase—has become one of many pathways and multiple devices.

And each of these devices has multiple points of interaction. From calls and texts to messaging apps, social media, Spotify and browsing on Amazon, the average person spends 5 hours and 24 minutes on their phone each day . And at least 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase using their mobile device over the past 6 months.

Think about the last product you bought. How many times did you interact with the brand online as you did your research? How many times did you visit the brand’s website before you bought? Did you interact with their web chat or online help?

Clearly there are more online touchpoints and digital customer journey stages than ever before, and businesses need a way to follow, map and understand this customer journey from beginning to end.

The different stages of the digital customer journey

One of the biggest challenges for companies is understanding motivations and influences that drive a prospect to become a customer. That information is critical to improving the digital customer journey from awareness through advocacy.

Each pathway to purchase will be different, but at some point they’ll go through these stages.

Awareness : This is the discovery phase. A consumer determines that they have a need for a product and starts investigating solutions. This is when people turn to the web to do research, looking at a variety of content–from articles to blogs to other educational content. This is the time you want to be noticed.

Consideration : During this stage, a consumer will start comparing different solutions and evaluate the pros and cons. This phase may involve visiting your website, attending a webinar, requesting a free trial and other actions to move closer to a decision. Ideally, the consumer is looking at your product as a viable solution to their needs.

Decision/purchase: This stage is that pivotal moment when the potential buyer has decided that your product is the best choice and wants to buy it. They will create an account, start shopping and buy your product. During this all-important decision phase, the overall experience will influence future behavior–the speed of purchase, delivery and communication.

Retention/loyalty: Once the shopper has moved to buyer, this is the time to nurture them to be a loyal customer. Post-purchase, the product should work as expected or exceed expectations and include strong support as needed. It’s also the time to optimize opportunities for future purchases, leveraging digital analytics to personalize pages, offer rewards and other loyalty techniques.

Advocacy: This phase of the customer journey pushes your brand forward through the power of a happy customer. This customer has established an emotional connection with your company, will purchase in the future and recommends your product to others through word-of-mouth referrals, reviews, customer generated content and other endorsements.

To retain customers and turn them into advocates, you need to understand how they really experience your brand or product. Customer journey analytics can help you see where customers are struggling, dropping off and errors across your website or app so you can optimize the customer journey and keep customers happy and build loyalty.

Examples of digital customer journeys

Every company has five stages to the digital customer journey, but the path to purchase and beyond will depend on the product and touchpoints in the process. Here are examples from different industries that illustrate the variety of strategies and approaches.

Retail and e-commerce digital customer journey examples

Online holiday gift purchase

Online cosmetics purchase

Food and beverage digital customer journey example

Online food order from a restaurant

Travel and hospitality digital customer journey example

Leisure traveller journey

Telecom digital customer journey example

Journey to choosing a new mobile phone

Health insurance digital customer journey

Banking and financial services

Internet banking customer journey

Why is it important to analyze and optimize the digital customer journey?

In today's digital age, businesses have to adapt to the changing customer behavior to remain competitive. As noted, customers have access to more information than ever before, which has made them more empowered and demanding. Therefore, businesses have to ensure that they are providing an exceptional customer experience at every touchpoint of the customer journey. This is where the analysis and optimization of the digital customer journey come in.

Importance of analyzing the digital customer journey

Analyzing the digital customer journey helps businesses understand how customers are interacting with their brand online. It provides insights into how customers are finding and engaging with their website, what content is resonating with them, and what pain points they're experiencing. This information helps businesses identify areas where they can improve the customer experience and increase conversions.

Optimizing the digital customer journey

Optimizing the digital customer journey involves making improvements to the touchpoints to provide a seamless and personalized customer experience. This includes optimizing the website's user experience, creating targeted content, and automating email communications. By doing this, businesses can reduce friction in the customer journey and increase the chances of conversion.

Benefits of analyzing and optimizing the digital customer journey

Analyzing and optimizing the digital customer journey provides several benefits to businesses, including:

Increased conversions: By reducing friction in the customer journey and providing a personalized experience, businesses can increase the chances of conversion.

Improved customer experience: By addressing pain points and providing relevant information, businesses can improve the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.

Better insights: By analyzing the customer journey, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can inform marketing and product development strategies.

Competitive advantage: By providing an exceptional customer experience, businesses can differentiate themselves from competitors and increase customer loyalty.

How to analyze and optimize the digital customer journey

Now that we have a better understanding of the digital customer journey, we can explore how to analyze and optimize it. In this section, we will outline several key steps businesses can take to improve their digital customer experience.

Step 1: Understand Your Customers

To optimize the digital customer journey, businesses need to have a deep understanding of their customers. A great way to get started is building out customer personas. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They help build an understanding of your customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors - what you need to craft content and messages that resonate with them. To create customer personas, you need to gather demographic data, psychographic data, and behavioral data.

Step 2: Map Out the Customer Journey

Once businesses have a better understanding of their customers, they can create a customer journey map to visualize the various stages of the digital customer journey. Be sure to read our complete guide to customer journey mapping where we discuss how to create an effective customer journey map and provide examples.

Step 3: Identify Pain Points and Opportunities

With a customer journey map in place, businesses can identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. Leveraging digital analytics tools to identify points of friction at important touchpoints in the digital journey is imperative when trying to identify opportunities for optimization. Further on we’ll discuss how you can leverage digital experience intelligence to surface actionable insights connected to real pain points, low customer satisfaction scores and revenue loss.

Step 4: Improve Website Usability

A crucial aspect of optimizing the digital customer journey is improving website usability. One of the biggest deal-breakers for a potential buyer is the purchase process. Cart abandonment is almost 70% across industries. How can you make it seamless and fast? Offer multiple ways of paying, like digital wallets, one-click purchases and guest check out for new customers. Clearly state shipping and other costs prior to purchase. Activate omnichannel purchasing methods through social shopping and headless check out.

Step 5: Personalize the Experience

Personalization is becoming increasingly important in the digital customer journey. Ninety percent of customers are more likely to buy from a business that personalizes the customer experience . This can include product recommendations based on past browsing behavior, personalized email campaigns, customized landing pages and other ways to show that you recognize them as an individual buyer and value their time.

Step 6: Use Omnichannel Marketing: Providing a consistent brand experience

Omnichannel marketing involves reaching customers through multiple channels, such as email, social media, and mobile apps. Continually assessing and optimizing your omnichannel strategy ensures you’re providing a consistent brand experience across the touchpoints your customers will pass through as they traverse the different stages of the digital journey.

Step 7: Measure and Optimize

Finally, businesses need to continually measure and optimize the digital customer journey to ensure it is working effectively. Having access to tools which enable businesses to easily access the most meaningful insights is essential in a digital era – where the best digital experiences create loyal customer bases.

Below we will discuss the tools you need to get ahead.

The tools you need to get ahead

Typical data analytics can offer useful quantitative data, but digital experience intelligence takes insights far beyond these capabilities for macro and micro conversion points that matter most.

With a comprehensive suite of sophisticated tools, you can optimize the parts of the customer digital journey that will provide the most value to your customers, and in turn, your bottom-line.

The benefits of leveraging digital experience intelligence tools to analyze and optimize key touchpoints in the digital customer journey

There are many benefits to using tools to help you cut ahead and optimize areas that’ll add the most value to your customers and bottom line. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Identifying opportunities to fuel experimentation programs

By replaying exactly what the customer sees, product, marketing and IT departments can test website changes, website content, campaigns and even microsites before they go live. This allows for better workflows and journey optimization.

Site usability monitoring & IT troubleshooting

With 40% of consumers abandoning a website if a page takes more than three seconds to load and 53% abandoning a mobile site if it takes more than three seconds to load, site usability must be fine-tuned. The digital consumer has little patience, so monitoring usability can significantly impact the business. Customer acquisition, conversion rates, retention and even SEO rankings can be improved by analysis of experience and performance data.

Reproduce and diagnose errors

If something goes wrong (even if it’s not visible to the customer), performance data and access to session replays can immediately pinpoint what to fix. This helps with rapid diagnosis and problem solving and eliminates the need to tediously and repeatedly reproduce the error.

Improved customer experience

For the user experience designer, the purpose of journey mapping is to identify gaps and touchpoints in the customer experience that are disjointed or frustrating. These might be:

Difference in experience between devices, when a user moves from one device to another

Gaps and disconnects between content or site categories, where the user might get frustrated

Gaps between channels (for example, where the experience of going from social media to the website could be better)

According to a report from Forrester Research, “Understanding the specific devices, touchpoints and interactions is the only way to know if your digital investments will directly improve a customer experience.”

Most of all, a digital journey map puts the customer at the center of the organization’s thinking. It demonstrates how both mobile and web layouts impact customer behaviors.

What to look for in analytics tools for digital customer journey optimization: the functions you need to get ahead

There are certain features built into most digital analytics tools that will help you quickly understand key moments and impact in the customer journey. They include:

Augmented journey map: Get a visual, “big picture” view of where there are problems along the digital customer journey to identify and prioritize issues to fix.

Session replay: Find out the why of an issue on the path to purchase with capture and review of the entire interaction.

Struggle score: Analyze actions, behavioral patterns, and technical errors that help determine friction points in the customer journey causing problems for users.

Mobile crash analytics : One of the biggest causes of app abandonment is crashes. Find out how, where, and why that happened so you can fix the problem.

Now it’s time to understand where customers are struggling and why, as well as why digital marketing and sales funnel conversions are underperforming. The functions that can help you understand this that you should be looking for when considering tools for improving the digital customer experience are:

You can decide on your own criteria for any marketing funnel in digital marketing, ideally by selecting a specific customer journey map for marketing (or maybe you have a tool that supports free-text search). For example, you might want to create a funnel of the entire purchase experience for all the traffic coming from Facebook. Then you can narrow it down to all the sessions where visitors spent more than 20 seconds on the “Special Offers” page but didn’t click to buy. With this data segmented into a digital marketing and sales funnel, you can start to understand the content marketing customer journey: why people struggle, where and why they are abandoning a transaction, and why they’re not converting.

Customer journey filters

To optimize customer experience on a particular page, try filtering your session replays by:

Mobile device

Operating system

Geographic location

Mouse movements

Customer demographics

Customer segment

Customer struggles

Traffic sources

Amount of time spent on page

These variables, and more, can help you to fine tune and understand who is struggling most, across which devices and locations, what issues were encountered and how to fix them for better outcomes.

A click map shows you on average how many times a specific element was clicked, was changed (e.g. data populated in a field) and how much time was spent on it, within a given timeframe. Use analysis of this experience data to understand if the behavior of an individual customer or visitor is representative of the overall digital consumer behavior on a page or web element and if the issue you’re witnessing in a specific session is a wider problem experienced by many customers.

Abandonment rate indicator

More advanced customer mapping tools can give you an idea of where your customers are abandoning their journey to conversion and how often this occurs, allowing you to create a customer decision journey example. This helps you prioritize steps in the customer value journey to maximize your impact to revenue in the shortest amount of time.

Flexible data exporting

Everyone in the organization who is involved in customer journey strategy needs access to the data–IT, marketing, product, distribution and customer service. Choose a customer journey map solution that lets you export the raw customer journey data, real-time scenario-based data, or even batches of data so everyone has access to the digital truth.

Customer feedback through VoC

An integrated voice of customer tool connects what customers are saying with what they really experienced so you can analyze, prioritize and act on feedback quickly. But the issue is not all customers will leave feedback. In a customer experience capacity, this means you can switch gears and uncover VoC through user behavior and actions of the silent majority (voice of the silent). Leveraging this feedback and data allows teams to truly understand and optimize the customer journey.

Checkout our guide on customer journey maps and how to get started mapping them out .

Asim Zaheer

Former Chief Marketing Officer, Glassbox

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What is personalized marketing?

According to recent Epsilon research , 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers a personalized experience.

This shows that customers not only expect personalization, they value it.

But taking a more tailored approach isn’t just about giving consumers more of what they want, it’s about reacting to complex shifts in consumer behaviors.

Today’s consumers expect personalization, and brands who use data-driven marketing campaigns to deliver this are seeing the results.

What do we know about today’s consumers?

What does this tell us?

These facts tell us more than we think. As digital consumers become more fragmented, and ever-more challenging to reach, they’re also taking more control over the marketing they’re exposed to.

Online consumers are now opting for a multi-device approach to purchasing, which in turn offers another angle to their data and their loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">purchase history , which sites such as loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Amazon , along with various brands use to help determine future purchases, connecting online and loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">mobile app usage to traditional marketing and in some cases, loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">physical stores .

Using loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">data collection to understand an individual’s buying behaviors and preferences is a powerful tool in any brand’s armoury, enabling them to target people on the right channels, via the right device, at the right time.

As consumer expectations change alongside behaviors, businesses have a huge opportunity to use the wealth of information at their fingertips.

Using this to tailor their marketing to their audience, this means improving the loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">individual loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;"> loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;">customer experience , increasing engagement, and ultimately, driving ROI.

Chapter 1: Why personalization matters

Demographic data that groups people according to age, gender, household income, location and ethnicity no longer provides enough intelligence to connect with consumers.

Today, brands have access to deep data that quantifies an individual consumer’s attitudes and behaviors, interests and perceptions, allowing them to go far beyond demographics.

The somewhat lazy pigeonholing of ‘millennials’ is a case in point. As marketing professor, Mark Ritson told Marketing Week UK, “The minute marketers start thinking all millennials are the same, they reject the behavioural and attitudinal nuances of a hugely heterogeneous population and collapse them into one big, generic mess.”

While there are key differences that set each generation apart, there are also shared attitudes and interests that bind them.

Smart brands will use deep insights to identify their audiences’ shared interests and attitudes, while pinpointing the differences that make them unique.

With AI and loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">machine learning forming a key part of how users are targeted these days, this has helped to enable a deeper level of targeting.

Enter micro-targeting.

Micro-audiences came on the scene as a means of segmenting small groups of like-minded individuals to target and influence their thoughts or actions.

It relies on understanding the target audience so well that marketers will also have a very good idea as to how these people will respond.

From first-party insights into what a consumer has searched for on your site to third-party insights that reveal behaviors and perceptions...

Brands can now drill down in as much detail as possible to reach very specific audiences in a microscopic way.

This gives them the tools to deliver content that truly resonates.

This kind of in-depth targeting is nothing new, but ready access to complex loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">customer data is changing how it’s done.

Chapter 2: Knowing your audience

Understanding segmentation.

Customer segmentation is about dividing your customer base into groups of individuals that share certain preferences and characteristics.

This was once the starting point for every brand striving to better understand their target audience, whereby consumers were split into designated groups based on demographic data to drive more targeted campaigns.

But times have changed.

With the help of global loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">data collection and platforms that track consumer behaviors and motivations on a massive scale, it’s now possible to create custom audiences within seconds, and build accurate audience profiles.

These go far beyond demographics, encompassing lifestyles, attitudes, self-perceptions and interests.

The steps that matter

1. Stop segmenting, start profiling

Audience profiling is now the most effective way to define, segment and target consumers in the more per sonalized loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">digital marketing space.

With insights that quantify not only the what, but the why behind consumer behaviors, it’s easier than ever to deliver the right message, to the right audience, in the right way.

This kind of profiling - analyzing interests, attitudes, behaviors and perceptions - is what makes personalization possible.

This ensures campaigns are highly targeted and brands are well positioned to make the most of their ROI, informing loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">marketing strategy from end to end.

2. Creating real-life personas

Buyer personas are fictitious representations of your consumers, created using in-depth insights into your target audience.

These are used by marketers in every sector and can take various forms, helping to put a face and a personality behind the consumers they want to target, painting a more accurate picture of their lives, needs and wants.

Real-life personas add the emotional and behavioral component, helping brands to determine an end goal for each target consumer.

This empowers marketers with the knowledge they need to get inside the minds of their target audience and build the radical empathy that’s needed to make real connections.

loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Third-party data is invaluable for building o ut these personas and backing your assumptions with hard facts.

3. Map the consumer journey

The loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">customer journey is a combined set of behaviors that customers display when they meet your brand, which grows ever more complex with increasing fragmentation across devices, channels and behaviors.

Customers and loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">potential customers interact with brands in numerous different ways, via many different touchpoints, depending on their needs.

Our latest research , for example, reveals that over half of digital consumers are now following brands on loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">social media , and social networks are now the top product research channel among consumers aged 16-24.

This shows how loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">social media is now playing a key role in the different stages of the consumer journey, but there are far more touchpoints to be identified by analyzing the buying process of each consumer group.

Many brands will identify and map several different journeys to get a complete understanding of the touchpoints that matter. To identify these journeys, deep insights are used to pinpoint the moments, dev ices and channels that offer the most potential to put personalization into practice.

Understanding this link between data and communications is the key to building connections that last.

As Mahesh Kolar, Director of Mobility Applications at NTT DATA says: “We believe that loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">customer journey mapping is vital for giving organizations the ‘Aha’ moment when it comes to understanding their digital possibilities.”

Chapter 3: Working with data

Audience profiling.

The first step in achieving personalization lies in understanding your target audience. This means going far beyond demographics to take an in-depth look at their interests, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors.

Audience profiling is about gathering the insights needed to do this.

This is where robust consumer data that quantifies consumer behaviors and perceptions come into play, guiding your brand every step of the way to ensure you stay as close to your consumers as possible.

With tools like GlobalWebIndex that eliminate the need for guesswork, a loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">marketing strategy can meet consumer demand for audience-centric content that’s targeted, personalized and responsive.

This can be applied to your entire loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">marketing strategy from end to end in the following ways:

Personalized marketing proves a brand’s dedication to their consumers. It shows they’ve gone the extra mile to get to know who this person is. In today’s massmedia world, this is an essential step in making real connections." Tom Smith, CEO and Founder, GlobalWebIndex

Turning data into insight

Creating personalized messages that resonate starts with understanding the perceptions and behaviors you want to shift.

Using audience profiling to quantify the perceptions that are blocking or powering repeat purchasing gives you the tools to know what to say.

Brands have access to a wealth of data, but giving this data the leverage it needs to drive meaningful creativity lies in the creation of insight. After all, a fact, a finding or a data point without context is worthless.

The path to identifying an actionable insight that will drive sales lies in matching your consumers to your objectives, and asking the right questions.

Here’s how it’s done.

How to do it

1. Quantify current perceptions of your brand. How can I split my audience into targeted groups that align with my goals? 2. Validate the perception changes that will drive revenue. Identify the perceptions that will drive or block repeat purchasing.

3. Create a message that will change perceptions. Define and test a message that will successfully change perceptions among your target audience.

4. Package this message into engaging formats Turn your messaging into engaging campaigns that will have impact.

Questions your data should answer

To put marketing that works into practice, you need data that will answer the right questions.

Am I targeting the right audience?
What defines this audience?
What matters to them?
What motivates them?
What interests them?
Who and what do they follow?
Where and when can we reach them?
What are their perceptions of our brand?
Which perceptions drive or block purchasing?
How are they interacting with us?
What does their purchase journey look like?
What are the touchpoints that matter?
What trends can we identify with these consumers?

Chapter 4: Getting personal

Tactics that work.

Once you have access to the data you need to create a pen portrait of your audience, you can start putting personalization to the test. While many tactics and tools are used to make this work, some stand out above the rest.

1. Content marketing

The institute’s research shows that loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">content marketing has become an almost universal tactic, with 90% of companies using it in 2016, and even more utilizing it in 2017.

Successful loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">content marketing not only carefully considers the target personas in question, it relies on both loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">real-time analytics and loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">third-party data to understand what, when, where and how will resonate best.

Not only this, today’s consumers expect loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">personalized content . Surrounded by the likes of loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Amazon ’s loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">product recommendations for related purchases, Netflix’s ‘what to watch next’, and Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ service, these brands are setting the standard when it comes to content.

Consumers value content that is useful, relevant and entertaining to them, so the more tailored it is, the better it will perform.

Consumers value content that is useful, relevant and entertaining to them, so the more tailored it is, the better it will perform.

Many brands are seeing a stronger ROI thanks to their loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">personalization efforts overall.

2. Email marketing

loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s playing a more important role than ever in delivering against marketing and wider business targets thanks to a more loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">personalized loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;"> loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;">email marketing approach.

But the kind of loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">email marketing that works for today’s consumers is evolving fast.

Research by The Direct Marketing Association , shows segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue.

Improved segmentation and targeting enables you to have a more personalized approach and, in turn, drive revenue via conversion and improved loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">open rates , while increasing loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">customer loyalty over time.

3. Retargeting

For many, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit to your website. Retargeting is a tactic designed to help brands reach that 98% who don’t convert right away, and attr act loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">prospective customers .

Content retargeting means serving customers with content specific to their needs, interests and journey stage. Tactics can include campaign mirroring, retaining past searches and reengaging through blogs.

Aligning your content in a personalized way allows you to streamline the customer’s experience of your brand throughout their online journey, whether the goal is to sign up, visit, download something or make an loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">ecommerce transa ction.

But while retargeting can prove effective when done right, using unreliable data - solely tied to cookies as opposed to real people - can have a detrimental impact on your brand.

Chapter 5: The authentic factor

Keeping it real.

The continuous rise of consumer power and increased demand for transparency means brands are under increasing pressure to be authentic.

Social media has led the way in forcing companies to be more up front, to be real, and to listen to their customers.

This shift has forced brands to think again, and at the heart of being authentic is being able to demonstrate that you know what your customers think and feel, and that you can anticipate their needs.

By matching their brand experiences to your data, you can show that you care about what they want. This not only boosts loyalty, but offers a human - or authentic - face to the brand experience.

As Ashley Deibert, Vice President of Marketing at iQ Media says: “Those that have embraced authenticity and transparency (Dove, Airbnb) find consumers will do the marketing for them.

Those that have fought it (Uber, Pepsi) continue to struggle to regain footing with an audience who will watch their every move, waiting to pounce when the first signs of negativity arise.”

As reported in Creative Review , people no longer want to be sold to, they want to feel part of a brand’s story. Data that taps into people’s perceptions and behaviors makes this possible.

For example, some brands try publicity stunts and influencer marketing on loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">social media in an effort to achieve huge reach, but those that use data and apply insights can cleverly create laser-focused content and messages, tailored to a targeted group of people.

This audience will respond much more favorably to content they see as genuine, valuable and on-brand. This in turn creates loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">lifetime value with the consumer, as they become more loyal customers that enjoy and interact with the brand's content.

As reported in Creative Review, people no longer want to be sold to, they want to feel part of a brand’s story. Data that taps into people’s perceptions and behaviors, this current form of loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="customer journey path to purchase" title="customer journey path to purchase" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">marketing personalization is what makes this possible.

Not sure where to begin? Start by analyzing your target consumers’ interests and online behaviors in GlobalWebIndex. From here, you can identify the tactics, topics and influencers that will have the most impact.

The reason authenticity is so important today is because people will simply no longer buy from inauthentic brands. The art of spin is becoming more and more redundant." Sue Unerman, Chief Transformation Officer, MediaCom UK

Personalized marketing checklist

Five key considerations when creating personalized marketing campaigns.

Know who you’re targeting by interrogating complex data.
Use consumer data to build out real-life personas of key members of your target audience, and personalize your communications for each group.
Use dynamic content to personalize the customer experience based on customer interests or browsing behaviors.
Find out what your audience wants on social media by using data to discover when they’re likely to be online and what kind of content they engage with.
Bring all your data together to create a single customer view, enabling you to deliver a consistently personalized experience, regardless of touchpoint.

Personalized marketing is only as good as the data it uses, yet many brands are relying on unreliable or inaccurate data to achieve this, wasting budget and tarnishing the practice.

To get it right, there’s a pressing need for a more comprehensive understanding of your consumers - from how they interact with your brand to the bigger picture concerning their interests, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors.

With this knowledge, you can deliver tailored marketing that resonates with the individuals you’re targeting, ultimately impacting your bottom line.

Your next steps...

Most marketers are already using audience profiling tools to get more personalized. We hope this guide has given you some actionable tips on what to do next.

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Customer Journey Stages

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

12 min read If you want to turn a potential customer into a lifetime one, you’ll need to get to know every step of the entire customer journey. Here’s why the secret to customer retention lies in knowing how to fine-tune your sales funnel…

What is the customer journey?

What do we actually mean when we talk about the customer journey? Well, the simplest way to think about it is by comparing it to any other journey: a destination in mind, a starting point, and steps to take along the way.

In this case, the destination is not only to make a purchase but to have a great experience with your product or service – sometimes by interacting with aftersale customer support channels – and become a loyal customer who buys again.

And, just like how you can’t arrive at your vacation resort before you’ve done you’ve found out about it, the customer journey starts with steps to do with discovery, research, understanding, and comparison, before moving on to the buying process.

“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

In short, the customer journey is the path taken by your target audience toward becoming loyal customers. So it’s really important to understand – both in terms of what each step entails and how you can improve each one to provide a maximally impressive and enjoyable experience.

Every customer journey will be different, after all, so getting to grips with the nuances of each customer journey stage is key to removing obstacles from in front of your potential and existing customers’ feet.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows:

Consideration

These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts:

Sale/Purchase

It’s important to understand every part of the puzzle, so let’s look at each sub-category and stage in turn, from the awareness and consideration stage, right through to advocacy:

Customer journey: Pre-sale

In the pre-sale phase, potential customers learn about products, evaluate their needs, make comparisons, and soak up information.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a company, product, or service. This might be passive – in that they’re served an ad online, on TV, or when out and about – or active in that they have a need and are searching for a solution. For example, if a customer needs car insurance, they’ll begin searching for providers.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the customer has been made aware of several possible solutions for their particular need and starts doing research to compare them. That might mean looking at reviews or what others are saying on social media, as well as absorbing info on product specs and features on companies’ own channels. They’re receptive to information that can help them make the best decision.

Customer journey: Sale

The sale phase is short but pivotal: it’s when the crucial decision on which option to go with has been made.

Decision stage

The customer has all the information they need on the various options available to them, and they make a purchase. This can be something that’s taken a long time to decide upon, like buying a new computer, or it can be as quick as quickly scouring the different kinds of bread available in the supermarket before picking the one they want.

Customer journey: Post-sale

Post-sale is a really important part of the puzzle because it’s where loyal customers , who come back time and again, are won or lost.

Retention stage

The retention stage of the customer journey is where you do whatever you can to help leave a lasting, positive impression on the customer, and entice them to purchase more. That means offering best-in-class customer support if they have any issues, but it also means being proactive with follow-up communications that offer personalized offers, information on new products, and rewards for loyalty.

Advocacy stage

If you nail the retention phase, you’ll have yourself a customer who not only wants to keep buying from you but will also advocate on your behalf. Here, the customer will become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, in that they’ll actively recommend you to their friends, family, followers, and colleagues.

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Great question; the two are similar, but not exactly the same. The buyer’s journey is a shorter, three-step process that describes the steps taken to make a purchase. So that’s awareness , consideration, and decision . That’s where things stop, however. The buyer’s journey doesn’t take into account the strategies you’ll use to keep the customer after a purchase has been made.

Why are the customer journey stages important?

The short answer? The customer journey is what shapes your entire business. It’s the method by which you attract and inform customers, how you convince them to purchase from you, and what you do to ensure they’re left feeling positive about every interaction.

Why this matters is that the journey is, in a way, cyclical. Customers who’ve had a smooth ride all the way through their individual journeys are more likely to stay with you, and that can have a massive effect on your operational metrics.

It’s up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, but even besides that: satisfied customers become loyal customers , and customer loyalty reduces churn at the same time as increasing profits .

So companies looking to really make an impact on the market need to think beyond simply attracting potential customers with impressive marketing, and more about the journey as a whole – where the retention and advocacy stages are equally important.

After all, 81% of US and UK consumers trust product advice from friends and family over brand messaging, and 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.

Importantly, to understand the customer journey as a whole is to understand its individual stages, recognize what works, and find things that could be improved to make it a more seamless experience. Because when you do that, you’ll be improving every part of your business proposition that matters.

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

Ok, so this whole customer journey thing is pretty important. Understanding the customer journey phases and how they relate to the overall customer experience is how you encourage customers to stick around and spread the news via word of mouth.

But how do you ensure every part of the journey is performing as it should? Here are some practical strategies to help each customer journey stage sing…

1. Perform customer journey mapping

A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map out a range of journeys that utilize a range of touch points along the way.

One customer journey map, for example, might start with a TV ad, then utilize social media and third-party review sites during the consideration stage, before purchasing online and then contacting customer support about you your delivery service. And then, finally, that customer may be served a discount code for a future purchase. That’s just one example.

Customer journey mapping is really about building a myriad of those journeys that are informed by everything you know about how customers interact with you – and then using those maps to discover weaker areas of the journey.

2. Listen like you mean it

The key to building better customer journeys is listening to what customers are saying. Getting feedbac k from every stage of the journey allows you to build a strong, all-encompassing view of what’s happening from those that are experiencing it.

Maybe there’s an issue with the customer sign-up experience, for example. Or maybe the number advertised to contact for a demo doesn’t work. Or maybe you have a customer service agent in need of coaching, who only makes the issue worse. By listening, you’ll understand your customers’ issues and be able to fix them at the source. That customer service agent, for example, may just feel disempowered and unsupported, and in need of the right tools to help them perform better. Fixing that will help to optimize a key stage in the customer journey.

Qualtrics in action with sentiment analysis

The key is to listen at every stage, and we can do that by employing the right technology at the right customer journey stages.

Customer surveys, for instance, can help you understand what went wrong from the people who’re willing to provide that feedback, but conversational analytics and AI solutions can automatically build insights out of all the structured and unstructured conversational data your customers are creating every time they reach out, or tweet, or leave a review on a third party website.

3. Get personal

The other side of the ‘listening’ equation is that it’s worth remembering that each and every customer’s journey is different – so treating them with a blanket approach won’t necessarily make anything better for them.

The trick instead is to use the tools available to you to build out a personalized view of every customer journey, customer journey stage, and customer engagemen t, and find common solutions.

Qualtrics Experience iD , for example, is an intelligent system that builds customer profiles that are unique to them and can identify through AI, natural language processing , and past interactions what’s not working – and what needs fixing.

On an individual basis, that will help turn each customer into an advocate. But as a whole, you’ll learn about experience gaps that are common to many journeys.

Listening to and understanding the customer experience at each customer journey stage is key to ensuring customers are satisfied and remain loyal on a huge scale.

It’s how you create 1:1 experiences, because, while an issue for one person might be an issue for many others, by fixing it quickly you can minimize the impact it might have on future customers who’re right at the start of their journey.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management Improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, request demo.

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Study reveals the complexity of modern consumer paths to purchase and how brands can make inroads

The modern path to purchase is as complex as the tech savvy consumer. New data from a study carried out by Google CEE and IPSOS reveals just how complex things can get and the steps brands can take to make inroads.

Today’s customer journey is so complex that it looks more like the plot of a “whodunit” than a decision to buy a new jacket. Consumers have more choice than ever before. They research and shop across multiple devices, multiple touch points, around the clock — both online and off.

That’s great news for consumers, but the level of complexity is enough to keep marketers awake at night. Complex and a tad intimidating? Sure, but getting it right can be the difference between your brand and the competition.

The concept of a “customer journey” has been with us for well over 100 years but it’s really within the last 5-10 years with the birth of the smartphone that the level of complexity has exploded.

The research carried out by Google CEE and IPSOS surveyed 4,200 consumers across four categories of products and services — a laptop, a TV, a mobile phone contract, and clothes and footwear. The study was focused on 16+ year old Internet users in Poland, the Ukraine, Greece and the Czech Republic who had recently purchased one of the products or services.

Bridging offline and online thinking

Offline and online activity adds to the already complex picture. Modern consumers move seamlessly between the physical and digital worlds so even if they do end up making in-store purchases, the chances are that they’ve done some prior online research.

On average, only 11% of consumers can be treated as strictly “online customers” and 12% can be earmarked as strictly “offline consumers”, which is driven by the clothes and footwear category — for consumer electronics, strictly offline purchases is significantly lower. Compare these to the overwhelming number of consumers — for most products it’s over 80% — who opt to research online and purchase offline or research offline and purchase online.

The lesson to be learned here is that marketers need to take a more holistic approach to the customer journey. They can no longer separate the digital and brick-n-mortar worlds. In practical terms this means improving communication and metrics when it comes to offline sales on the ground and digital campaigns.

Joining the dots

Despite the complexity, the modern customer journey can be broken down into moments that reveal the how, why and where people are making purchase decisions. The research revealed that the average range of touchpoints for all four products and services was 2.8, with laptops and TV sets having a much wider range.

This makes sense when you look at average costs and how people tend to make decisions when it comes to different types of purchases. Consumers are more inclined to spend more time researching high-end purchases like laptops and TV sets and so more touchpoints are generated.

(Almost) everything starts with a search

Search has become second nature to consumers. People use search in those “I want to know”, “I want to do”, and “I want to buy” moments. For almost all of the products and services surveyed, Search came out on top as the first touchpoint for consumers.

Most touchpoints are self explanatory, consumers go to price comparison sites for the best deals or ask friends for advice before making a purchase. But the study showed that consumers use Search, Youtube and in-store research for a variety of reasons.

Depending on the touchpoint, the reasons range from the simple to the most complex and multi-purpose. Search is particularly complex. People are searching for inspiration, reviews, product attributes and prices before taking action.

The lesson for marketers? Be where it matters most, and be helpful. As the saying goes, content is king but context is queen. Consumers demand and expect useful information as they progress along their purchase path. The brands that can provide relevant content at key touchpoints are the ones that will win consumer trust and come out on top.

The pathway to purchase in a mobile-first world

Today’s consumers are mobile-first. Mobile behaviour adds to the challenge of mapping out purchase pathways but it also yields valuable opportunities for brands to connect with consumers across more touchpoints.

On mobile, touchpoints don’t compete for consumers’ attention, they complement them. People consume more media on mobile which means product reviews on YouTube can complement the in-store experience.

Mobile is the missing link between inspiration and action when consumers move from online to offline purchases. For tech products, over 50% of consumers surveyed used their mobile phones to research while physically browsing in-store.

The lesson here? Think cross-device and provide consistent messaging both online and off. Think hyper-local targeting with push notifications that provide discounts and coupons to mobile users while in-store to seal the deal.

Provide value-added mobile experiences to consumers that help them find what they are looking for, seamlessly and quickly. Use tools like TestMySite to see how your mobile experience measures up.

What’s brand got to do with it?

Empathy goes a long way in advertising. Understanding consumers’ states of mind and motives during the moments of inspiration and action can be key when it comes to conversions.

Of the four types of products and services surveyed, respondents could be categorised into three brand loyalty groups—consumers shopping with a range of brands in mind, consumers shopping for a specific brand, and consumers with no brand loyalty.

Consumers with a range of brands in mind are more likely to take a longer time researching and can spend over a week before making a final decision. Consumers with no brand loyalty and consumers with a single brand in mind are more likely to act faster and take a decision while they are in-store.

The lesson here is that the strategy deployed depends largely on your customers’ brand loyalty. Loyal customers should be guided seamlessly to their product. Similarly, consumers with no brand loyalty want a seamless experience but are less likely to spend as much as loyal consumers.

Consumers with a range of brands in mind want more information before making a decision and marketers need to provide them with the relevant content and messaging at key silos.

Key takeaways: Making inroads on the purchase path

The study revealed just how complex the path to purchase can be, but it also provided patterns and mapped out the how and why of consumer behaviour.

Offline and online are not separate worlds. Consumers expect to travel between them seamlessly. Brands need to meet these expectations by taking a more holistic approach to marketing.
Touchpoints can be segmented depending on industry and product or service. Brands should provide relevant information at each touchpoint.
We live in a mobile-first world. Brands should use mobile to optimise pathways to purchase by aligning cross-device messaging and improving their mobile experience.
Brand loyalty has an impact on how consumers research and make decisions. Understanding consumer intent can help marketers improve experiences and conversion rates.

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Retail customer journey map: Navigating the path to purchase

What is a retail customer journey map?

A retail customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer's experience with different touchpoints, from when they enter the store to when they leave. It illustrates a customer's interactions with the products, shelves, brand zones, or cash register. Retail customer journey mapping is essential because it helps retailers identify areas of improvement and create a positive and memorable shopping experience for their customers. Retail customer journey mapping benefits include increased customer satisfaction, improved customer loyalty, and increased sales.

The retail customer journey can be divided into five stages:

Consideration

This journey provides a detailed view of consumer behavior from the initial discovery to post-purchase experiences, underlining the importance of understanding this path for optimizing sales funnels and driving profound customer engagement.

Advanced analytics solution

Retailers increasingly leverage advanced analytics solutions like DISPL Visitor Insights to measure and optimize this journey. This AI-powered retail audience analytics collects demographic and engagement data throughout the various store areas, from entrance to checkout, helping craft detailed customer journey maps that reflect customer paths and preferences. These insights are essential for retailers striving to enhance the customer experience, boost dwell times, and significantly augment overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. By integrating such technologies, retailers can navigate the complex landscape of customer journey mapping, ultimately leading to a more refined and effective customer engagement strategy.

The stages of the retail customer journey

Navigating the retail customer journey involves understanding each customer's distinct stages, from initial awareness to becoming a brand advocate. This journey is crucial for crafting strategies to enhance retail customer experience and engagement. Here's a breakdown of the stages:

Objective: Make potential customers aware of the store or products.
Tools: One effective way to promote your brand, highlight special offers, or showcase new products is to use digital signage at strategic locations such as storefronts or high-traffic areas within malls. By utilizing audience analytics , you can tailor the content based on the demographics of your target audience and optimize it for times when they are most likely to be present. Another simple yet effective approach is to frequently update the content displayed on the digital screen and track which ads attract more visitors and positively impact sales.
Objective: The aim is to establish a welcoming environment that encourages visitors to browse the available products.
Tools: To achieve this, you must focus on several aspects, such as appealing visual merchandising, creating a comfortable space, providing straightforward navigation, and hiring friendly staff. If the customer feels relaxed and satisfied, they are likelier to show interest and attentiveness towards exploring the products displayed on the shelves.
Objective: Encourage customers to consider the products or services offered by the store and assist them in making a purchase decision.
Tools: To help customers make an informed decision, targeted digital signage can be used in high-decision areas. These signages can compare products, show customer testimonials, or offer limited-time deals to nudge the decision. Analyzing customer data makes it possible to identify which content works best and optimize it in real time. Additionally, interactive kiosks can be deployed inside the store, allowing customers to explore product ranges, read reviews, or see products in action.
Objective: Streamline the purchase process and make it as effortless as possible for customers.
Tools: Leverage digital signage technology at the point of sale to reduce perceived wait times. Also, queue management systems that integrate with digital signage should be implemented to manage customer flow and improve service times. Use audience analytics to determine peak times and adjust staffing accordingly.
Objective: Encourage repeat visits and foster loyalty.
Tools: Use tablets to gather customer feedback and utilize negative feedback to enhance products and services, ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Challenges in data collection and analysis

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool that can help businesses understand the customer experience from start to finish. However, creating a customer journey map can be complex and challenging.

Gathering data can take time and effort

There are different ways to collect data, including social media analytics and surveys. Surveys help determine the number of people who know about your store and those who have made purchases. Similarly, analyzing social media reviews provides valuable information on customer perceptions. However, these methods may only sometimes be entirely accurate and can be expensive and time-consuming.

Interpreting data can be ambiguous

Even when businesses have gathered data, interpreting it can be ambiguous. There may be multiple interpretations of the data, and knowing which interpretation is the most accurate can be challenging.

The journey is constantly changing

Customer behavior and expectations constantly evolve, meaning the customer journey is always changing. This means businesses must continually update their customer journey map to ensure it remains accurate and relevant.

Innovative solution

Businesses can benefit from using a tool like DISPL analytics, which collects data from sensors installed in physical stores. These sensors gather information on visitor numbers, demographics, conversion rates, time spent in the store, and popular zones. All the collected data is presented in a single dashboard, making it easier for businesses to make informed decisions based on the data. DISPL analytics solves several problems at once:

Simplify the data collection process.
Make it easier to interpret.
Update the data promptly.

How to create a customer journey map

Building a customer journey map for your in-store experience can help you identify pain points and areas for improvement in the customer journey. By understanding your customers, mapping out their journey, and identifying pain points, you can develop solutions to improve the overall experience and create a positive and memorable shopping experience for your customers.

Define your customer personas

You need to understand your customers before you can map out a customer journey. Define your customer personas based on demographics, behaviors, and needs.

Identify touchpoints

Think about all the touchpoints a customer has, from entering the store to browsing the products, making a purchase, and leaving. Identify all the different touchpoints and interactions a customer has in-store.

Map out the journey

Once you have identified all the touchpoints, you can map the customer journey. Start with the customer entering the store and map out each touchpoint and interaction until they leave.

Identify pain points

As you map out the customer journey, identify any pain points or areas where the customer experience could be improved. This could be anything from long wait times at the checkout to difficulty finding products in-store.

Develop solutions

Once you have identified pain points, develop solutions to improve the customer experience. This could be anything from adding more staff to the store floor to improve customer service or optimizing the store layout to make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for.

Test and iterate

Once you have developed solutions, test them out and see how they impact the customer experience. Iterate and make changes as needed to improve the in-store experience for your customers continually.

How to optimize a customer journey map

When optimizing a customer journey path, it's crucial to analyze each touchpoint to identify possible problems and find solutions to create a more positive and successful customer experience. Here are some examples:

Store department

Possible problems : Low footfall, disorganized layout, lack of product information.
Solution : Rearrange the department to increase foot traffic, improve store layout, and ensure all products are easily accessible.
Possible problems : Lack of customer engagement, low brand awareness, ineffective product displays.
Solution : Create a more interactive brand zone, provide informative product displays, and offer promotions or discounts to increase engagement.

Screen with content

Possible problems : Low engagement, uninteresting content, lack of relevance to the customer.
Solution : Measure engagement to understand customer preferences, improve the quality of the content, tailor it to the customer's interests and needs, and make it more interactive and engaging.

Cash register

Possible problems : Long wait times, confusion about payment options, understaffing at the cash desk.
Solution : Add more cash registers, provide clear payment instructions, and manage staff efficiently based on traffic data.

Tablet with feedback form

Possible problems : Low response rate, difficulty finding, lack of award.
Solution : Make the tablet more visible and accessible, provide clear instructions, and offer incentives for giving feedback.

By analyzing each touchpoint and identifying possible problems, businesses can find solutions to create a more positive and successful customer journey path. Whether moving the touchpoint to another place or changing its look, shape, or content, there are always ways to improve the customer experience.

How DISPL Visitor Insights can help retailers

DISPL Visitor Insights is revolutionizing the way retailers understand and engage with their customers, offering an audience analytics solution that captures comprehensive demographic and engagement data. This tool is instrumental in creating detailed retail customer journey paths from entry through different store areas to check out and uncover insights into lead-to-sale conversions and the most attractive in-store locations. Here's how DISPL Visitor Insights can empower retailers:

Visitor demographics

DISPL analytics can help retailers collect data on visitor demographics, such as age and gender. This data can help retailers understand their customer base and create customer personas to guide their customer journey-mapping efforts.

Dwell time

DISPL analytics can track the time visitors spend in the store and at different locations within the store. This can help retailers understand which areas of the store are most attractive and identify areas where visitors spend less time. This data can be used to optimize the store layout and improve the overall customer experience.

Engagement level

DISPL Analytics is a tool that can help you keep track of visitor engagement at various touch points such as brand zones, content screens, and more. You can get insights into which of your touchpoints is more effective by analyzing the data on the amount of time visitors spend looking at it. For instance, the graph shows the distribution of visitors by the time they spent at a particular touchpoint.

Long queues

One way to better manage visitor flow in a store is to install a sensor near the checkout area. This will allow you to track how much time visitors spend waiting in line. With this information, you can offer special promotions such as morning discounts to reduce wait times during peak hours. Additionally, it will help you optimize the number of employees needed to support the store's operations.

By exploring the retail customer journey, we have highlighted the importance of understanding every interaction along the path to purchase to enhance customer experience and loyalty. Innovative tools like DISPL Visitor Insights can provide valuable insights to retailers, empowering them to create an environment that anticipates customer needs. This results in an engaging and satisfying shopping experience, leading to increased dwell times, improved conversion rates, and the development of customers into brand advocates.

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

A customer experiences an interaction that exemplifies a great customer journey experience.

Businesses need to understand their customers to increase engagement, sales, and retention. But building an understanding with your customers isn’t easy.

The customer journey is the road a person takes to convert, but this journey isn’t always obvious to business owners. Understanding every step of that journey is key to business success. After reading this article, you’ll understand the customer journey better and how to use it to improve the customer experience while achieving your business goals.

This post will discuss:

What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

Use the customer journey map to optimize the customer experience, what is a customer journey.

The customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

Giving customers a positive customer experience is important for getting customers to trust a business, so optimizing the customer journey has never mattered more. By mastering the customer journey, you can design customer experiences that will lead to better customer relationships, loyalty, and long-term retention .

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

The stages of the customer’s journey are different from the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer. The better this experience is for customers at each stage, the more likely your leads are to stick around.

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams optimize for these five stages of the customer journey:

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand and products. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for pens for left-handed people, their customer journey begins when they’re first aware of your brand’s left-handed pen.

At this stage, potential customers learn about your business via web content, social media, influencers, and even their friends and family. However, this isn’t the time for hard sells. Customers are simply gathering information at this stage, so you should focus first on answering their questions and building trust.

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to their problem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

Consideration-stage customers want to see product features that lean heavily toward solving problems and content that doesn’t necessarily push a sale. At this stage, businesses need to position their solution as a better alternative. For example, a nutrition coaching app might create content explaining the differences between using the app and working with an in-person nutritionist — while subtly promoting the benefits of choosing the app.

3. Purchase

The purchase stage is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers are ready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

As a business, it’s your job to persuade shoppers at this stage to buy from you. Provide information on pricing, share comparison guides to showcase why you’re the superior option, and set up abandoned cart email sequences.

4. Retention

The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

The key to the retention stage is to maintain positive, engaging relationships between your brand and its customers. Try strategies like regular email outreach, coupons and sales, or exclusive communities to encourage customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers are so delighted with your products and services that they spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

Customer journeys don’t have a distinct end because brands should always aim to please even their most loyal customers. In the advocacy stage of the customer journey, you can offer referral bonuses, loyalty programs, and special deals for your most active customers to encourage further advocacy.

Being aware of the customer journey helps shed more light on your target audience’s expectations and needs. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. This means optimizing the customer journey will not only encourage your current customers to remain loyal but will also make you more competitive in acquiring new business.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

The benefits that come from knowing the customer journey

Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.
Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing on only the most effective channels.
Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.
Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.
Increase customer engagement. Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% of customers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.
Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.
Generate more ROI. You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7% .
Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

Customer-focused companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren't

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Businesses shouldn’t use a rigid, one-size-fits-all customer journey map. Instead, they should plan flexible, individual types of customer journeys — whether they’re based on a certain demographic or on individual customer personas. To design the most effective customer journey map, your brand needs to understand a customer’s:

Actions. Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look for common patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.
Motivations. Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at every stage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.
Questions. Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of the customer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.
Pain points. Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by just gathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

Customer journey touchpoints

Every stage of the customer journey should also include touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels. A customer’s actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will differ at each stage and at each touchpoint.

For example, a customer searching for a fishing rod and reading posts about how they’re made will have very different motivations and questions from when later comparing specs and trying to stay within budget. Likewise, that same customer will have different pain points when calling customer service after buying a particular rod.

Brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2-7%

It might sound like more work, but mapping the entire customer journey helps businesses create a better customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer’s interaction with your brand.

Before jumping into the steps of how to create the customer journey map, first be clear that your customer journey map needs to illustrate the following:

Customer journey stages. Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.
Touchpoints. Log the most common touchpoints customers have at every stage. For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.
The full customer experience. Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.
Your brand’s solutions. Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content. With these necessary elements in mind, creating an effective customer journey map is a simple three-step process.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

Gather and analyze customer data. Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.
Segment customers into specific buying groups. Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.
Build the personas. Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

For example, ClearVoice created a buyer persona called “John The Marketing Manager.” The in-depth persona details the target customer’s pain points, pet peeves, and potential reactions to help ClearVoice marketers create more customer-focused experiences.

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

Every customer’s experience is different, but these touchpoints most commonly line up with each stage of the customer journey:

Awareness. Advertising, social media, company blog, referrals from friends and family, how-to videos, streaming ads, and brand activation events.
Consideration. Email, sales calls, SMS, landing pages, and reviews.
Purchase. Live chat, chatbots, cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and product print inserts.
Retention. Thank you emails, product walkthroughs, sales follow-ups, and online communities.
Advocacy. Surveys, loyalty programs, and in-person events.

Leave no stone unturned. Logging the most relevant touchpoints at each stage eliminates blind spots and ensures your brand is there for its customers, wherever they choose to connect with you.

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint. Every touchpoint needs to consider the customer’s:

Actions. Describe how the customer got to this touchpoint and what they’re going to do now that they’re here.
Motivations. Specify how the customer feels at this moment. Are they frustrated, confused, curious, or excited? Explain why they feel this way.
Questions. Every customer has questions. Anticipate the questions someone at this stage and touchpoint would have — and how your brand can answer those questions.
Pain points. Define the problem the customer has — and how you can solve that problem at this stage. For example, imagine you sell women’s dress shoes. You’re focusing on the buyer persona of a 36-year-old Canadian woman who works in human resources. Her touchpoints might include clicking on your Facebook ad, exploring your online shop, but then abandoning her cart. After receiving a coupon from you, she finally buys. Later, she decides to exchange the shoes for a different color. After the exchange, she leaves a review. Note how she acts at each of these touchpoints and detail her likely pain points, motivations, and questions, for each scenario. Note on the map where you intend to respond to the customer’s motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions. If you can create custom-tailored solutions for every stage of the funnel, that’s even better.

A positive customer experience is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions. By mapping your customers’ motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions, you’ll find opportunities to improve the customer experience. When you truly address their deepest needs, you’ll increase engagement and generate more positive reviews.

Follow these strategies to improve the customer experience with your customer journey map:

Prioritize objectives. Identify the stages of the customer journey where your brand has the strongest presence and take advantage of those points. For example, if leads at the consideration stage frequently subscribe to your YouTube channel, that gives you more opportunities to connect with loyal followers.
Use an omnichannel approach to engage customers. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to gather information and create a more holistic view of the customer journey. This allows you to personalize the customer experience on another level entirely. Use an omnichannel analytics solution that allows you to capture and analyze the true cross-channel experience.
Personalize interactions at every stage. The goal of mapping the customer journey is to create more personalized, helpful experiences for your audience at every stage and touchpoint. For example, with the right data you can personalize the retail shopping experience and customer’s website experience.
Cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. When consumer trust is low, brands have to work even harder to earn their customers’ trust. Back up your marketing promises with good customer service, personalized incentives, and loyalty programs.

Getting started with customer journeys

Customer journeys are complicated in an omnichannel environment, but mapping these journeys can help businesses better understand their customers. Customer journey maps help you deliver the exact experience your customers expect from your business while increasing engagement and sales.

When you’re ready to get started, trace the interactions your customers have at each stage of their journey with your brand. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics — a service built on Adobe Experience Platform — can break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization let companies make better decisions with a holistic view of their business and the context behind every customer action.

Learn more about Customer Journey Analytics by watching the overview video .

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/introducing-adobes-customer-journey-maturity-model

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/create-customer-journey-maps

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-customer-journey-map

A customer experiences an interaction that exemplifies a great customer journey experience. card image

Path to Purchase

The 'Path to Purchase' is a marketing term that describes the customer's journey from recognizing a need for a product or service, to the final act of purchase.

The 'Path to Purchase' is a term used in marketing to describe the customer's journey from the initial stage of recognizing a need for a product or service, to the final act of making a purchase. This journey can include several touchpoints such as product discovery, research, comparison, and decision-making.

Usage and Context

In the context of digital marketing, the path to purchase is critical for understanding consumer behavior. It provides insights into how customers interact with a brand or product before they make a purchase. This information can be used to optimize marketing strategies, tailor advertising campaigns, and improve the overall customer experience.

What are the stages of the Path to Purchase?

The typical stages of the Path to Purchase are awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, and loyalty.

How can businesses leverage the Path to Purchase?

Businesses can leverage the Path to Purchase by understanding their customer's journey and tailoring their marketing and sales strategies accordingly.

Related Software

Several software tools can help businesses map and analyze the Path to Purchase, including Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and HubSpot .

Understanding the Path to Purchase can offer several benefits. It can help businesses identify potential barriers to purchase, optimize their marketing efforts, improve customer engagement, and ultimately drive sales.

In conclusion, the Path to Purchase is a valuable tool for businesses seeking to understand and optimize their customer's journey. By leveraging this concept, businesses can improve their marketing strategies and enhance the customer experience.

Related Terms

Ai customer experience consultant, cx (customer experience), cxm (customer experience management), conversion funnel, conversion funnel optimization, customer experience analyst, customer experience automation, customer experience consultant, customer experience coordinator, customer experience course, customer experience designer, customer experience director, customer experience executive, customer experience improvement director, customer experience improvement manager, customer experience improvement specialist, customer experience improvement strategist, customer experience manager, customer experience mapping, customer experience officer, customer experience programs, customer experience project manager, customer experience specialist, customer experience strategist, customer experience testing, customer experience training, customer experience training courses, customer experience transformation manager, customer loyalty, customer loyalty analyst, customer loyalty consultant, customer loyalty director, customer loyalty manager, customer loyalty specialist, customer loyalty strategist, digital customer experience job.

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The 5 Step Guide: Evolving Your Customer Journey Strategy

What can brands do in order to put up a fight against growing influences and depleting attention spans? It starts with taking a long, hard look in the mirror.

How many times do you change your mind a day?

If you’re standing in the grocery store staring at 35 different types of shampoo and conditioner, how many do you actually consider before making the final decision?

Have you ever wondered why you only consider 3-5 brands? What makes those brands so special?

No? Well, we have.

Today we published a guide that looks at the evolution of the customer journey and how brands can do a better job at understanding where their customers are in this process.

As consumers, we’ve become more informed and ultimately less trustworthy of brands. From advertising to family and friends, the number of influences which affect our decisions is growing day on day.

So what can brands do in order to put up a fight against these growing influences and depleting attention spans?

Well, it starts with taking a long, hard look in the mirror.

1.The brand

No matter what market you’re in, I’m almost certain in saying there’s fierce competition. Standing out is getting harder and harder, but brands are looking to new ways of reinventing themselves that align more closely with the modern customer journey. Chieu Cao, CMO at Perkbox, explains;

“Today you also need to factor in the B2B2C approach, where you’re not directly targeting the customer but rather the end user. This can sometimes turn into a very powerful tool to differentiate yourself from the competition. In fact, it’s what we do here at Perkbox. Employee engagement is a very well-established industry. We’ve come in and created a different way of looking at it. We create pull from employees where they request employers to launch Perkbox. By focusing on keeping employees engaged, we ensure employers win. In that way, we’re B2B as we look to partner with business owners, HR departments and decision makers, but through our B2C brand because we want to connect directly with users. This has helped us create an exciting brand, one that employees look forward to using, and has been really important to our growth.”

Think about Trader Joe’s. For anyone that has not been to Trader Joe’s, let me assure you it is the nicest grocery shopping experience you will ever have. They dedicate themselves to making sure every shopper has a positive exp erience. This ranges from always being on hand to answer questions to handing out treats when the queues get a little long.

Even though it’s just another grocery store, the brand have created space in the market by being better than anyone else at one thing in particular.

2. Personas

If customers are the ones buying our products or services, then surely we should try to understand more about these people? Seems simple, but big brands still fail to get this stage of the process right.

Investing in persona-based marketing is not something you will regret. Don’t just focus on demographics, look the shared values and shared objectives of each group. What are the common threads that your can use to reach them more effectively?

There are a few ways to discern this information. Firstly, talk to them. Next do some research, look at your existing database, use social intelligence tools like Brandwatch Analytics to get a better (unbiased) view of your target and current customers.

3. Initial consideration

Brands have little control over this stage, as it is directed predominantly but the customer. When a need or want is determined by the customer, they will almost automatically have an initial set of brands that they will consider.

This initial consideration set can be influenced by any number of factors; previous exposure, friends and family, price, accessibility. However, if your brand is confident in the previous two steps, then the chances of entering this set are far greater.

4. Active consideration

Woo! You’ve progressed onto the next stage. You, and some other lucky brands are the chosen few. Don’t panic, you’ve prepared for this.

McKinsey reports that two-thirds of marketing touch points at this stage are customer-driven.

There are few ways to combat this:

Be conscious of your brand online

Having a real-time view of what your customers, and everyone else, is saying about your brand will allow you to spot opportunities or identify possible risks before they happen. Products like Brandwatch Vizia enable you to maintain an always-on approach to your customers and marketing.

Look after your website

You website could be the turning point for turing a prospective customer into a actual customers. That said, be sure you’re putting your best foot forward. Make sure everything is up to date and ensure it’s as easy as possible for people to find what they’re looking for.

Invest in influencer marketing

In order to succeed with influencer marketing , brands must ensure that they are getting return on their investment.

While this is tricky to measure, there’s no point in investing crazy budget on influencers that have no actual influence on the desired target groups.

5. Post-purchase

Congratulations!

You have won another customer, but some may argue that this is when the hard work begins. Drive the customer experience in order to foster long-term relationships, and hopefully create brand advocates.

For this strategy to be successful, it must have buy-in across the organization. The sooner there is alignment on customer-centric strategies and decision-making, the sooner your brand will reap the rewards.

The more you get to know about your customers, the easier it will be to drive the customer experience by reaching them in the right place, at the right time.

Read our guide for in-depth details on how your brand can start to leverage customer journey marketing.

Emma Shanahan

Former Brandwatch Employee

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What is omnichannel marketing?

Picture this: you’re browsing online for some new work clothes, and you add something to your virtual cart but ultimately decide not to buy it. Then later, you see an ad on social media for the abandoned garment. Some scratch their heads at this, but it’s actually an example of omnichannel marketing.

The prefix “omni” means “all,” and “channel” is a reference to the many ways customers might interact with a company—in physical stores, by surfing the web, on social media, and in emails, apps, SMS, and other digital spaces. And this omnichannel approach can be a powerful way to meet your customers where they are, providing them good service in line with their preferences and needs. (Note that, in this article, we use the terms “customers,” “consumers,” and “shoppers” interchangeably in referring to omnichannel marketing in both B2B and B2C contexts.)

More and more, customers move across all channels—in person, online, and beyond—to get what they want. But not every customer is looking for the same thing, and omnichannel marketing acknowledges that. Some people want more services for certain transactions; others prefer low-touch, 24/7 interactions. Effective omnichannel marketing , then, happens when companies provide a set of seamlessly integrated channels, catering to customer preferences, and steer them to the most efficient solutions.

So why is omnichannel marketing important? Research on the omnichannel experience shows more than half of B2C customers engage with three to five channels each time they make a purchase or resolve a request. And the average customer looking to make a single reservation for accommodations (like a hotel room) online switched nearly six times between websites and mobile channels. If these customers encounter inconsistent information or can’t get what they need, they may lose interest in a brand’s products or services.

And this can translate into business outcomes. Omnichannel customers shop 1.7 times more than shoppers who use a single channel. They also spend more.

Sometimes the term omnichannel is used in the context of customer service or customer experience . And it’s also used as a descriptor of other elements that go into supporting an organization’s omnichannel efforts—for instance, omnichannel supply chains , which is shorthand for an approach in which companies ensure that their supply chains are optimally set up to support omnichannel marketing efforts.

What are examples of omnichannel?

Omnichannel approaches are commonly used in retail (both B2B and B2C ), but you’ll also find it in healthcare and other spaces. Medtech companies , for instance, use a variety of channels including digital marketing, inside sales, portal and e-commerce, and hybrid sales-rep interactions to engage with healthcare professionals.

Several omnichannel examples can illustrate various approaches:

Best Buy typically focuses on commerce (both in store and online), but boosted its in-store experience by creating offerings for customers to explore smart home-technology solutions, pairing them with free in-home advisory services. And its mobile app lets customers “scan to shop” from catalogs and curbside, or buy online and pick up merchandise in the store itself, smoothing the end-to-end journey for customers with the 24/7 tech support from its Geek Squad. Best Buy’s Totaltech support offer was compelling to customers—it launched with 200,000 memberships in 2018, which climbed to two million within a year.
Beauty retailer Sephora emphasizes omnichannel personalization, relying on rich in-app messaging, personalized push notifications, and easy ways for customers to book in-person consultations. Its in-store technology is a powerful complement that allows employees to access customer favorites and suggest products they might try next. Its loyalty program also plays an important role. The efforts are already driving value for Sephora: data showed that customers visiting the retail website within 24 hours of visiting a store were three times more likely to make a purchase, and orders were 13 percent higher than for other customers.
Nike takes an ecosystems view of omnichannel, extending the brand experience and offering customers an ever-growing platform of content, offers, and community interactions. Its SNKRS and Run Club apps, for example, facilitate in-person meetups, running groups, and events. It also has an app for delivering individual workouts and fitness programs, creating experiences that go far beyond shoe and apparel lines to meet customers in their day-to-day routines.

Learn more about our Retail and Growth, Marketing & Sales practices.

How has omnichannel been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic?

Omnichannel rose during the COVID-19 pandemic as more consumers turned to e-commerce. Due to the increased demand for contactless shopping during the height of the pandemic, US grocery stores saw 20 to 30 percent of their business shift to online . Before the pandemic, e-commerce accounted for just 3 to 4 percent of total sales for grocers.

The shifts made during the pandemic are likely to persist . In the pandemic, people gravitated to curbside pickup, “buy online, pay in store” models, and self-checkout at higher rates than in the past. And recent research indicates these behaviors are “sticky”—indeed, about 70 percent of people who first tried self-checkout in the pandemic say they’ll use it again.

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What do customers want out of the omnichannel experience.

Customers want a compelling and personalized omnichannel user experience with robust digital capabilities, both online and offline. About 60 to 70 percent of consumers research and shop both in stores and online . More concretely, over one-third of Americans made omnichannel features—think buying online and picking up in store or curbside—part of their regular shopping routines since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Nearly two-thirds of those individuals plan to continue doing so. And younger buyers, like Gen Zers, embrace omnichannel enthusiastically; these customers don’t think in terms of traditional channel boundaries, and they expect brands and retailers to provide a seamless experience, no matter where they are.

In a sense, all customers are omnichannel customers now, McKinsey partner Tiffany Burns explains in an episode of the McKinsey on Consumer and Retail podcast :

“Many retailers still think, ‘There are omnichannel interactions and store interactions, and I’m optimizing those two things separately. I have two different teams working on and thinking about those experiences.’ But as a consumer, when I go on the retailer’s website or app, I expect to see availability, a connection to what’s in the store, and a way to order things that I can pick up in store. I also expect to be able to stand in the aisle in the store and research a product. Today, consumers are figuring out workarounds to do all those things: they’re switching over from the app to Google, looking up the product, and searching for reviews.”

Organizations that make shopping a seamless omnichannel experience , or provide an app that helps customers find their way or see what’s in stock in the store, are already creating experiences that are a win for omnichannel customers .

Is omnichannel the same thing as phygital? And what is phygital, anyway?

Omnichannel is a business strategy, while “phygital” (a portmanteau that combines the word “physical” and “digital”) refers to the integration of the physical and digital worlds.

The term suggests a completely connected world that is both physical and digital at the same time . While fewer consumers are visiting brick-and-mortar stores and choosing to use e-commerce instead, more than 80 percent of retail sales still occur in a physical location . By 2030, the shopping experience will be highly personalized , and some activities may even take place in the metaverse . According to a recent survey, 80 percent of US adults want personalization from retailers with multiple, personalized touchpoints , which can include a mobile app, digital displays, interactive screens, tech-enabled associates, and point of sale.

What about omnichannel vs multichannel?

When it comes to omnichannel vs multichannel, the key difference is the focus at the center of all efforts. Omnichannel is a customer-centric approach in which all channels are integrated so the customer has a unified and consistent experience whether they are at a physical store, using an app, or on a website. Multichannel, in contrast, tends to revolve around products instead of customers. It aims to inform as many people as possible about the product or brand, and the channels are not linked, so the customer experience is often different for each channel.

An interview with an insurance executive, Eric Gewirtzman of BOLT , makes that distinction relatable: “Insurance customers are already moving between various channels,” Gewirtzman says. “But there’s a big difference between being multichannel and being omnichannel. Just because carriers have, say, an exclusive agent channel, an independent agent channel, and a website, doesn’t mean they’re omnichannel. Too often, consumers will get a different experience and different results depending on which channel they use. This has to change. If there is no awareness between the channels, sales are lost.”

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What is omnichannel personalization?

Omnichannel personalization refers to the way organizations might tailor the customer experience for individuals across physical and digital channels. This includes multiple touchpoints that cater to the customer’s preferences pre-visit, during the visit, and post-visit. Customers receive products, offers, and communications that are unique to them as individuals.

Efforts to personalize the omnichannel market can have a big payoff. Indeed, getting omnichannel personalization right could help companies increase revenue by 5 to 15 percent across the full customer base.

While companies recognize the power of omnichannel personalization, they may face roadblocks in implementing these efforts for a variety of reasons:

Omnichannel personalization requires a lot of investment in technology (both software and hardware). Personalizing physical spaces often starts from scratch because it requires enabling digital touchpoints such as screens, kiosks, or tablets for store associates, which may not exist.
It is difficult to deliver a seamless customer experience and train employees. The front line needs training to understand and reinforce the customer journey.
Traditionally, companies operate their digital and physical channels independently. Omnichannel personalization requires companies to rethink their organizational structure across both the digital and physical parts of the business .

These barriers, however, can be overcome. Five steps can help companies achieve omnichannel personalization :

Define the omnichannel personalization strategy and learning agenda. It’s crucial to develop a clear view on key moments of influence in the customer journey , and then identify what outcomes are desired at each step of that journey. Finally, an organization needs to prioritize use cases to test, looking at their ability to deliver business benefits and value to customers.
Address five digital touchpoints to activate personalized experiences in physical environments. Companies need to connect digital and physical footprints to drive omnichannel personalization, especially at touchpoints where these worlds converge. Five are particularly important: mobile apps, digital displays, interactive screens, tech-enabled associates, and point of sale.
Use an omnichannel “ decisioning engine ” to deliver experiences and measure performance. This can help organizations identify, quickly and accurately, the next best action to take with each customer.
Implement agile operating practices. Personalized marketing goes beyond mere technology; it requires new ways of working, and agile marketing teams can help in this regard.
Activate omnichannel personalization in the field. To bring all these elements together, a company’s sales force must be fully aligned and well trained. In-person teams could make your customer’s day, so frontline personnel need to support personalization efforts, understand their value, and use digital tools to deliver the complete experience.

What is omnichannel strategy?

An omnichannel strategy for marketing is a way of ensuring that your efforts drive tangible business value. Rather than rushing blindly into the space, or haphazardly approaching it, organizations should step back and think about underlying business value drivers. Excelling in omnichannel depends on a laser focus on value creation, looking at both strategic and customer priorities to craft the omnichannel strategy that will be most effective for their unique circumstances.

The most successful companies set their omnichannel strategy by leading with their strategic ambition and aspirations for customer experience. There are three primary omnichannel strategies :

Commerce. This prioritizes cross-channel shopping experience both in store and online.
Personalization. This strategy focuses on tailored, targeted, and relevant cross-channel engagement at scale.
Ecosystem. Here, the strategy aims to provide rich cross-channel platforms integrated with consumer needs and lifestyles.

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What’s involved in omnichannel operations?

Organizations can build leading omnichannel operations , spanning a variety of areas. By strengthening the foundation of your omnichannel operations and focusing on strategy, structure, and processes, you could gain a performance edge.

Topics to explore include mastering omnichannel supply chains , creating a customer-centric supply chain strategy , designing the omnichannel distribution network of the future , reimagining the role of physical stores , and more.

What should I know about B2B omnichannel?

Omnichannel has become a permanent part of B2B sales , with e-commerce, face-to-face, and remote videoconference sales all a necessary part of buyers’ experience. According to a 2021 McKinsey survey of US-based B2B decision makers, 94 percent of respondents view today’s B2B omnichannel reality as being as effective or more effective than before COVID-19. The findings also revealed that B2B customers regularly use ten or more channels to interact with suppliers, up from five in 2016.

B2B omnichannel efforts can be a path to grow an organization’s market share, but loyalty is up for grabs, with customers more willing than ever to switch suppliers for a better omnichannel experience. B2B decision makers use more channels than ever before to interact with suppliers, and being attuned to those channels will be important.

There are five must-dos for B2B companies seeking to retain customer loyalty and succeed in omnichannel:

offer a performance guarantee (nearly 80 percent of B2B customers say it’s crucial)
show product availability online
enable purchases over any channel
provide customer service in real time
ensure the customer experience is consistent as buyers toggle between channels

While B2C omnichannel efforts might be the first to spring to mind, omnichannel experience is crucial to giving all customers a better and more seamless journey.

For more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s insights on marketing and sales —and check out omnichannel-related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced include:

“ The new B2B growth equation ,” February 23, 2022, Arun Arora , Liz Harrison , Max Magni, Candace Lun Plotkin , and Jennifer Stanley
“ Omnichannel: The path to value ,” April 30, 2021, Holly Briedis, Brian Gregg , Kevin Heidenreich, and Wei Wei Liu
“ Omnichannel shopping in 2030 ,” April 9, 2021, Praveen Adhi , Eric Hazan , Sajal Kohli , and Kelsey Robinson
“ Redefine the omnichannel approach: Focus on what truly matters ,” June 22, 2020, Jorge Amar , Raelyn Jacobson , Becca Kleinstein, and Allison Shi
“ The end of shopping’s boundaries: Omnichannel personalization ,” February 10, 2020, Gal Gitter, Meg Raymond, Kelsey Robinson , and Jamie Wilkie

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Omnichannel: The path to value

The new B2B growth equation

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COMMENTS

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]
Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey. Many businesses that I've worked with were confused about the differences between the customer's journey and the buyer's journey. The buyer's journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.
Customer Journey Map: Everything You Need To Know
A customer journey map generally includes a summary of your customer persona, purchase phases, touchpoints with your company, customer thoughts/actions/emotions and opportunities to improve the ...
Path to Purchase: What Is It, Stages & Data Analysis
The "path to purchase" refers to the journey that a consumer takes from initial awareness of a product or service to making a purchase decision. It typically involves stages such as awareness, consideration, and decision, reflecting the steps a customer goes through before making a buying choice. 2.
What is Path to Purchase? How Do You Track It?
The path to purchase is the journey of a customer right from their very first touchpoint with your business to the very last. This journey happens on your website and across every other channel as a customer engages with your business. These channels might be emails, social media, or adverts. The path to purchase is also commonly referred to as ...
Customer journey mapping: The path to loyalty
Let's take a look at five steps your team can take to start journey mapping. 1. Find the sweet spot where your customers' goals and your own align. Before you start journey mapping, nail down your business goals. Any marketing and communication you deliver during the customer journey should be focused on helping your brand reach those goals.
What are Customer Journey Touchpoints and How to Identify Them
Here's how to identify these touchpoints: 1. Map out the customer journey. Start by visualizing the journey your customers take when they interact with your brand. Visualize the customer journey from awareness to post-purchase. Break it down into stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase.
How to Create a Customer Journey Map: Template & Guide
Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus. A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer's journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you.
Digital Customer Journey Mapping: From awareness to purchase ...
The digital customer journey captures the five steps a consumer takes on their path to conversion, such as purchase. This includes all customer touchpoints where there is engagement-from interest in the product, to making contact with the brand and the further path down the journey to purchase. It's important to know that once the sale is ...
Paths to Purchase: The Seven Steps of Customer Purchase Journey Mapping
Rutgers Business Review (2020), Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.84-100. A consumer purchase map details the decision paths and key interactions customers encounter with a firm or brand as they move throughout the purchase process. This article details a seven-step process that channel members can use to better plan and implement customer journey mapping: (1 ...
Guide to Consumer Journey Mapping: How to Analyze the Path to Purchase
After all, a fact, a finding or a data point without context is worthless. The path to identifying an actionable insight that will drive sales lies in matching your consumers to your objectives, and asking the right questions. Here's how it's done. How to do it. 1. Quantify current perceptions of your brand.
Customer Journey Stages: The Complete Guide
While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows: Awareness. Consideration. Decision. Retention. Advocacy. These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts: Pre-sale. Sale/Purchase.
Path to Purchase: Definition and Best Practices
The path to purchase refers to the journey that a potential customer takes from the initial awareness of a product or service to the final decision to make a purchase. It encompasses the various stages and touchpoints influencing a customer's buying decision. Understanding the path to purchase helps businesses tailor their marketing ...
7 ways to win consumers on their path to purchase
The path to purchase, from start to finish, is rarely linear—it's more akin to a scavenger hunt. Along the customer journey, one search can spark an entirely new idea or want. And one search can make the difference between your brand and the competition.
4 lessons to understand the purchase path
The modern path to purchase is as complex as the tech savvy consumer. New data from a study carried out by Google CEE and IPSOS reveals just how complex things can get and the steps brands can take to make inroads. Today's customer journey is so complex that it looks more like the plot of a "whodunit" than a decision to buy a new jacket.
Retail customer journey map: Navigating the path to purchase
5 Steps of customer journey Awareness. Objective: Make potential customers aware of the store or products. Tools: One effective way to promote your brand, highlight special offers, or showcase new products is to use digital signage at strategic locations such as storefronts or high-traffic areas within malls. By utilizing audience analytics, you can tailor the content based on the demographics ...
The customer journey
The buyer's journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others. Customer journey stages. Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer.
Path to Purchase
The 'Path to Purchase' is a term used in marketing to describe the customer's journey from the initial stage of recognizing a need for a product or service, to the final act of making a purchase. This journey can include several touchpoints such as product discovery, research, comparison, and decision-making.
Paths to Purchase: The Seven Steps of Customer Purchase Journey Mapping
A consumer purchase map details the decision paths and key interactions customers encounter with a firm or brand as they move throughout the purchase process. This article details a seven-step process that channel members can use to better plan and implement customer journey mapping: (1) developing an organization unit to manage the consumer ...
The consumer decision journey
In the traditional funnel metaphor, consumers start with a set of potential brands and methodically reduce that number to make a purchase. We developed this approach by examining the purchase decisions of almost 20,000 consumers across five industries and three continents. Our research showed that the proliferation of media and products ...
Customer journey models [McKinsey model & RACE Framework]
McKinsey's consumer decision journey model helps you identify the moment of purchase, while the RACE Framework helps you build a strategy to get there. Use these customer journey models to win more customers. Based on empirical research, in 2009, McKinsey & Company suggested dramatic alternative customer journey models to the traditional ...
The 5 Step Guide: Evolving Your Customer Journey Strategy
5. Post-purchase. Congratulations! You have won another customer, but some may argue that this is when the hard work begins. Drive the customer experience in order to foster long-term relationships, and hopefully create brand advocates. For this strategy to be successful, it must have buy-in across the organization.
What is omnichannel marketing?
The prefix "omni" means "all," and "channel" is a reference to the many ways customers might interact with a company—in physical stores, by surfing the web, on social media, and in emails, apps, SMS, and other digital spaces. And this omnichannel approach can be a powerful way to meet your customers where they are, providing them ...
Blog
Get industry news for contact centers, customer experience, artificial intelligence, employee experience and more on the Genesys blog. ... Unleashing the Power of Customer Journey Orchestration. Today, customers want to achieve their service and purchasing goals through simple and connected experiences across any channel...

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

What is the customer journey?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

1. Use customer journey map templates.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

5. List out all touchpoints.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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Path to Purchase: What Is It, Stages & Data Analysis

What is the Path to Purchase?

The Importance of Tracking the Path to Purchase

Stages in the Path to Purchase

1. Building Awareness

2. Consideration Strategies

3. Mastering the Purchase Phase

Exploring Post-Purchase Stages

1. Retention Tactics

2. Cultivating Advocacy

Influential Factors in the Path to Purchase

Influence on Your B2C and B2B Purchases

Building Reputation and Credibility

Harnessing Referrals and Word-of-Mouth

The Role of Presales and Support

Building Relationships and Retaining You as a Customer

Crucial Data Points for Tracking the Path to Purchase

01. Source and Referrer Insights

02. Analyzing Your Page Visits and App Interactions

03. Identifying Your Entry Points

04. Measuring Your Website Content Engagement

05. Assessing Your Email Engagement

06. Checkpoints for Your Business

Challenges in Navigating the Path to Purchase

Tackling Long Customer Journeys

Navigating Omni-Channel Engagement

Unifying Data Sources

How to Conduct a Path to Purchase Analysis

01. Surveying Customers at Key Points

02. In-Depth Customer Interviews

03. Tracking Brand Awareness Metrics

04. Exploring the Potential of Behavior Data

05. Essential Metrics to Track

Maximizing Path to Purchase for Customer Acquisition

Target by Locations

Help Customers with More Information

Think What Else Could Trigger Interest in Your Products

Make Use of Customer Review

Path to Purchase vs. Customer Journey

Tracking the Path to Purchase with QuestionPro

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What are Customer Journey Touchpoints and How to Identify Them

What are Customer Journey Touchpoints?

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How to Identify Customer Journey Touchpoints

1. Map out the customer journey

2. List potential touchpoints