A Step-By-Step Guide To Customer Journey Mapping

“How do we get our customers to do what we want them to do?”

Digital marketers get asked this question all the time. But it’s the wrong question.

What businesses should really ask is, “How do I help my customers achieve their goals on my website while still achieving mine?” Focusing on that question is the starting point for building a customer journey map.

When it comes to your website, customer journey maps reveal exactly where your site is helping visitors succeed—or letting them down.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is an illustration or diagram of all the touchpoints your customers have with your company, online or off.

User journey maps allow you to understand each step customers have to go through, their interaction at each phase, and their experience when going from the first contact with your product until they become a customer—or abandon your user journey.

Why do you need a customer journey map?

Kerry Bodine, a customer experience consultant, explained the purpose of customer journey maps in a Moz Whiteboard Friday:

The goal of the customer journey map is really to get a holistic view of what the customer is going through from their point of view and really what it’s like for them on a personal level, that human level.

What does a great customer journey map look like?

Although we’ve previously looked at great customer journey mapping examples, no two journey maps are exactly the same. Depending on the customer experience expert you follow and the business (i.e. product or service) you’re mapping, the design will differ.

According to Woopra, Spotify hired a marketing agency to help better its customers’ music-sharing experience. The company used customer surveys and data research to gather qualitative and quantitative research data about every stage of the user experience. Every touchpoint of the music-sharing experience was then mapped out, including what the user was doing, thinking, feeling, and engaging with.

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As you can see above, they start the customer mapping process by defining the behavioral stages a typical customer goes through. Then, they add granularity to each touchpoint.

With that in place, they bring in their customer’ thoughts and emotions to create a “lens” through which to view the journey. 

By mapping out the customer journey and analyzing user behavior and engagement, Spotify could pinpoint areas of improvement. This helped them to not only streamline the music-sharing experience but significantly increase customer satisfaction.

A customer journey map helps crystallize where customers get stuck or frustrated on their path to purchase and beyond. It’s a visual representation that synthesizes data on personas and user behavior.

While journey maps can cover all interactions with a business, this post focuses on how to build a map to optimize your website. And, as the Spotify example suggests, it starts with data.

How to create a customer journey map.

Here is a process to create an effective user journey map in six steps:

Step 1: Create data-driven personas.

What motivates your customers? What are their needs, hesitations, and concerns? Knowing whom you’re talking to is the starting point. Guesses or anecdotes aren’t enough.

To build viable personas, you need data. Today, the most successful companies dig deep into their data to build personas. Over a decade ago, few did. In fact, a CMO Council study from 2008 found that:

Over 50% of global marketers report that they have fair, little, or no knowledge of the customer demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and transactional data. Just 6% say they have excellent knowledge of the customer.

According to Gartner, the trend toward data-driven decision-making is shifting, predicting that by 2026, 65% of business-to-business (B2B) organizations will implement data-decision making.

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If you haven’t yet created data-driven personas for your business, take a look at these posts. Each will help you build a customer persona based on research, not conjecture:

• How to Identify Your Online Target Audience and Sell More;
• How To Create Customer Personas With Actual, Real Life Data;
• Spray and Pray Doesn’t Work: How to Identify and Target Micro Segments;
• How to Drive Product Growth with Behavioral Personas;
• How Data-Driven Marketers Are Using Psychographics;
• How to Build Robust User Personas in Under a Month.

Or, go in-depth with a full course. Once you have your personas, you can combine that data with an in-depth look at user behavior on your website. The outcome will be your customer journey map.

Step 2: Define the behavioral stages.

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Depending on your business, customers may go through different stages while navigating your site. A B2C ecommerce company may have just a few clearly defined phases; a B2B SaaS company selling to the Fortune 100 may have more.

Your personas should give you a pretty good idea of the process that customers go through from their first landing to an eventual purchase and subsequent interactions.

The next step identifies which interactions fit into which stages.

Step 3: Align customer goals with each stage.

This may be the most critical—and, in some cases, most difficult—step when creating a customer journey map.

What do customers want to achieve as they move through each behavioral stage? You can mine several data sources to get that information:

• Survey answers;
• User testing;
• Interview transcripts;
• Customer service emails or support transcripts.

Then, you’ll be able to see if your website supports each of those goals.

Step 4: Plot the touchpoints.

Think of touchpoints as places where customers engage with your site and where you support the completion of their goals. These touchpoints will be grouped under the relevant stage in your customer’s journey.

For retailers, a common touchpoint might be a product description page; for a service business, it may be anything from a pricing page to a contact form.

You can identify touchpoints along the user journey in two reports in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

GA4 allows you to analyze user behavior and how users interact with the website. There are four report categories:

1. Acquisition 
2. Engagement 
3. Monetization
4. Retention

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Alternatively, for more specific insights, there’s [GA4] Path exploration, which includes reports like:

• Free-form exploration;
• Cohort exploration;
• Funnel exploration;
• Segment overlap;
• Path exploration;
• User lifetime.

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GA4 Exploration allows you to identify the most frequently accessed pages by new users after visiting the home page, as well as where users get stuck or loop back.

Step 5: Determine if customers achieve their goals.

This is where you take the data you’ve collected and measure it against how easily your customers can get what they need to do. Ask yourself the following types of questions:

• Where are there roadblocks?
• Do tons of people abandon their carts on the checkout page?
• Do users go to your opt-in download page but not fill out the form?

The Google Analytics reports you’ve mined for insights will show you where issues crop up. The existing qualitative research you have—the same research you used to build your personas—should help you understand the why behind the problems.

Analyze the actions (or lack thereof) of your customers. How well are their needs met at each touchpoint and during each phase?

Step 6: Recommend changes.

Start by prioritizing which pages or touchpoints to address first. You can rank pages by ease and cost-effectiveness to implement changes. Then, it’s a matter of determining what to test.

For instance, if research suggests that customers worry about getting locked into a particular plan after they sign up, tweaking your copy on a relevant page could alleviate their hesitations.

If you want to learn more about testing or our research and prioritization frameworks, see these posts:

• A/B Testing Mastery: From Beginner to Pro in a Blog Post;
• How to Come Up with More Winning Tests Using Data;
• PXL: A Better Way to Prioritize Your A/B Tests.

How to visualize your customer journey map

Spreadsheets may not be sexy, but they’re ideal for organizing data. Your customer journey map doesn’t need to be complicated—or beautiful.

Remember: It’s a tool to help you understand how users interact with your site, where they get stuck, and how to improve trouble spots.

Above is an example I put together to represent the journey a customer may go through with a SaaS company. Each stage has a corresponding customer goal, along with the relevant touchpoints.

Keep track of the reports and surveys you reference, along with the stages they illuminate:

Get as granular as you like. Add annotations where you find that customers seem to miss steps or loop back. Then, add your analysis of the journey under “Key Findings” and the hypotheses to test under “Recommendations.”

Conclusion

How your customers interact with your website or your brand isn’t a linear process—no matter how much you might want it to be. Getting people to move from Point A to Point B without jumping ship or missing a step doesn’t always happen.

But taking the time to understand as much as you can about your customers’ goals—and how they move through your website—can go a long way toward keeping them happy. It will also grow your business.

Understand the ins and outs of the customer journey flow with the CXL Customer Journey Course today!