Email Mapping: Your Course to Customer Loyalty
Email mapping, or email journey mapping, is a marketing strategy for planning the sequence of emails a customer receives after their initial contact with your brand.
While you could plan the perfect email campaign, the messages may still be far from what your readers want to see in their inboxes.
This gap often leads to lower email engagement rates and, ultimately, loss of customer loyalty.
This is why segmented campaigns, tailored to individual preferences, are powerful means of reaching people where they are in the buyer’s journey. In fact, marketers who implement segmentation in their campaigns note a 760% increase in their revenue.
You could achieve similar results by just mapping out critical customer behavior.
Let’s embark on an email journey, learning to map each customer touchpoint to provide a wholesome experience.
What is Email Journey Mapping?
Email journey mapping is a method of visualizing and optimizing customer interactions with your email communication over time.
This approach helps you understand how customers engage with your emails, from the initial message to subsequent interactions, creating a personalized marketing strategy.
Key Components of Email Journey Mapping
Email mapping goes beyond tracking and optimizing customer interactions; it involves key components that create successful and personalized customer experiences.
The table below contains the critical email mapping components.
| Component | What to do |
|---|---|
| Customer segments | Identify and segment customer groups based on their behavior, previous purchases, demographics, and other relevant factors |
| Touchpoints | Identify and segment customer groups based on their behavior, previous purchases, demographics, and other relevant factors. |
| Customer actions | Map out all the points that the customers interact with emails such as welcome emails, transactional emails, newsletters, etc. |
| Timeline | Track the customer action within each email, such as opening the email, clicking on a link within an email, and so on. |
| Customer experience | Outline the email sequence, including intervals between emails and any triggers prompting you to send an email. |
| Goals and metrics | Define the objectives for each email campaign and identify key performance indicators (KPIs). |
Proper customer data collection can help you set up trigger emails, which can, in turn, increase your revenue even without having to implement B2B lead generation efforts.
This process often starts with identifying your buyer personas and mapping out your customer journeys.
Let’s delve into the key details below.
Understanding the Customer Journey
The email customer journey is a complete roadmap of your customer’s experience with your brand, product, or service. Understanding this journey is crucial for building customer relationships and fostering loyalty.
Let’s quickly review the different stages of the customer journey.
| Customer Journey Stage | How it works |
|---|---|
| Awareness | The customer is actively considering your brand or product and comparing it with competitors to finalize their options. |
| Consideration | The customer has weighed their options and is ready to make a decision. This is where a strong value proposition plays a vital role in converting them. |
| Decision | The customer has weighed their options and is ready to make a decision. This is where a strong value proposition plays a vital role in converting them |
| Purchase | Providing excellent customer service, addressing issues promptly, and offering ongoing support will maintain healthy customer relationships. |
| Post-purchase | Providing excellent customer service, addressing issues promptly, and offering ongoing support will maintain healthy customer relationships |
In each of these stages, you’ll send email sequences based on customers’ actions with your brand.
For example, when a customer signs up for your email list, you’ll map out a welcome email series to introduce your brand and foster a personal connection.
This is where an email mapping strategy comes in handy, filling the gaps in email communication, if any.
Building Your Email Mapping Strategy
We’ll take a deeper look at the key elements that will form the backbone of your email marketing and mapping strategy:
- Know your audience: Email mapping starts with knowing who you’re sending emails to. Segment audiences based on factors such as demographics, purchase history, and website behavior.
For a more targeted approach, Campaign Refinery clients can use the “Audience Groups” feature, which lets them group different audience segments for the same email campaign. - Define your goals: What do you intend to achieve with your emails? Is it driving sales, nurturing leads, or improving brand awareness? Having a clear goal will guide the email content and timing of your emails within the map.
- Chart the customer journey: Map out the different stages your customers go through, from initial interaction to purchase and beyond. Identify key points where your emails can provide value and nudge customers through the email marketing funnel.
- Craft compelling content: Each email in your sequence should have a purpose and deliver targeted content. Focus on providing value, identifying customer pain points, and aligning your emails to specific customer journeys.
- Optimize for engagement: Craft intriguing subject lines, preheader text, and use high-quality visuals to demonstrate expertise. Also, A/B test email campaigns to understand what resonates with your audience.
- Automate the journey: Leverage a reliable email marketing platform to automate your email sequences. This reduces errors and ensures timely delivery.
Campaign Refinery offers powerful automation functionality that lets you send email broadcasts, employ smart goal triggers, use the tag system, and increase engagement with the evergreen flash sale and engagement gamification features.
- Track and analyze: Analyze data and monitor key campaign metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates, to determine the right approach to customer journeys.
Let’s merge these basics and learn how to map a perfect customer email journey.
How to Map an Email Journey?
Mapping an email journey is like planning a road trip — you must guide travelers toward the destination and plan pitstops, if any.
It’s a structured process that ensures every email interaction with your customers is purposeful and optimized for the best possible outcomes.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to mapping an email journey.
1. Gather Customer Data
Use tools like CRM systems, email marketing platforms, and analytics software to gather information on:
- Customer demographics,
- Purchase history,
- Website interactions,
- Email open rates,
- Click-through rates,
- Conversion rates,
- And unsubscribe rates.
2. Segment Your Audience
Divide customers into segments based on the data collected.
Common customer segmentation models include:
- Demographics (Age, gender, location),
- Behavior (Browsing activity, purchase history)
- Engagement levels (Active, inactive),
- Preferences (Interests, email frequency).
3. Identify Customer Touchpoints
Create a list of how and where customers interact with your brand emails.
These could include:
4. Create Customer Personas
Customer personas, also known as buyer or user personas, are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They are usually based on market research, customer data, and user behavior to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience.
Personas also help you understand customers beyond factors like age and income. Knowing their psychographics, like goals, motivations, and buying habits, can help you tailor your marketing strategy effectively.
5. Map the Customer Journey
This phase is about bringing all the elements together to map customer touchpoints across their entire journey with your brand.
For each persona, you must identify key touchpoints on a timeline, such as:
- The sequence of emails,
- The timing and frequency of emails,
- Triggers that initiate each email (sign-up, purchase, inactivity).
It’s important to talk to people based on their most recent actions. For example, when someone signs up, you send them a welcome and onboarding series. But when they don’t convert, you immediately put them on an evergreen content or a nurture email sequence list and start the process again.
Converting people the second time is easier because the leads are already aware of your business and its value proposition.
6. Visualize the Email Journey
Using diagrams and flow charts to visualize the email journey is a great way to quickly understand customer data. Tools like journey mapping software, flowchart tools, or simply using whiteboards can be helpful.
You can use shapes to represent different customer stages and connect the shapes with arrows to indicate the flow of the journey and the triggers for sending them. Add brief descriptions to these shapes that outline the content and purpose of each email.
Ensure you include key components in your visualizer, such as:
- All customer touchpoints,
- Customer actions,
- Email triggers,
- Expected outcomes.
7. Analyze and Optimize
Review the email journey maps regularly to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Use data from email surveys, social media listening, or customer testimonials to understand how satisfied customers behave in each stage of the journey.
These gaps usually come in the form of:
- Gaps where customers might drop off,
- Redundant or ineffective emails,
- Missed opportunities for better personalization,
- Timing and frequency issues.
Most importantly, look for any steps in the journey that are making customers’ journey difficult. This could be confusing website navigation, a lengthy checkout process, or limited information in your post-purchase emails.
8. Monitor and Adjust
Reviewing email metrics and KPIs can help you understand the effectiveness of email mapping. But beyond that, you must also seek customer feedback and use website analytics tools to track customer behavior and interpret gaps.
If you use an email marketing tool, these are the common KPIs to track:
Additionally, analyze data from different sources, such as sales, social media engagement, and customer support.
The customer journey map example below will show you how the process flows by.
Example Email Journey Map
This is a common scenario. You can, of course, customize the process depending on the specific customer actions and needs.
- Sign-up: Customer signs up → welcome email (Day 0).
- Onboarding: Educational email about product features (Day 1) → Follow-up email with user tips (Day 3).
- Engagement: Newsletter with relevant content (Weekly) → promotional email with discount code (Day 14).
- Purchase: Transactional email confirming a purchase (Immediate) → Shipping notification (Day 1 post-purchase).
- Post-purchase: Thank you email with product review request (Day 7 post-purchase) → Re-engagement email if inactive after 30 days.
Your email journey map will constantly evolve with the customer needs and market trends. That’s why you must create a proper plan of action.
Follow these tips below to provide valuable email content, which increases engagement and conversions.
Tips for Building a Perfect Email Journey Map
We know personalization is a prime factor for successful email journey mapping. But there are more elements that work in sync, to create a powerful and engaging customer experience.
Be mindful of these aspects as you move forward with email mapping:
- Emphasize storytelling: Enhance emotional connection through your brand stories. You can share a brief history, a letter from the founder, or a heartwarming message from your clients about your brand.
- Structure your email sequence: Plan a series of emails addressing customer needs at each touchpoint. For example, send abandoned cart reminders as soon as customers add items to their carts and fail to check out.
- Maintain consistent branding: Use uniform brand elements and visuals to help customers identify and engage with your brand.
- Set proper triggers and timing: Determine when each email will be sent. Use triggers, such as when someone signs up or abandons their cart.
- Optimize for flow: Ensure a natural progression between emails without overwhelming customers.
The perfect email journey map is a living document and evolves with time. While it’s not always possible to maintain the same marketing results, you can ensure consistency by following email marketing best practices.
This leads to a secure sender reputation and a higher inbox placement rate. When emails consistently reach your customers’ inboxes, it’s easier to map various customer touchpoints and collect data.
In fact, using reliable email deliverability tools can help you optimize customer experience, build trust, and maximize email marketing ROI.
Iterate Your Email Journey Mapping With a Robust Deliverability System
Email deliverability is the gatekeeper for customer engagement. Consistent email arrivals in customer inboxes show that your brand is trustworthy and credible.
Campaign Refinery offers the highest inbox placement rate on the market. Our powerful combination of authentication protocols, email-sending best practices, and cutting-edge email deliverability technology enables us to maintain a strong inbox placement portfolio.
Our clients noticed a 600% increase in their email deliverability rates after they joining us along with up to 400% improvement in their email open rates.
It’s time to take control of your email deliverability and start building winning customer journeys.
