How to Define Your Email Marketing Customer Journey – With Examples and Strategies
The email marketing customer journey shows the methodical steps a prospect takes toward conversion. It includes the potential buyers’ entire lifecycle, from the awareness stage to post-purchase upsell and beyond.
Think of a customer journey like a road trip; it represents the path from the starting point to the destination.
At each stage, you tailor the messages and offers to meet their unique needs.
But it’s not as simple as it sounds — to define your customer’s journey properly, you must track every interaction a prospect takes with your brand, from encountering your brand to conversions.
Understanding how important the purchase path is, we’ve created a guide to help you create an email marketing customer journey map, show you how to strategize, and give you tips to create viable customer journeys with examples.
What is an Email Journey?
An email marketing journey map paints the entire experience a prospect goes through with your brand. Multiple touchpoints help you build a strong relationship with recipients as they convert. A touchpoint is any interaction with your brand, such as visiting your website or engaging with your marketing emails.
There’s no timeline for when they will reach the conversion stage and become loyal followers. For example, a prospect might be on the top of the email marketing funnel for years until they decide to purchase. At the same time, someone else could immediately convert after receiving one email from the sender.
Each brand’s email customer journey can look different and depends on the products, marketing methods, and audience demographics. Regardless of how you use it, email journey mapping is vital to understand your subscribers’ needs and behavior.
The Importance of Customer Journey
Knowing where your potential buyers’ email marketing journey can lead to clarity for users and yourself in terms of customer experience and loyalty.
Understanding your email customer journey is critical for several reasons such as:
- To enhance customer experience: By mapping the journey, you can gain insights into customer interactions to send proper onboarding email sequences.
- To improve customer engagement: A well-designed email customer journey encourages active email engagement throughout their lifecycle stage.
- To increase conversions and sales: Guiding recipients through their journey can avoid friction, address pain points, and incentivize them to act, increasing conversions.
- To build brand loyalty: Solving customers’ pain points and being there for them helps increase brand credibility.
- To gain a competitive advantage: Brands prioritizing purchasers can gain an upper hand in the market.
Designing a good customer journey email sequence will help you tackle weak spots in their brand experience, helping you build effective campaigns that solve common challenges.
Email Marketing and Email Customer Journey Map
Your customers’ marketing journeys represent a comprehensive view of email marketing subscriber feedback from various steps in their journey, especially in email marketing.
Email marketing and journey mapping work in unity and help:
- Build relationships: Emails can be more personal and help build lasting customer relationships. Personalized and targeted messages foster trust and loyalty.
- Encourage lead nurturing: Different email campaigns help nurture and guide leads through the sales funnel.
- Drive awareness: Email marketing can help introduce potential buyers to your brand and create a seamless purchase experience.
- Retain customers: Email marketing facilitates constant communication, unlike website pop-ups. Your campaign journey map can contain different types of email campaigns in intervals to maximize your brand impact.
Email marketing is a straightforward way to nurture your target audience with personalized content based on their actions. Your email content for different customer segments will help the messages resonate deeper with the users.
Effective email campaigns start with a journey visual through journey mapping.
Email Journey Template
Here’s an email journey mapping template to design and implement an email journey tailored to your audience:
- Define a goal: Have a primary and secondary goal to start your journey mapping.
- Segment your target audience: Divide the audiences based on pain points and key characteristics.
- Tackle the journey stages: Send relevant emails at each stage of the customer journey.
- Implement design and content guidelines: Publish an email branding guideline and use it for all email campaigns.
- Track and optimize emails: Monitor key email campaign metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
- Automate setup: Use automation best practices to set up trigger emails. The email automation journey will help guide users toward the next step in the sales funnel.
Marketing funnel vs customer journey examples
The table below compares marketing funnel and customer journey side-by-side.
| Aspect | Marketing Funnel | Customer Journey Example |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | It guides prospective customers toward conversions. | It aims to enhance the customer experience of interacting with a brand. |
| Journey timeline | It’s mostly linear – from awareness to conversion stage. | It includes loops (returning customers, service inquiries, etc) |
| Key tools/channels | Ads, landing pages, emails, sales calls, and retargeting. | Website, in-store visits, customer support, and social media. |
| Objective | To build awareness, drive leads, and optimize conversions. | To improve customer experience and build long-term loyalty. |
Email Customer Journey Mapping Techniques
A customer journey map helps you visualize the various touch points a person goes through with your brand. It helps you implement email marketing psychology; get into your customers’ heads and understand what people think, how they react, and what motivates their decisions.
There’s no rule to visualize this data — you can use marketing funnels, circular mapping, or the infinite loop journey map. Optimizing your email marketing campaigns is critical regardless of how you represent this data.
Email Journey Flow
This structured template outlines the email flow for customer onboarding and retention.
Welcome Phase (Day 0-7)
The welcome phase helps you make a strong first impression and build trust.
Email 1: Welcome email
- Send it immediately after signup.
- Include a warm introduction, highlight brand values, and provide the next steps.
Email 2: Getting started
- Send it 2-3 days after the initial email.
- Offer a step-by-step instruction to help the customers get the most of your product or service.
Activation Phase (Day 7-14)
It helps customers engage actively with your product or service.
Email 3: Feature highlight
- Showcase a unique feature that is beneficial to the customer.
- Include exclusive product images, a compelling CTA, and product benefits.
Email 4: Social proof and testimonials
- Implement testimonial advertising and success stories of other users to build credibility.
- Include links to case studies and video testimonials.
Engagement Phase (Day 15-30)
This phase is about keeping your customers engaged with interactive emails, gamified content, or relevant offers.
Email 5: Exclusive content/offer
- Provide access to exclusive content, discount, or members-only perk.
Email 6: Community support
- Invite the customer to join a community, forum, or follow on social media.
Retention and Upsell (Day 31)
In this phase, your aim should be to retain customers and introduce upsell emails and cross sell opportunities.
Email 7: Check-in and feedback request
- Send email surveys and feedback requests while resolving customer queries.
Email 8: Upsell/cross-sell email
- Include a compelling incentive.
- Suggest products or services related to the customers’ previous purchase history.
Re-engagement Phase (When customers become inactive)
Sometimes, customers could become busy or start to lose interest in your brand communication. At this stage, you can send win back emails to get customers back in the game.
Email 9: We miss you
- Send the re-engagement email after a user has become inactive for 30-60 days.
Email 10: Final call
- Send a final reminder email with a compelling offer and a reminder of what the customer is missing.
Essential Components of a Customer Journey Map
The journey-based marketing consists of key components that address the overall recipient experience. You must consider every detail regarding marketing touchpoints in the customer journey.
Here’s a breakdown of the key components you must have in your customer journey map:
- Customer personas: Develop detailed profiles of your target audiences, including demographics, preferences, goals, and pain points. It’s critical to know customer motivation and behavior to craft personalized experiences.
- Stages: The number of stages can vary according to your brand goals and customer profiles. Each stage represents a distinct subscriber interaction with your brand.
- Touchpoints: Take note of touchpoints across channels — it can be social media, website visits, or customer service interactions.
- Pain points: Identify pain points across touchpoints and how to navigate them. It could include product selection, checkout process, or website navigation issues.
- Goals and objectives: Define the goals of the customer journey map — are you aiming to increase conversions or improve subscriber satisfaction? The customer journey mapping for improved conversion optimization must with specific goals.
- Data and insights: Analyze customer data to understand the behavioral process and common pain points.
- Cross-channel consistency: Ensure consistency across marketing channels and devices. Whether customers interact with your brand online or offline, consistency in messages and branding is key.
Apart from these components, you must know what prevents recipients from moving to the next stage.
Maybe they found something better or couldn’t get through to the checkout page. Understand the obstacles to build a proper email marketing customer journey.
Common Barriers to Customer Journey
The following barriers are common for all marketing channels, especially email marketing.
Your customers could face the following:
- Motivational barriers: When they decide they don’t need or want your product, they won’t likely move past the awareness stage. You must build a rapport and show customers that you understand their pain points and that your product can solve them.
- Experiential barriers: Expected buyers might have faced issues with similar products or categories in the past. Even though the barrier is not related to you, you should slowly build confidence in them through proof.
- Temptation barriers: They may constantly be tempted to find a one-click solution — you need to provide enough evidence and showcase competitive advantage. Exclusive offers and time-sensitive promotions may help overcome this barrier.
Understanding these barriers will help you properly utilize customer journey maps in email marketing.
Assessing this data is also vital to deploying the right email marketing strategy.
A smart customer journey mapping starts with the emotional essence of your brand and extends to the following factors.
What Makes a Good Email Marketing Map?
Every customer is different, and so are their journeys — a good email journey map will highlight the various pathways the recipients can take. It should also include potential roadblocks to increase the likelihood of having more people at the destination.
Look at the key characteristics of a customer journey in the table below.
| Characteristics | What They Do |
|---|---|
| Customer-centric focus | A good journey map focuses on the prospects’ emotions, preferences, and needs. |
| Comprehensive understanding | The map must have an outline of all customer touchpoints from awareness to post-purchase and re-engagement stages. |
| Visual representation | Diagrams, charts, and graphs help communicate the complex structure of the customer journey. |
| Empathy | The journey map must focus more on customer emotions, including their feelings and experiences with your brand. |
| Customer emotions | Consider the emotional state of the buyers at each point of the journey and how it might affect your overall marketing goals. |
| Iterative and adaptive | The journey map is flexible and changes overtime based on the customers’ preferences and behavior. |
| Opportunities | The map should outline opportunities to delight potential prospects at various touchpoints, such as personalized recommendations or exclusive offers. |
| Measurable outcome | A good customer journey map must contain measurable KPIs to evaluate performance and refine strategies. |
Email marketing and customer journey form the perfect partnership to provide the best customer experience.
To effectively map your subscriber journey, you must consider these 6 stages.
We’ll also look at examples of journeys for each of them.
Stage 1: Awareness
The first step is to inform people of your brand’s existence and mention your value proposition. Give them a way to discover their needs for your product or service.
Your potential purchasers could have found you through a Facebook ad, a website pop-up, or through Google. Your job is to get their valid email addresses to warm a lead for a future purchase. For example, if you find that many discover your brand through blog posts, include an email sign-up form on your blog post.
A Warm Welcome From E-commerce Senders
This welcome email from E-commerce Senders is straightforward — it starts with a ‘Thank you’ message and introduces the team behind the scenes. By mentioning the email addresses and contact names, the brand nips customer concerns at an early stage.
Stage 2: Consideration
At this stage, customers are evaluating their options — they might read reviews, seek more information about your brand, or compare pricing to a competitor.
Buyers typically search Google 2-3 times before making a decision. Customer experience adds weight to buyers’ decision-making — 86% are willing to pay more for a great experience. They are also more willing to pay for expensive items when pricing is concerned.
VidAngel: Streaming Something This Weekend?
By highlighting the benefits, VidAngel convinces buyers that they deserve their dollars. Although there’s no direct competitor analysis, the brand ensures it provides the best for the price point.
For people new to VidAngel, the platform guides them to the best performing content.
Stage 3: Purchase
The purchase stage is about reassuring recipients about their decision to purchase from you.
They finally hit the ‘Purchase now’ button and land on the ‘Thank you page.’ From here, you need to provide a pleasant post-purchase experience and invite them to purchase more.
At this stage of the customer journey email marketing, send them welcome emails, information on how your products solve their pain points, and discounts.
Chatters Salons — Get it Before it’s Gone
The purchase stage is where the buyers make the final decision — abandoned cart emails are a great way to keep customers in line with their favorite items. Chatters Salons uses simple language to communicate about the cart items.
Stage 4: Retention
In this stage, your goal will shift to retaining the customer. Most are particular about speed, convenience, and friendly service, over 70% in importance. They are also more likely to stay engaged when you focus on these core demands through email marketing.
Busuu – It’s Your Busuuversary!
At some point, customers may reconsider their choice to purchase from you. This is a good time to send discounts and special occasion deals to keep them engaged. Busuu gives 60% off for a 3-month anniversary and mentions their premium plan and features.
Stage 5: Advocacy
In this final stage of the customer email journey, satisfied customers become your brand advocates; they become repeat buyers and recommend your brand to others.
However, these buyers don’t make extra efforts to spread the word. So, your email marketing must provide these shoppers with the necessary information to get them to spread the word.
Ghia — If you Prefer to Shop IRL
Encouraging customers to follow you on socials or attend a drinking game increases the chances of them becoming your brand advocates, eventually. Ghia invites purchasers to get outside as well as follow them on their social media channels.
Stage 6: Re-engagement
Sometimes, customers may have reasons to stop engaging with your brand or using your products. Maybe they’re dissatisfied, or they forgot about your brand. In this case, you need to re-engage them through personalized offers and content.
Koala Eco — Last Day to Save 25% Off
Get creative to encourage disengaged customers to return to your brand, just like Koala Eco. The brand uses urgency techniques to increase interest. A clean email design with a simple CTA helps them gauge the information immediately.
Understanding your customer needs is primary throughout these stages — create relevant touchpoints and deliver personalized content. You can opt for various email marketing methods to provide the best customer experience at each stage.
Strategies For Each Customer Journey Stage
To make it easier for you, we’ve gathered the best marketing strategies for your email journeys.
Here’s a neat overview.
| Customer Journey Stages | Customer Journey Marketing Strategy |
|---|---|
| Brand awareness | ‣ Welcome series: Send a welcome series to introduce new subscribers to your brand. ‣ Educational content: Create educational content to attract potential clients. ‣ Storytelling: Share compelling brand stories, including journey, mission, and values to captivate the audience’s interest and attention. |
| Consideration | ‣ Product highlights: Highlight your product’s unique features through high-quality visuals and compelling narrative. ‣ Customer testimonials: Share feedback and reviews from satisfied clients to demonstrate social proof and alleviate concerns. ‣ Comparison guides: Send comparison guides or product demos to help them evaluate their options and make a decision. |
| Purchase | ‣ Limited-time offers: Incentivize purchase decisions with limited-time discounts and deals. ‣ Abandoned cart email reminders: Encourage customers with personalized reminders about the items in their shopping carts. ‣ Transactional emails: Send prompt order confirmation and post-purchase emails to keep buyers informed and engaged. ‣ Cross-sell or upsell: Refer to complementary products to increase the average order value. |
| Retention | ‣ Follow-up surveys: Identify areas for improvement using surveys and post-purchase feedback. ‣ Loyalty program: Invite satisfied customers to enroll in the loyalty program for extra rewards. ‣ Re-order reminders: Send reminders and offers for repeat purchases. |
| Advocacy | ‣ Referral program: Encourage recipients to refer their friends or family through rewards. ‣ Exclusive VIP offers: Provide exclusive offers to new products/services for loyal customers and brand advocates. |
| Re-engagement | ‣ Deals and discounts: Incentivize potential buyers to return to your brand through compelling deals. ‣ Create scarcity: Personalize email campaigns and promote scarcity through timed offers. |
Ensure you pay extra attention to customer experience — 17% of customers can leave a brand because of one bad experience. That’s why strategizing according to customer data becomes vital; let’s see how!
How to Use Data to Map an Email Customer Journey
Using correct data in your customer experience email marketing can lead to behavioral insights that help increase your email marketing metrics.
Here’s how you can use data to effectively map an email customer journey.
Segment Your Customers
Segmentation strategies help you send customized email content to each of your audiences, resulting in more targeted communication. You can find common touchpoints that audiences use to interact with your brand and use them to map your customer journeys.
Here’s how you can incorporate segmentation into your email marketing journey:
- Identify segmentation criteria: Whether it’s demographics, psychographics, or behavioral data, choose a criteria for segmenting your audience.
- Segment customers at each stage of the journey: Segment subscribers based on their familiarity with your brand. Do this for every stage of the customer journey to map out more personalized experiences.
- Create tailored content: Develop targeted email content for each audience segment. For example, send welcome emails to new subscribers and exclusive VIP offers for re-engaging inactive customers.
- Utilize triggered emails: Set up triggered emails based on your segmentation criteria. This way, the automated email journeys will help you send messages as and when a customer interacts with your brand.
- Test and optimize: Continuously monitor your segmentation strategy based on performance metrics and customer feedback.
Find Your Brand Strength
Email tracking and A/B testing will help you harness the points in customer experience. One stage could work better than the rest, so it’s important to capitalize on these insights to drive better results.
Positive engagement, high click rates, and conversions are signs that your segmentation strategies are working. Focus on these data points to address potential recipient pain points and emotionally connect with them.
Evaluate Competition
Competitor research will tell you which areas need more focus and improvement. Conversion rate optimization is a valuable tool to analyze how customers behave on your site. CRO also tells you which content is more engaging and where they are likely to drop off.
Use competitor analysis along with email marketing reports to improve customer experience and overall returns. Measure your email journey for a more detailed report, such as the ones below.
The Key Metrics to Measure Email Customer Journey
The email customer journey is similar to measuring other email marketing campaigns.
The 5 basic metrics to measure are:
- Open rates: The open rate shows how well your subject lines perform. A higher open rate indicates that your emails are grabbing customer attention, while a lower rate may signal areas for improvement.
- Click-through rates: This metric shows the effectiveness of your content, links, and CTA. Analyzing CTR shows which content resonates most with your audience.
- Bounce rates: Bounced emails can occur due to invalid email addresses or technical issues. Monitoring this metric shows the accuracy of your email list, ensuring emails reach your intended audiences. It’s critical to keep your email lists updated and clean — Campaign Refinery’s automatic email list cleaning tool eliminates unwanted and harmful email addresses, retaining your email deliverability and sender reputation.
- Subscribe rates: More subscribers means you have high-quality email content that recipients find useful. A high subscribe rate shows that recipients trust you enough to give their email addresses.
- Unsubscribe rates: Monitoring this rate shows the impact of your email content and frequency. High unsubscribe rates could indicate that your content or email timing does not align with your audience’s preferences and expectations.
You can also track website visits, page scroll length, customer lifetime value, and subscriber satisfaction rates to understand your audience better.
How to Utilize Customer Journey Map for Email Marketing?
Email marketing is an ongoing communication with your subscribers, which means your customer journey must align with your email communication.
Here are 3 best ways to do it:
- Branded email templates: Once you understand what resonates the most with your audience, you can create branded email templates to showcase your strengths. This will also help you show polished brand identity in all your correspondences.
- Automated email campaigns: Customer journey mapping can help you find out the best ways to connect with customers — you can then automate your email campaigns to send relevant and personalized content to subscribers. For example, with Campaign Refinery, you can choose different email marketing campaigns from the campaign library and automate them based on smart goal triggers. You can also set up Evergreen Flash Sales to create scarcity and increase conversions.
- Email tracking: Use tracking tools to gather relevant customer insights and implement the data in your email marketing campaigns. You can use specialized tracking tools or your ESP’s built-in analytics dashboard. Campaign Refinery provides users with a clean and single-view analytics dashboard that contains all the information at a glance.
To make the most of your email marketing, you should learn to use email journey best practices to tackle customer support and experience.
How to Make the Most of Email Customer Journeys
The email journey is never linear — it frequently intertwines with multiple touchpoints. The best way to win customers is to anticipate their needs even before they tell you. This means providing proactive support — solving customary issues before they become problems.
Here’s how reactive and proactive customer service differs.
| Reactive Customer Support | Proactive Customer Support |
|---|---|
| Handles problems as they occur. | Anticipates common challenges and aims to stay prepared with solutions. |
| Longer wait time for recipients. | Focuses on accessible solutions; lesser wait times. |
| The customer initiates the conversation. | Business initiates the conversation |
| Less empathetic and customer-centric. | Revolves around subscriber emotions and pain points. |
Further, immediate customer attention can increase interest in your brand. The most important attribute for customer experience is 75% faster response times and 55% consistency across channels.
This means the longer you take to reply, the less likely a recipient will engage. Customer experience can make or break your brand image, and it’s critical to follow all the attributes that lead to a valuable outcome.
For example, Campaign Refinery offers dedicated expert support for issues or concerns the users may have — the reply time is usually within a few hours.
For this reason, use automated email software to schedule and send email campaigns based on each customer touchpoint in the journey map.
Gain Human Insights Into Your Automated Marketing Journey
Customers are people, just like you and me. Looking past data and numbers to form a lasting bond with them is important — you need to put yourself in their shoes to understand their needs better.
Check for reliability, relevance, and automate your email campaigns for higher conversions. Data and automation are your best friends if you want to align your email marketing strategy with your customer journey.
Campaign Refinery helps you collect relevant data, segment subscribers, map customer journeys, and set up various email marketing funnels. You can also send personalized emails by setting goals to define your desired outcome for your email campaigns.
But first, you’ll need to attract the right audience. We can help you with that as our founder Travis Ketchum wrote a stellar guide on increasing open and click rates for your lead magnets.
Download the Lead Magnet Multiplier Course now, and learn to attract newer audiences and boost your sender reputation like never before.
If you want the most out of your email marketing, we’re here to take care of the nitty-gritty details for you — apply to become a Campaign Refinery client and upgrade your email marketing revenue today!
FAQ
What is a marketing journey?
A marketing journey is a series of interactions a customer takes with your brand throughout the buying cycle, from initial awareness to post-purchase upsell.
What are the email journey best practices?
The email journey best practices ensure your email campaigns resonate with the audience and bring out the desired outcome. Start by defining your goal, map the customer journey, create engaging email content, and adhere to privacy and compliance.
How to keep customers engaged throughout customer journey marketing?
Keeping customers engaged throughout the customer journey marketing requires a strategic approach. Provide value at every stage by using multi-channel marketing and exclusive offers.
Why is it important to map out the conversion path of a smart cta for each segment?
Properly mapping out the smart CTA helps you personalize emails, improve conversion rates, optimize user experience, and gain unique data insights.
What are the 5 ts of email marketing?
The 5 Ts of email marketing create a framework for providing optimum email campaign performance. The Ts are Tease, target, teach, test, and track.
What is a post-sale customer journey?
A post-sale customer journey focuses on maintaining customer relationships after a purchase, ensuring loyalty and satisfaction.
Why marketers care about customer journeys?
Understanding the customer journeys provides a comprehensive marketing framework for optimizing the entire customer experience. They help comprehend customer behavior, personalize content, and optimize marketing touchpoints.
What are the email marketing pain points?
Although highly effective, email marketing comes with certain challenges, such as low open rates, click-through rates, high unsubscribe rates, and deliverability issues. Email fatigue can sometimes be the biggest email marketing concern, among others.
What is a loyalty program customer journey map?
A loyalty program customer journey map outlines the customer experiences when interacting with a brand’s loyalty program. It helps visualize how customers join, use, and benefit from the program.
What are the five typical key stages of customer interaction with a company?
The five key stages of customer interaction with a company are awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.
