How To Create a Customer Journey Map + Template

A customer journey map lays out the steps shoppers take from the moment they first learn about your brand until they become loyal customers. Mapping the customer journey helps you visualize how customers move from one stage of the marketing funnel to the next—and what you can do to push them toward their next purchase.

Ahead, learn more about what a customer journey map is and the benefits of creating one. Then use Shopify’s customer journey mapping template to create your own customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a hypothetical customer’s experience with your business from the moment they become aware of your brand through post-purchase interactions like leaving a review or recommending your company to other shoppers. The map usually follows customers through five stages: awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, and loyalty.

Brands use real customer data to develop their understanding of the customer journey, like the number of times the average user visits your site before making a purchase or starting a client relationship with your business. That data is then contextualized with insights from buyer personas. The personas’ emotions and motivations provide context for otherwise dry data.

Customer journey vs. buyer journey vs. user journey

The terms buyer journey, customer journey, and user journey are often used interchangeably, but there are a few distinctions between them.

Some marketers see the customer journey as part of the larger buyer journey: A buyer can be anyone, but once they start to interact with your business, they become a customer. By this logic, a buyer journey might include steps taken before someone becomes aware of your business, like the moment they experience a pain point or discover your product’s category. 

A user journey, also known as a user experience (UX) journey, follows a user as they attempt to complete a goal on a website, app, or other digital interface. If their goal is to make a purchase, there may be some overlap between the user journey and the customer journey. 

Customer journey maps are used primarily by sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, while user journey maps are used by UX developers and product teams working to improve the customer experience design of a website or app.

Types of customer journey maps

There are three types of customer journey maps you can adapt to your needs:

• Current state: These maps depict the customer journey under your current system. Companies use them to illustrate gaps or points of friction and include problem-solving suggestions for fixing issues.
• Future state: Future-state customer journey maps show the ideal customer journey. Companies often pair them with current state maps to show how a change or fix could improve the customer journey. 
• Service blueprint: Instead of mapping the entire customer journey, a service blueprint shows only customer service touchpoints. This can be helpful for companies planning or revising their customer service processes.

What to include in customer journey maps

• Personas
• Stages
• Time frame
• Action
• Touchpoints
• Emotions
• Owner
• Opportunities

A typical customer journey map takes the form of a table, with columns representing the different stages of the customer’s journey and the rows representing elements associated with each stage, such as touchpoints, customer emotions, and which team or department is involved. 

The map for your business can take whatever form makes the most sense, but here are some common elements to include:

Personas

Most customer journey maps identify a buyer persona: the hypothetical customer whose journey you’re mapping. The persona provides a backstory, such as their age, profession, location, shopping preferences, and motivations or pain points. This information usually goes above the main table. 

Stages

In a standard customer journey map, each column represents a different stage in the customer journey. These five stages are common, but depending on the type of map you’d like to create, you may use different stages:

1. Awareness: In the awareness stage, a potential customer learns about your brand or products for the first time. 

2. Consideration: In the consideration stage, the customer knows of you but has yet to decide how they feel about your brand. They may also be making comparisons with your competitors.

3. Acquisition: In the acquisition stage, the customer makes a purchase.

4. Service: In the service stage, the customer is actively using your product. They may engage your brand with questions, concerns, or thoughts.

5. Loyalty: In the loyalty stage, the customer is satisfied with their purchase, recommends your brand to others, and keeps buying from you.

Time frame

This is the number of days the user spends in each stage of the journey. For example, they might spend a week in the consideration stage and a day in the acquisition stage. 

Action

This is what the persona does in each stage, such as clicking on an ad or researching competitors. If they take multiple actions in the same section of the customer journey, such as visiting competitors’ sites and reading reviews in the consideration stage, you’ll list more than one action per stage.

Touchpoints

The touchpoints are the concrete ways in which a customer interacts with your brand. These include:

• Owned marketing channels: Your website, mobile app, blog, newsletter, and social media accounts
• Advertisements: Digital ads, social media ads, and outdoor advertising
• Third-party marketplaces: Platforms like Amazon and eBay
• Review sites: Sites like Google Maps and Yelp
• Customer service touchpoints: Chatbots, phone calls, and emails with customer service representatives
• Physical touchpoints: Brick-and-mortar stores and product packaging

At each stage of their journey, customers will interact with different touchpoints. For example, a customer in the awareness stage might see your ads on Instagram, while a customer in the consideration stage might view your ecommerce store’s self-service FAQ page. 

Emotions 

A good customer journey map doesn’t just show how your customer moves from one stage to another. It also provides context on why. For each stage in the customer journey, you should provide a brief description of possible emotions and motivations for moving to the next stage. 

Owner

This is the person, team, or department responsible for giving customers a positive customer experience at this stage. If a stage has multiple touchpoints, it may have multiple owners. 

Opportunities

These are ideas for improving the customer experience at each stage. They relate to pain points or hurdles that prevent customers from moving on to the next stage and forming long-term relationships with your brand. 

Customer journey map template

A template provides a framework for starting your customer journey map. Download Shopify’s free customer journey map template, which you can use to map out your business’s current or future states.

Benefits of using customer journey maps

• Deliver more relevant messaging
• Identify gaps
• Improve internal alignment
• Focus on customer retention

A customer journey map can help you:

Deliver more relevant messaging

Customer journey mapping involves uncovering what your customers care most about at each stage, so that you can deliver more meaningful messaging to them. For each stage of the journey, ask yourself:

• What is the customer trying to achieve at this stage?
• How well are we meeting their needs?
• What friction points might the customer encounter?
• How does this touchpoint influence the customer’s next action?
• What emotions and feelings might the customer be experiencing at this point?

You can use what you learn to tailor the way you communicate with shoppers depending on where they’re at in the customer journey.

This is the approach energy drink brand Guru takes. 

“One of the first things we do is map out our omnichannel journey—who our consumers are, where they are, where they shop, what their mindset and behavior is at each stage,” says Shingly Lee, Guru’s vice president of marketing, on Shopify Masters. “We tailor our content very specifically and accordingly.”

For customers in the awareness stage, Shingly says it’s all about “selling the brand, then selling the can.” This messaging shifts as customers move through the customer journey. 

“When it comes to conversion and consideration content, it’s direct. It’s tactical. It talks about the functional prowess of our product.” 

Shingly says this type of messaging drives immediate action.

To deliver messaging tailored to each stage of the customer journey, use Shopify Segmentation to create audience segments, then write unique content for each segment.

Identify gaps

The customer journey isn’t always linear, but it should be easy for customers to take each step in the process toward conversion. Because a customer journey map illustrates how your customers move from one touchpoint to another, it makes it easier to see any gaps in communication that might prevent customers from moving on to the next stage.

“It really makes you think more critically about what your life cycle journey truly looks like,” Divy Ojha, founder of grocery delivery company Odd Bunch, says on Shopify Masters. 

For example, mapping the customer journey forces you to look at how you interact with shoppers in the loyalty stage. 

“How are you talking to the customer post-purchase?” says Divy. “What are the pieces of content that you’re serving them? How are you turning that first box moment into a habit?”

Filling in any gaps helps you optimize the customer journey and create a cohesive customer experience for shoppers.

Improve internal alignment

A shared customer journey map ensures your entire team has the same vision and goals when it comes to the customer experience. To create a customer journey map, you’ll need to work with different functions like marketing and customer service. This can open the lines of communication and increase understanding between departments.

Focus on customer retention

The customer journey has two stages beyond acquisition: service and loyalty. Creating a map is a reminder that the journey continues after someone makes a purchase. 

Focusing on these stages of the journey means homing in on customer retention, which can help your bottom line. That’s because it can be more expensive to acquire a new customer than retain a current one. If you’re on Shopify, use Customer reports to check the number of new vs. returning customers over a given period.

How to create your own customer journey map

1. Gather data
2. Create customer personas
3. Map out stages
4. Update

The customer journey mapping process will differ depending on your business and goals, but the general steps are:

1. Gather data

Determine what data from your customer analytics tools you need to fill out your map. A good customer journey map includes a combination of quantitative data (like email opens, purchase history, and traffic from different channels) and qualitative data (customer interviews and post-purchase customer satisfaction surveys).

Think about the data you need to support your hypotheses. You can find qualitative data like conversion rates and average order value numbers in Shopify Analytics. To find qualitative data, you may need to send out customer surveys or use pop-up forms. You can do this with a tool like Shopify Forms and an email marketing software like Shopify Messaging.

2. Create customer personas

Customer personas, also known as buyer personas, are short, fictionalized profiles of your customers based on real data. Here are some data points to include:

• Location: Where do they live? 
• Age: What is their general age range?
• Gender: What is the most likely gender of this customer?
• Interests: What interests and hobbies are relevant to your product?
• Education: What is the education level of this persona? If relevant, what did they study in school?
• Job title: What’s their field of work, and what job titles do they have?
• Income: What is the income range and purchasing power of this persona?
• Relationship status: Are they single or married?
• Language: What languages do they speak?
• Buying motivations: What is their primary reason for buying your products?

Customer journey maps are told from the customer’s perspective, so the more lifelike your persona is, the easier it will be to imagine yourself in their shoes. 

Here’s what a customer persona looks like:

3. Map out stages

Now that you have a hypothesis, relevant data, and a customer persona, it’s time to put everything together. 

For each of the five stages of the customer journey—awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, and loyalty—fill out the rows in your template with the details of your persona’s journey, like time frame and emotions.

4. Update

As your strategy evolves, update your customer journey maps to reflect the current customer experience. Ideally, you’ll update your customer journey maps after every adjustment to a customer touchpoint, but you should aim to review them at least quarterly.