The definitive 6-step customer journey mapping process

Mapping the customer journey is essential to understanding your buyers and turning them into loyal customers, but it can be tricky to effectively capture all the different user personas and purchasing processes in the customer journey. A misaligned map can derail your plans—leading to dissatisfied users who don’t stick around long enough to convert or become loyal customers.

Following certain customer journey mapping stages helps you to create tried-and-tested customer journey maps that improve your user's experience (UX), driving increased conversions and satisfaction. 

This article walks you through the six key stages of great customer journey mapping, showing you how to create a map that tracks your users’ unique journeys and get key insights into your customers and their needs.

A 6-step process for effective customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visualization of every point of interaction a user has with your company and product.

Follow these six steps to create a powerful customer journey map that lets you understand—and enhance—the customer experience.

1. Set goals unique to your business

Before you start mapping out the customer journey, define your larger business and customer goals. 

To begin, ask yourself what you want your customers to achieve. What are their jobs to be done (JTBD)? Does your business depend on repeat customers, or are your products one-off larger ticket items?

Your customer journey will look different depending on your company’s needs and goals. For example, the journey for an ecommerce brand helping users navigate several different products and make multiple purchases will differ from that of a SaaS company selling subscriptions for one core product.

Even different B2B businesses will have very different objectives. A company like GE Renewable Energy that sells large equipment to B2B customers may prioritize goals like generating more website conversions and creating brand advocates who recommend GE products to other businesses in the industry. On the other hand, a software company like HubSpot will need to emphasize the customer journey's onboarding and renewal components to increase customer retention. 

Know what your goals are before creating your customer journey map to prioritize the most important steps for your customers and your business.

HubSpot’s customer journey map focuses heavily on onboarding and renewal, two parts of the customer journey that are essential to the company’s success

2. Identify your customer segments

Use customer segmentation to organize users into similar groups and analyze their behaviors. This is an important step in the customer journey mapping process, because if you don’t understand your users and what they’re looking for, you won’t be able to create user journeys that meet their needs.

During your analysis, consider the goals of these different customer segments. What do they hope to accomplish when they search for your product or service? What do they want to do when they click on your website? Address and answer these questions to build a deep understanding of your users’ goals and pain points to inform your customer journey.

Don’t forget: the purchasing process is an especially nuanced cycle for B2B businesses, because the end users of your product or service are often not the same people making the purchasing decision. So don't just focus on the users who’ll try out your product or service or the C-level decision makers—understand every stakeholder involved in the purchasing process to map out an accurate customer journey. 

Take Canva: the design tool is used by a variety of businesses, from freelancers to large corporations like PayPal and Danone. Understanding different user profiles and needs gave Canva the insight they needed to design their homepage for different customer types who can choose their own adventure and head off on their most relevant user journey.

Canva customers can choose between the Free, Pro, and Enterprise plans so they get started on the right journey for them

Pro tip: not sure where to start with customer segmentation? Check out our five-step guide to customer segmentation analysis.

User Segmentation in Contentsquare lets you analyze specific user segments to get in-depth insights that inform your customer journey maps

3. Define the customer journey stages

Once you’ve identified your goals and target audience, it’s time to define the stages of the customer journey. Let’s take a look at a typical seven-stage B2B customer journey, using the popular SEO tool Ahrefs as an example:

• Awareness: a buyer becomes aware of their problem and begins to search for solutions, which is when they discover your brand. In our example, a buyer knows they need to improve their website’s SEO performance, so they search for ‘best SEO tools’ and come across Ahrefs. They visit the homepage, where the tool’s value proposition entices them to learn more.

• Consideration: customers consider your product or service as a potential solution. Here, the buyer visits the Ahrefs website and learns about the brand’s unique selling proposition, reads about features, watches a demo, explores resources like the Ahrefs blog and SEO guide, and weighs up whether Ahrefs is the product solution for them.

• Decision: the buyer makes a decision and purchases the product or service that best fits their needs. In the case of Ahrefs, the buyer purchases the subscription (Lite, Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise) that’s right for them. The Ahrefs website guides users in the decision and purchasing process by displaying clear CTAs that encourage users to become paying customers.

• Onboarding: the buyer starts to use the product, goes through the onboarding process, and gets familiar with the tool by reading guides and watching demos. They (ideally) start to adopt it into their everyday workflow. 

• Support: users contact customer teams as they need support. In our example, customers have easy access to customer support agents and the Ahrefs help center to smoothly resolve issues and questions.

• Retention: customer retention is a key part of the buyer journey, and at this stage, buyers decide whether or not they’ll remain loyal customers and continue using your product. Ahrefs offers a range of subscription models and gives users who sign up for an annual subscription a two-month free plan. 

• Advocacy: the final stage in an ideal customer journey is turning customers into brand advocates. Ahrefs has done a good job of this: the homepage shows reviews from real users who recommend the tool, including pro SEOs, content marketers, and agencies.

The Ahrefs website helps visitors move through customer journey stages with a clear value proposition and prominent CTAs

Pro tip: your product's user journey may look different depending on your company and customer types: a customer purchasing a one-off product will have a very different journey from a company subscribing to a service. 

Oleg Donets, founder and chief marketing officer at Real Estate Bees, points out how the stages of non-SaaS B2B customer journeys can differ from SaaS journeys: 

"Since the vast majority of SaaS companies utilize subscription revenue models, this directly impacts the customer journey. B2B customer journeys often scale back a notch shortly after a sale has been made, but that’s when the customer journey of a SaaS company just starts kicking in."

4. List all possible B2B customer touchpoints 

Once you map out the steps in your customer’s B2B journey, identify each ‘touchpoint’ where they interact with your company, from social media posts to your homepage CTAs and your product itself. 

Collaboration is key to identifying touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. At this stage of the journey mapping process, include insights from different teams and stakeholders. Your marketing and sales teams will have a strong understanding of the touchpoints involved pre-purchase, while the customer experience department can shed light on post-purchase touchpoints.

Let’s go back to the Ahrefs example. A key touchpoint in the early awareness, consideration, and purchase stages of the B2B customer journey is their homepage and a clear call-to-action (CTA) button. These onsite touchpoints show customers what their next steps in the product experience (PX) should be and give them the information they need to make a decision. 

In the next phases—onboarding and support—follow Ahrefs' example by making it easy for users to connect with your B2B business, resolve their issues, and upgrade. On the Ahrefs help center page, customers can reach out to representatives and receive support within minutes.

Make sure you continue mapping out how your users interact with your business in the retention and advocacy phases after they become customers. How can you make it easier for them to renew their subscription? Do you offer any rewards for referrals?

Making it easy for customers to contact an agent enhances onboarding and support touchpoints

As well as mapping out touchpoints by customer journey phase, consider the different touchpoints experienced by different user personas. For example, the product experience of high-level executives who make the purchasing decision may not be the same as their employees who are your end-users. 

By identifying key B2B customer journey touchpoints for different customers and purchasing stages, you can improve UX, making product advocates out of your buyers.

Pro tip: use Heatmaps and Session Replay to explore how your users interact with key customer touchpoints on your website and product—and get the insights you need to improve their journey. 

Watch session replays to see exactly how users navigate your site or product and engage with specific touchpoints

5. Map out the customer journey

This is the part where you put everything together. 

First, map out an overarching customer journey by putting your key touchpoints in order and identifying how your various user personas interact with them. Then, home in on the details, looking at how customers engage with specific aspects of your website, product, or social media accounts. 

Breaking down the mapping process into smaller phases will ensure you don’t miss any key interactions. 

Here’s how an ecommerce brand could lay out general touchpoints, then narrow each down into more specific actions:

Pro tip: it’s helpful to think of the user journey in terms of different functions when mapping it out, like:

• Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

• Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

• Serve: how are you serving customers when they want to purchase?

• Retain: how are you promoting brand advocacy and customer retention?

6. Measure and analyze the success of the customer journey

One of the most important customer journey mapping best practices is measuring the success of your customer journey. 

Use the right digital experience analytics platform to help you evaluate the impact of your touchpoints. For best results, combine quantitative and qualitative data to fully understand the impact of the customer journey on CX. 

Use Voice of the Customer (VoC) tools like surveys and feedback collection to learn what your users really think and feel about their experience, and watch related session replays to contextualize these insights and see what went right (or wrong).

Use Voice of the Customer tools to get direct feedback from users about their experience on your site or product

After you’ve mapped the customer journey, regularly check in on your key goals and what matters most to your customers. Keep measuring the outcomes of your customer journey to understand which aspects are successful and which parts need improvement.

Pro tip: want to cut down on work without sacrificing results? Contentsquare’s Customer Journeys shows you how users progress through your site or product, page by page.

Automatically capture data from 100% of customers to surface common journeys—and pain points, like bottlenecks or looping behavior. Use segments to get granular and uncover the customer journeys of your most valuable cohorts, then work backward to encourage new users to take the same path. Compare journeys to understand how different personas interact with your site, and find optimization opportunities tailored to them.

Get at-a-glance visualizations to make data-driven decisions, and jump straight from your customer journey analysis to Zone-Based Heatmaps or Session Replay to get even more insights.

Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis visualizes the customer journey from beginning to end, empowering you to make data-driven optimizations based on your goals

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

Jamie Irwin, director and search marketing expert at Straight Up Search, says companies should avoid these three common mistakes when mapping out the customer journey:

1. Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

2. Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

3. Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

1. Start by mapping out the overall journey, and only drill down into more detail once you have a broader, higher-level overview of the customer journey

2. Factor in every way that customers interact with your brand, even the ones you don’t have as much visibility on, like ‘dark social’ communications about your brand shared in private channels. Talk to your users to find out what they’ve heard about your brand outside of public channels, and use sticky share buttons to keep track of when your content’s shared through email or social media messengers.

3. Take a data-informed approach. Don’t assume you already know your users—test out your hypotheses with real users and qualitative and quantitative data. 

Map out effective customer journeys to improve UX and boost conversions

Successfully mapping out the customer journey requires a deep understanding of all your buyers and how they interact with your brand and product. 

Adapting these steps to your customers and company helps you create a customer journey map that identifies what your users need at each stage of the buying cycle to provide them with the best possible experience.

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages