In today’s digitally connected world, customers have a myriad of choices when it comes to connecting with brands and businesses. There are many benefits to this, such as greater reach and more touchpoints to connect with customers, but there are also some drawbacks. When looking at customer journeys, there is rarely only one route available, making understanding how your customers find and interact with you more challenging.
Consider the London tube map. Let’s say you want to get to Oxford Circus. You know you can always get the Central (red) line, but you could also get the Bakerloo (brown) line or the Victoria (blue) line, depending on where you are coming from. Each journey is slightly different, and will give you a particular type of experience.
We can apply this thinking when analyzing digital customer journeys. One customer may find you through Google search, whereas another may see an advert on social media, or through an online event. And the thing is, as the number of channels that customers can find us on increases, so too does the amount of touchpoints needed to make a sale.
According to research by EmailToolTester, in 2025 there could be up to 50 touchpoints in a buyer journey before a sale is made:
"While it is widely accepted that it takes 8 touchpoints to make a sale, our research suggests that in 2025, the actual number of touchpoints before a sale varies between 1 and 50, depending on the prospect’s buying stage:
- Inactive customers only need 1–3 touches on average
- A warm inbound lead will need 5–12 touches
- A cold prospect can require 20–50 touches"
This might feel quite overwhelming. How can you possibly manage all these different touchpoints and complexities? That is where customer journey maps come to save the day.
A customer journey map is a visual model that shows you how your customers behave at each touchpoint with your business. This technique, also known as “touchpoint mapping”, is aimed at reviewing how digital experiences and content support customer decision-making across a multi-channel journey.
As customers navigate touchpoints in different ways, enhancing your omnichannel experience across different platforms is essential for improving the success of your marketing. Omnichannel strategy and customer journey mapping go hand in hand. In order to have cohesion in messaging and identity across your touchpoints, you need a strong understanding of your entire digital identity.
"A seamless customer journey is crucial for omnichannel success. By creating a unified experience across channels—online, in-store or on social media—brands reduce friction and make it easy for customers to engage. This smooth journey fosters deeper interaction, increases satisfaction, builds trust and drives conversions and loyalty." [Annie Austin, Forbes]
However, without a proper plan in place it's hard to track all the different elements of your customer journey. If you don't have a dedicated plan in place, you can use our free digital marketing plan template to get started.
Free digital marketing plan template Our popular marketing planning template is structured across the Smart Insights RACE Framework. Join Smart Insights as a Free Member to download our digital marketing plan template today. Access the Free digital marketing plan template
Put simply, customer journey maps help you understand your buyers’ behaviour. You can use them to quickly identify any possible snags in your digital journey, and any barriers to sale. They can also show you what areas of your marketing funnel are strong or need developing.
Customer journey mapping helps you get into the mind of your customers and consider their needs at each touchpoint, and as a result better predict future behaviour, wants and needs. You can then use this information to solve their pain points with your product/brand by implementing strategic marketing tactics.
But how do you get started?
Before you can start customer journey mapping, it is helpful to know your key customers and how they operate across your digital touchpoints. The best way to do this is to use your key customer personas as the basis for your customer journey maps.
New to personas? Here is a useful definition from our co-founder Dr. Dave Chaffey:
“A persona is a fictional character that communicates the primary characteristics of a group of users, identified and selected as a key target through use of segmentation data, across the company in a usable and effective manner”.
If you need help identifying the key personas for your business, download our handy persona guide and template. You’ll want to use a range of data sources and real customer feedback to create the most accurate personas for your business.
Once you have your customer personas identified, you can begin creating your customer journey maps.
Top tip: We recommend creating one customer journey map per persona, so you can be clear on your different buyers’ behaviours.
As customer behaviour differs at different stages of the customer journey, we created a set of handy customer journey mapping templates to help you map out customer interactions at each stage of Smart Insights’ RACE funnel.
Customer journey mapping templates
Using our customer journey map templates, map out customer journeys for your key personas to help understand your buyers' behaviour. In this download bundle you get access to 3 useful templates; Our original customer journey mapping template, a customer journey map audit spreadsheet and an editable version of our popular customer lifecycle graphic.
Access the Customer journey mapping templates
Using our original customer journey mapping template and your business' persona data, share what actions, touchpoints, thoughts and emotions are involved at each stage of the customer journey, and plot this across each RACE stage: Awareness, Evaluation, Decision, and Retention.
You can access and create your own editable RACE customer journey map by downloading our customer journey mapping template bundle. Included is a useful video which explains how to complete each stage of the map.
Top tip: When completing your RACE table, you are looking at how your persona navigates across touchpoints currently, not how you would ideally like them to! This is an important distinction as we are using the map to look for areas we can optimize and improve the customer journey.
The most actionable element of this template is the bottom two rows for each column. This is where we identify the pain points and resolutions for each stage of RACE.
Let’s say our company is an online retailer specializing in female clothing and accessories. Our persona is Wendy, and in this example Wendy is looking for a new outfit to wear to a friend’s wedding. In the Reach phase, she searches for ‘wedding guest outfits’ on Google. The pain point for our example B2C brand here could be that we are not ranking organically on Google for ‘wedding guest outfits’, so it is likely that Wendy will go to a competitor’s site that is higher up in her search results. That’s bad news for us as it means we miss out on acquiring a new lead.
Underneath the Pain Points box we have a Resolution box, so you can easily consider how to solve this problem to improve the customer journey for Wendy (and your brand!) For this problem, our example company could assess and implement better keyword targeting in new content/blog articles to highlight key wedding guest outfit terms to improve ranking over-time. Long-term, this will help boost the brand's position and visibility in Google for key search terms that their persona uses.
You can use these boxes to highlight blockers that stop your persona moving along the RACE funnel, and what actionable steps you can take to resolve them. In turn you’ll also get a better understanding of key decision points for your customer.
To see the full, completed example of ‘Wendy’s’ customer journey map and how to use the template, download our customer journey mapping template bundle.
It’s easy to eagerly complete a customer journey map with every intention to implement it, only for it to end up in the ‘to-do’ pile that never surfaces again. Customer journey mapping gives you a chance to identify snags in your existing customer journeys and space to create resolutions to resolve them. However if this information is not integrated with your marketing strategy, it won’t end up getting actioned and your improvements will never fully come to fruition. Which would suck!
It is important that you integrate the resolutions you devise with the RACE template into your overall digital marketing strategy, so you can work on improving your customers’ journeys at each critical point of the funnel. Consider your persona’s goals alongside your marketing objectives - what are you looking to achieve? Then you can turn these insights into action by planning what marketing tactics you will use to improve user experience and elevate the omnichannel experience for your customers.
Customer journey mapping templates
Ready to better understand your customers and improve their experiences with your brand? Download our customer journey mapping templates to get started.
Access the Customer journey mapping templates
By Amelia Cooper
Amelia Cooper (née Mayes) is Head of Content at Smart Insights, managing the creation and optimization of paid member resources to ensure customers get the most from their memberships. She is a University of Southampton and Chartered Institute of Marketing graduate with 10 years’ experience in digital marketing, specializing in content marketing. She spends her spare time reading with her son, painting animals, and cuddling her canine assistant Merlin and house bunny Rolo. You can connect with Amelia on LinkedIn.
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