The 7 Customer Journey Map Templates You Need to Level Up Your Product Onboarding
Providing a seamless customer experience is one of the best things you can do to attract new business and boost engagement with your product. According to a Salesforce survey, 70% of consumers say that connected processes through their journey are a contributing factor to their purchasing decisions.
How do you make customers feel this connection throughout their experience with your brand? By mapping out the customer journey. When you understand how different types of customers move through the process, from becoming familiar with your product to their eventual purchase, you ensure they get the most value at every touchpoint.
Building out these customer journey maps also helps you track the various ways that new users become familiar with your product and grow from a newbie into a loyal advocate of your brand. While everyone’s experience with your product is slightly different, customer journey map templates help you visualize these processes across all different use cases.
Not only does that help you foster understanding of the customer journey within your team, but it also helps you highlight how to add value at each step.
Current vs. Future State Customer Journey Map Templates
Customer journey maps are a way to visualize a customer’s experience with your brand. They outline key touchpoints in the relationship and highlight how the customer moves toward a specific goal. A customer journey map template can have two different states: current and future. As you build out your templates, it’s important to understand both the current state of your customers’ experience as well as how you want that experience to change.
Creating both types of journey maps provides the most comprehensive picture of your team’s impact, goals, and desired outcomes.
- Current customer journey map templates provide clarity into the experience as it is today.
- Future customer journey map templates help you spec out what you’d like the experience to be in the future.
When you combine the two together, it helps you refine the customer experience over time and ensure that each step—from interest to consideration, purchase, and beyond—adds concrete value to the customer experience.
How to Read a Customer Journey Map
You can conceptualize the customer journey in many different ways, but it all comes down to tracking each step toward a specific goal or desired outcome. The following journey map templates list each step from left to right, with the specific activities, motivations, emotions, and potential barriers a customer encounters at each stage.
- Activities – the specific actions taken at each step
- Motivations – why people perform those actions
- Emotions – how they feel at each step
- Barriers – known issues that stop the action
Following this structure helps you connect with customers, buyers, and users on a deeper level and see more opportunities to help them along the way.
1. The Buyer’s Journey Map
This first customer journey map template is arguably one of the most important. Understanding your target persona’s journey, from interested consumer to paying customer, ensures you provide information that motivates them to make the final purchase decision.
Mapping out the buyer’s journey in this way requires a comprehensive understanding of each stage of the customer acquisition funnel. It’s important to know how potential leads become aware of your product, how those leads learn more about the value your product provides, and what makes them finally turn their interest into an actual purchase.
But the reality of what happens at each stage of the process is only the first step. To make your buyer’s journey map valuable for the team, you also need to include the potential customer’s motivations at each stage of the process and the type of content you use to move them closer to making the final purchase. That provides insight into the underlying “why” behind people’s purchase decisions, which is the key to providing the type of experiences that match their expectations.
2. The Sales Funnel Journey Map
Whether your product’s sales cycle is shorter or longer, identifying key inflection points that motivate customers to engage with your sales team is crucial. Mapping out these touchpoints ensures that your team always understands the best tactics for nudging people towards an eventual sale.
This map mirrors the buyer’s journey in some ways by following the movement of potential customers from interest to consideration to purchase. It focuses on how those stages progress after a potential customer reaches out to your sales team.
Make sure to include your typical sales cycle, call cadence, and time required for your team to complete the sale. Support this with the common sales objectives and educational material—sales enablement resources or third-party review sites—leads refer to when speaking with your team.
3. The New User Onboarding Map
Once someone has purchased your product or signed up for your service, you need to onboard them fast. Doing so increases engagement and sets customers up for success. New user onboarding also ensures that your new customer gets the most value out of the product as quickly as possible, which boosts retention rates and builds stronger relationships.
Use your new user onboarding map to identify specific actions users need to take to properly set up their accounts, like entering an up-to-date email address or clicking through a modal pop-up on their account settings page. Then highlight where your team can make improvements to those processes. The steps you choose will depend on the goal, or first action, you want people to accomplish to signify the end of their onboarding.
Be sure to include the actions new users take, where in the account they do so, and how your team can provide proactive help at each step of the process. When your customers feel comfortable using the product on their own, it helps them get the most out of the relationship.
4. The Feature Adoption Journey Map
Rolling out a new product or feature is the culmination of a lot of time and hard work from your team—which is why you need to understand the path customers take to learn and use that new product. The first few days after a release are a leading indicator of overall engagement rates and pivotal to the lasting success of your product. This customer journey map template follows a similar path to new user onboarding as the goal for each process is to spur customers to take action in their account.
Use your release management plan to highlight the new product’s value and walk through the steps people need to take to find that value as quickly as possible. It’s important you don’t leave any of this to chance since the longer it takes to find value in your product, the less likely it will be that consumers will use it.
Your feature adoption journey map should include release announcements, beta testing, testimonial outreach, and follow-up emails. Understanding the path users take, from learning about your product to using it and recommending it to their peers, helps you provide value at each step along the way.
5. Your Competitor’s Buyer Journey Map
To be truly effective with your marketing and positioning, you need to understand how competitors attract, convert, and retain their customers. This insight helps you build a better picture of your market and customer expectations. Use competitor analysis to show each member of your team how other players in your industry think about acquiring new business. Then document that process for your team.
The easiest way to understand more about this journey is to sign up for their marketing campaigns and a free trial account. Doing so provides a firsthand experience with your competitor’s content, which you can use to make smarter decisions about your own positioning.
Notice how this customer journey map template is structured similarly to your own buyer’s journey, and that’s by design. When you can cross-reference the potential customer’s experience at each stage of your competitor’s sales process, that helps to nail down exactly how that differs from your own experience. With that knowledge, it’s easy to bypass potential issues and sync up with customer expectations.
6. The Lead Nurture Journey Map
Like our sales funnel example from earlier, the lead nurture map exists in tandem with your overall buyer’s journey. This customer journey map template focuses specifically on how sales and marketing leads move through your omnichannel marketing experience. Used alongside its counterparts, the lead nurture map helps you track the impact of various campaigns on potential customers who have subscribed to your distribution lists.
Visualizing the lead nurture experience helps you see the way marketing educates customers about the value of your product. And it helps you provide more relevant and personalized information to users as they move through each campaign. The modern online buying experience spans so many touchpoints across different channels, so you need to understand how they all work together.
Make sure to include each channel people interact with, how those channels play off one another, and how it all combines to move leads toward your desired goal. That ensures you have clarity into what kind of messaging has the most potential to convert these leads into paying customers.
7. The Day-in-the-Life Journey Map
Visualizing both the product and marketing experience helps you gain a clear understanding of the relationship between your customer and your company. But to truly connect with customers’ needs, you also need to see how your product or service fits into their daily lives. Mapping out this information not only helps you refine your understanding of certain customer personas, but it also helps you communicate the value of your product more effectively.
The day-in-the-life customer journey map is more about understanding what drives potential customers to seek out your product. It’s a way to build empathy with their problems and position your product as a solution. Be sure to create a different map for each of your target personas.
When you use this template, make sure to include specific actions people take throughout the day, as well as what drives those actions. The best way to suss out these motivations is through a discovery or usability interview. Speaking directly to your customers in this way ensures that you’re not extrapolating too much—which keeps your day-in-the-life map grounded in reality.
Customer Journey Maps Build Understanding Across Your Team
Using a customer journey map template solidifies your understanding of the customer experience faster, without sacrificing too much of your time. Every member of your team is able to engage with these journeys on a deeper level and connect with the customer’s underlying needs and desired outcomes. With that knowledge, building products that are truly valuable is simple.