user journey for new product

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot's free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer's journey, a day in the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you're creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don't have one, I would recommend creating a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics at the ready.

Don't have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot's Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started. 

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services and who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you've learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I would recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a UX journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company — so if you group too many personas into one journey, your map won't accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it's best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don't worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there's no overlap.

This is essential in creating a UX journey map because it provides insight into your customers' actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they're quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you also need to look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels
• Email marketing
• Third-party review sites or mentions

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand, impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding -- you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

Free course: Introduction to UX Design

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Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service. 

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition. 

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What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app. 

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage? 

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

• Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
• Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
• Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
• Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders. 

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs. 

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process. 

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product. 

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity. 

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where. 

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following: 

• A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
• A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
• User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
• High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
• Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
• Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
• Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
• Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
• Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
• Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable. 

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

• Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
• Define your persona and scenario
• Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions 
• Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
• Identify opportunities 
• Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

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1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own. 

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map. 

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases. 

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with. 

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy . 

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online. 

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way. 

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant. 

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”. 

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog. 

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.  

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps 

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product. 

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights. 

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps? 

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process. 

For more how-to guides, check out:

• The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
• How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
• How to Conduct User Interviews

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The Do’s and Don’ts of User Journey Mapping

Last March, three weeks after Joseph Siwak was hired as an experience designer at the online hotel-booking company Rocket Travel, they sent him home — not with a pink slip, but with a new set of marching orders.

“I went from, literally, being in the middle of a normal traveler journey map to saying, ‘OK, what could the new normal be?’” Siwak said.

For Siwak, an illustrator whose user journey maps resemble artful graphic novels, the arrival of the pandemic meant, among other things, redrawing his vision of the modern traveler’s online experience. And he wasn’t the only one.

“We kind of suspected that people would want more localized safe spaces, like Airbnb and Vrbo, to hang out,” Autumn Schultz, director of experience design at Rocket Travel, said. “So we hypothesized around those ideas and what people might want to do in that space as well.”

User Journey Mapping Do’s

• Clarify your goals.
• Consider the scope. 
• Gather a multidisciplinary team.
• Validate assumptions with analytics.
• Validate assumptions with interviews of loyal users.
• Start the journey prior to the customer’s discovery of your product.
• Differentiate new and existing customers.
• Match the fidelity of the map to its goals.
• Weave in real-life artifacts.
• Sync your in-app messaging with user journey flows.

These conversations led to a new journey map plotting users’ experiences on Rocketmiles, the company’s signature hotel booking app. Cartoon personas took on new expressions of anxiety. Once concerned over hotel prices, travelers were now frightened at the prospect of going, basically, anywhere. The map suggested where in-app messaging at key touchpoints could help address user concerns.

Turns out, user journey maps serve many functions. They help internal teams empathize with user needs. They clarify where and how features or engagements should surface in a digital product. They contextualize how a product or offering stacks up to a competitor’s.

“It’s a tool to generate ideas, to get people in a room and have real discussions, strategically, about what we want to address and when.”

Whether created on physical whiteboards or the digital boards of companies like Miro, Figma, Confluence or Lucidchart, journey maps offer a high-level view of a customer’s experience that sheds light on how they feel as they navigate the product.

“It’s a tool to generate ideas, to get people in a room and have real discussions, strategically, about what we want to address and when. Not every pain point is the worst pain point and not every opportunity is a happy path,” Siwak said.

Here, executives and product leaders reveal what to do — and what not to do — to make the exercise worthwhile.

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Clarify Your Goals

“All good journey maps have a goal in mind,” said Keith Mancuso, a technical product manager at the digital agency Happy Cog. “You might want to increase utilization of discounts, increase average order value or increase page views.”

At Fueled, a New York-headquartered web and app development consultancy, journey mapping serves a two-fold purpose, Derek Burgess, the lead product manager, said. For existing clients like MGM Resorts International, Verizon and Warby Parker, journey mapping guides the development of new or existing products or services. For prospective clients, Fueled uses journey maps to plan and execute pitches.

“Any time a designer kicks off a project like this, it’s really important to describe why you’re doing it and what we should expect.”

“We do communications-strategy deliverables and growth-strategy deliverables. And with both of them, we use the user journey map to target areas that may be inefficient,” Burgess said.

Often, the goal is to rally support for a feature release among internal teams.

“Any time a designer kicks off a project like this, it’s really important to describe why you’re doing it and what we should expect,” Schultz said. “[Designers] all get really excited about doing these things, but if your partners — whether that’s your product people, engineers, CEO, operations or customer service people — don’t know why you’re doing it, it feels untethered.”

Consider the Scope

Matthew Hardesty is vice president of product at Brainbase, a platform that helps organizations like BuzzFeed and the Van Gogh Museum manage their intellectual property. He said his team generally spends no more than a week on a journey map. However, the time allotted reflects the breadth of the tasks being mapped.

A map might span the entire product lifecycle or a single engagement, such as the registration flow. The scope of the map should reflect the projected value of the product or proposed changes.

“You want to understand the tradeoffs, whether they are monetary or based on strategic reasons,” Hardesty said. “We know conversion rates are each worth X dollars. We think these improvements will increase the value by X amount and affect this many users.”

Gather a Multidisciplinary Team

Schultz recommends gathering a multi-disciplinary team early on to co-create the user journey map.

“So, not just design, but maybe it’s operations, maybe it’s customer service, maybe it’s a product person,” she said. “You could do this as a workshop, you can start mapping Post-Its from, say, the moment people start thinking about an experience to when they start looking for solutions to their problem or whatever they’re trying to achieve.”

Validate Assumptions With Analytics

Journey maps tend to be chock full of assumptions. One way to validate these is through behavioral analytics platforms like FullStory, Hotjar and Amplitude that offer reports, performance graphs and session replays to evaluate user engagement.

“With tools like FullStory, you can basically watch user sessions,” Hardesty said. “Press play and see exactly what they did. It’s not just analytics or a heat map, but how far they scrolled down a landing page, where they are in the viewport, what they’re looking at and whether they’re converting.”

Validate Assumptions Through Interviews With Loyal Users

Hard data helps validate assumptions, but qualitative interviews with longtime customers are often just as valuable.

“If they’re a repeat customer, and you’re trying to understand lifetime value, you can’t outsource that all that easily,”  Schultz said. “One thing I think is super interesting is if you can get actual videos of your customers — if they’re willing to be recorded. Because tying an emotional hook to the experience is a lot more compelling for an engineer, or someone who is pretty far from the customer experience. It’s a way for them to understand, ‘This is why we’re doing it.’”

Conversations can happen informally, Siwak said, via a Zoom call with a customer who has opted in to provide input on a beta release, or a shared Slack channel where a peer from another company may be able to provide useful insights. Companies like dscout and UserTesting also offer remote user testing services.

Start the Journey Prior to the Customer’s Discovery of Your Product

A user journey map doesn’t have to start inside your product — it can start in the mind of a prospective user, Siwak said. Take the journey of a would-be traveler on Rocketmiles: “You’re sitting at work one day, and you’re just daydreaming of doing something different,” he said. “That’s a great jumping-off point for thinking about [the journey map].”

Envisioning the user’s journey holistically, beginning even prior to discovery, can lead to unexpected insights.

“People are discovering things [during the pandemic] maybe they wouldn’t have in a normal life and doing things differently — learning to ski all of a sudden,” Siwak added. “I have a friend who’s living near Yellowstone and trying to become an influencer with some buffalo.”

Differentiate Between New and Existing Customers

Within a journey map, design patterns often follow a typical chronology and tree logic. At registration, for instance, a visitor might be asked to sign up or continue as a guest. Assuming they sign up, a subsequent message asks for permission to send notifications. Later, they might be asked if they’d like to share their location.

But it’s important to differentiate the journeys of new and long-time users, Burgess told me.

In a mapping project for an insurance company offering supplemental employee benefits and discounts, Fueled plotted two distinct journeys  — one for new employees enrolling shortly after being hired, and a second for established employees casually shopping online.

New employees received the promotions as an upgrade offer when they enrolled for standard benefits packages. For the second group, a pre-installed Chrome extension embedded in the insurance platform promoted discount codes at optimized intervals.

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Match the Fidelity of the Map to Its Goals

The fidelity of a map should match its goals. Rocket Travel uses low-fidelity journey mapping to explore how potential Rocketmile customers use rival services such as Expedia, TripAdvisor — even Google — to plan for travel.

“I often will start with a lower-fidelity user journey with lots of assumptions on it,” Siwak said. “And just put a giant watermark that says, ‘These are all assumptions.’ And then, as we validate things, I’ll increase the fidelity — make it feel like we’ve talked to people about this, we know that it’s true.”

“I often will start with a lower-fidelity user journey with lots of assumptions on it, and just put a giant watermark that says, ‘These are all assumptions.’”

As a journey map becomes more refined, Siwak sharpens the imagery to create a dramatic narrative that accentuates pain points and happy moments along the user’s journey.

“I’ll try to make them almost like a comic,” he said. “Because I want people to be excited by the map and feel like it’s something they want to look at. The online [templates] are usually just so dry. If it’s all text, people will not want to read it.”

Weave in Real-Life Artifacts

Digital artifacts or “bread crumbs” — such as links to competitors’ sites, video or audio recordings of customer interviews, surveys and key research findings — are another way to create an emotional hook. Want to strengthen your case for adding a new feature? Try adding a snapshot of what’s possible.

For example: “We might include a picture of a Google spreadsheet of a user’s hotel options,” Schultz said. “It’s very true that customers create these to manage their reservations and share with their friends. Clearly, there’s a pain point in the travel experience that we’re not addressing and no one else has actually addressed, and that’s an opportunity. People have developed their own hacks. How do you lean into those hacks?”

Sync Your In-App Messaging With User Journey Flows

Platforms like Intercom, HubSpot and Braze now include custom journey builders designers can use to map the delivery of announcements, product tours, feature highlights and call-outs. These automated messaging services have become quite sophisticated in recent years, Burgess said.

“It’s almost like a CMS,” he explained. “You can use [the tools] to set up the structure for when a message triggers and how it triggers, and you can even set goals. It will report back to you the open rate and where people dropped off.”

User Journey Mapping Don'ts

• Don’t build journey maps from customer support tickets.
• Don’t limit your journey to the product funnel.
• Don’t over-index your map.
• Don’t forget your internal users and administrators.
• Don't wait to consult with other teams.
• Don’t create too many personas.
• Don’t ignore your non-users.
• Don’t do journey mapping in a vacuum.
• Don’t act on every customer suggestion.

Don’t Build Journey Maps From Customer Support Tickets

Joseph Ansanelli is CEO and co-founder of Gladly, a company that helps consumer brands like Crate & Barrel, Porsche and Ralph Lauren provide customer service through a multi-channel platform. He said journey maps that scope a customer’s experience across a single support ticket, rather than their entire history with a brand, miss the mark.

“We come at this from a standpoint of questioning how everyone else is doing journey mapping,” Ansanelli said. “The historical model is to create a journey based on a support ticket. That’s the wrong journey.”

“The historical model is to create a journey based on a support ticket. That’s the wrong journey.”

Instead, Ansanelli said interactions across channels — web browsers, in-app chat services, social media and live phone calls with customer-support agents — should be treated as a single journey.

“The right journey is when a customer contacts you, and you get them to the best person to help. It’s part of one lifelong conversation,” he said. “Otherwise, anytime a problem arises, you have to create another journey and another ticket, which requires two different support people to manage. That’s a broken system.”

Don’t Limit Your Journey to the Product Funnel

Conceptualizing the user journey as a funnel can make sense from a business standpoint, but that model has limitations.

“People don’t live in a funnel, they bounce around,” Schultz said. “Things are not constant. Journeys aren’t linear.”

Instead, journey maps should approach the product experience from a customer’s perspective. Stages in the journey such as discovery, onboarding, experimentation and habit-building should track the user’s evolving attitudes and reasoning.

“When you talk about funnels, it’s very hard to wear both hats,” Schultz said. “You’re looking at it from like a purely quantitative perspective — again, not wrong, just a different type of framework. Whereas journey mapping is meant to deepen your empathy and generate ideas.”

Don’t Over-Index Your Map

It’s easy to get bogged down in minutiae that mean little to customer satisfaction, much less the bottom line. Unless you’re a designer at a huge company like Amazon, where you might be called on to work toward infinitesimal improvements of a nano-feature, your focus should be on prioritizing what’s really important.

“What percent confidence are you adding by knowing a user scrolled 5 percent more on a page?” Hardesty asked. “Unless it’s your landing page, who cares? It’s not meaningful information.”

A better route, he told me, is to use a prioritization framework, such as the Kano model , to determine which features are most likely to resonate with customers. As he put it: “Do we think this will be a big winner? Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Don’t Forget Internal Users and Administrators

Too many companies consider the journeys of their end-users, but not the internal teams supporting the software.

Recently, Happy Cog consulted on a web design and development refresh for Posse, a non-profit organization that awards scholarships to groups of first-generation college students. The site offers several touchpoints to guide students through the nomination and selection process.

However, the support that students receive from mentors once they attend college is equally important to the program’s success. Are they maintaining good grades? Are they attending organizational meetings? These factors needed to be better addressed in the design, Mancuso said.

“Posse, for the longest time, only focused on what student nominees see. But the internal audience has a journey as well, through more complicated content management systems that allow mentors to post news, update marketing features and check in on students,” he said.

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Don’t Wait to Consult With Other Teams

Another way to torpedo a journey map is by waiting too long to invite key stakeholders.

“The more you wait, the more folks might feel surprised or question your findings,” Siwak said. “When people feel like they’re discovering it with you, there’s a lot less pushback. No one likes the surprise of hearing, ‘Hey, whatever part of the journey you’re responsible for sucks.’”

Beyond that, the journey mapping exercise can build solidarity for new product initiatives.

“I’ve never had anyone be like, ‘I think it was a waste of time,’” Siwak said. “And even if nothing scandalous is discovered in an ideation session, most people just enjoyed doing something different with their day.”

Don’t Create Too Many Personas

On the surface, separating personas by demographics — for instance, women in their 40s and men in their 20s — might seem like a good way to get an accurate view of your customer cohorts. But you can quickly lose the forest for the trees.

“Creating too many personas divides the audience too much,” Mancuso told me. “The journey becomes too complicated because there’s too much noise.”

Keep it simple: three to five personas.

Don’t Ignore Your Non-Users

What does this mean at a hotel-booking site like Rocketmiles?

“You have travelers who will never use the internet,” Siwak said. “Like the person on a road trip. You hit a rest stop in Tennessee, and there are those little pamphlets, and maybe you’re like, ‘You know what, I am going to go check out Dollywood today.’ Knowing that happens in the world might give us an opportunity, in the future, to capture a new market.”

Don’t Do Journey Mapping in a Vacuum

Talking to real customers to understand their attitudes toward your product, as well as those of competitors, is crucial to journey mapping. But companies often shortchange this part of the process.

“You get small companies that say, ‘We don’t have a lot of resources and money and time, and we’ve made this decision and we’re going to go with it.’ Or big companies that think they know everything about their customers,” Hardesty said.

Both views are distorted.

“Every time you come up with a feature idea, go back to the journey map, go back to your highest-grossing customers, your champions. At previous companies, I’ve helped establish customer advisor boards — a set of industry experts you can go to to gut check your assumptions.”

Don’t Act on Every Customer Suggestion

When several customers point to a particular bug or feature flaw, that’s a good signal that it’s time to revisit the journey map. However, while customers are good at seeing what’s broken, they’re less adept at positing solutions.

For example, if a customer requested a better way to search, sort and filter information: “You have to take these things with a grain of salt,” Hardesty said. “Maybe we create a different page, or reassign some of the content, and take care of 90 percent of what the individual user needs.”

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Design and Technology Guides

A guide to user journey mapping

By Rachel Robinson, Brittany Murphy, Sayla Tenenbaum, and Crystal Gee

User journey maps help tell the story of customer experiences across a brand’s touchpoints. At Think Company, our teams use journey mapping to understand how customers are actually using and experiencing a tool or process—and how that real-world experience aligns with the design’s intention. User journey mapping gives us valuable context and insight to build digital strategies that perform in real life.

Table of Contents

• What is a user journey map

Why is user journey mapping important?

Components of user journey maps, when to build a user journey map.

• How to create a journey map
• Types of user journey maps

User journey map examples

Service blueprints and user journey maps, forming digital strategies with user journey mapping, what is a user journey map.

User journey map: Visual representation of users’ various paths while using a tool or system.

A user journey map, also commonly called a customer journey map, is a tool that communicates a user’s “journey”—the path they take while they navigate an experience. User journey maps shed light on the emotional state at specific points during an experience, and can be used to highlight critical touchpoints along that journey. In general, user journey maps help stakeholders see the digital experience within a larger context.

User journey mapping also goes beyond the tool’s intention and illuminates how the user actually uses it and experiences it. If there’s a problem in the user journey, a user journey map allows you to identify the problem in the real world—and resolve it.

The most important benefit of a user journey map is that it highlights any gaps between intention and reality. Digital experiences designed by even the most seasoned UX teams can still have a distinct difference between how they’re intended to be used and how a user moves through them. There’s always an element of unpredictability.

Customer journey mapping identifies “easy fixes” to alleviate obvious pain points while planning for the future, while also providing insight for creating a roadmap to fixing existing problems and building future solutions. But it’s not all doom and gloom—user journey maps also identify what’s working! This information provides an opportunity to learn from what’s successful, too.

Understanding the areas of disconnection not only inform design teams about where they can try to bridge the gap in the short term, but these learnings also inform future design decisions.

The other benefit to user journey mapping is that it creates a source of universal truth for the whole team to look at together. In many organizations, no one is responsible for looking at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. With a user journey map, the data is comprehensive, objective, and can be talked about and addressed by the entire team.

While journey maps come in many different formats, there are a few important (and familiar) components that should be considered:

• User archetype: Simply put, the people who experience the journey—who the journey map is about. The archetype should be rooted in data.
• Scenario: The scenario is the situation (or journey) that the map addresses. A scenario can be real or anticipated (if the product doesn’t exist yet and is in the design phase), high level or detailed. 
• Journey phases: The stages in the journey; the steps the user moves through. Examples include discovery, purchase, adoption, evaluation, expansion, etc.
• Pain points: The moments in the users’ journey that cause friction, confusion or drop offs, and point  to spots for improvement.
• Opportunities: Insights gained from customer journey mapping that help us understand where and how we should optimize the product.

A user journey map can be a framework within which to communicate research findings during a discovery phase. They are great tools when user research is done to understand how a customer or an employee experiences a process or journey–maybe the team went into identify opportunities for improvement in a sales process or to find where to make changes in an onboarding journey or to plan out a new purchasing experience. Journey maps help to shift perspectives to align with users’ actual needs versus what your company stakeholders might be projecting as needs. It’s important to build journey maps based on actual user data, so if you don’t have the ability to do the research, the journey map might be a waste of valuable time and resources.

How to create a customer journey map

Journey maps can be created in many tools and formats. Don’t overthink it, start simple with sticky notes or a simple whiteboard tool. There’s no “right way” to create a journey map, they will look different depending on the business, product or service you are mapping out. Below we share the steps you can take when creating a journey map.

Step 1: Identify the scenario

When thinking about how to create a user journey map, the first step is to identify the specific scenario you’ll be examining.

You can look at scenarios like:

• What moments are causing people to call customer service?
• How are new hires experiencing our onboarding process?
• What factors influence customers to upgrade their subscription?

It’s also essential to think about this user journey and its relevance to the big picture. What is the larger context for this experience, and what other factors might be influencing the user’s journey?

For example, within the customer service ecosystem, users can call, chat, sometimes visit a store, sometimes a sales rep visits their home, or all customer service is self-serve. Ideally, all those experiences are equally seamless or even enjoyable for users. But if one of these individual experiences is inferior, it impacts the customer service experience. It’s essential to consider how this single journey influences and is influenced by other factors before you start.

Step 2: Research

When you create a user journey map, the second step is to identify your target user. This can be a group like current customers, customers of competitors’ experiences, employees, or even specific sub-segments of customers.

Then, double-check that the scenario is timely and relevant to your target. For example, if the scenario is onboarding, the users you learn from should be current employees who are going through onboarding now or have completed onboarding within a few months of the research.

It’s also essential to understand the length of time you’ll be studying. Do you want to look at a user’s 5-minute interaction with an app? Their experience with a brand over a year? The period matters here.

Once you’ve identified your target group, the period you’ll be examining, and ensured this scenario is relevant to your target user, you can move to gathering information. Conduct in-depth interviews, perform a contextual inquiry , or analyze the data from user surveys to understand each step the user takes as they interact with this digital experience.

You’ll want to understand as much about the user’s goals and needs while going through the experience, and their pain points along the way. During this step, it’s essential to use as many different types of research as needed to ensure your data is as comprehensive as possible.

Step 3: Synthesize

Once you have hit saturation with your data, move to finding commonalities within the users’ journeys. Create “ stages ” and identify key moments, touchpoints, and emotions that happen within each stage. It can also help to focus on these users’ needs and determine whether or not users can be grouped into personas or archetypes. From there, analyze the data to pinpoint what’s working—as well as pain points, user reactions to those issues, what the user needs from the client at that moment, and the available methods for troubleshooting.

This is often a great time to compare the data to initiatives that have already been implemented to meet users’ needs and identify opportunities for further research on touchpoints or archetypes.

Step 4: Build the user journey map

Once you’ve synthesized and examined your data, you can start using the stages you’ve developed to begin plotting the user journey. It helps to create a touchpoint map , visualizing the customer processes and key interactions they have with you.

When building the overall customer journey map, size and color help to emphasize major key moments and touchpoints, and varying highs and lows in the path conveys positive and negative emotions felt throughout the journey. This can sometimes lead to diverging paths if there is an overwhelming pain point that could occur.

It’s important to remember that while the user journey map tells the basic story of the user’s journey, it does not need to account for the nuance of each archetype. Think back to the goal of your map; what key insights do you want to communicate? Let that influence the data you highlight.

Step 5: Make it useful

This basic journey map will help you understand the user, but not necessarily how to address the user or the issues users face. To take it a step further, identify opportunities and create strategies to meet the user’s needs. This is the time to transition from research to design and start to take advantage of the insights you’ve gleaned.

Step 6: Further research

Sometimes, we don’t get all the insights needed to flesh out the full story during the first research phase. Depending on the subject matter, a quantitative survey may be required to understand the frequency of situations surrounding a particular touchpoint or validate whether a key moment happens often enough to be included in the journey map.

Types of customer journey maps

As mentioned above, there is no “right way” to create a customer journey map, just like there is no single type of customer journey map. Depending on your goals and what data you’re trying to glean, you might want to utilize one over another. Below we’ll explain more about a few types of customer journey maps; from current state and future state to day in the life and service blueprints, each has a unique use case. Learn which one might be right for your project!

Day in the life customer journey maps

If you want a wider vantage point, a day in the life customer journey map allows you to understand the actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers are currently experiencing pertaining (or not!) to your company. Utilizing this type of user journey map is helpful when you’re looking towards new product development—allowing you to create solutions from the ground up. Importantly, day in the life journey maps can be both current or future state, but more on that below.

Current state customer journey maps

Widely used, the current state customer journey map allows you to understand how your customers are interacting with your product or service as it is right now. These user journey maps help you evaluate and improve your product to better your customer’s experience.

Future state customer journey maps

If you’re looking at the future evolution of your product, these customer journey maps visualize what customers will experience in future interactions with your product or company. This type of customer journey map is a great tool to utilize when you’re in the visioning and strategy mindset, assessing your goals and planning for future improvements to your products or services.

We’ve compiled a few customer journey map examples so you can see a few of the many ways these maps can look.

In this example of a journey map for a hired service, you see two simultaneous customer journeys—one for a best-case experience across touchpoints and one for a worst-case experience. The worst-case experience identifies points of frustration for the customer, eventually leading to a negative experience with a company. These examples can apply to many business and service types.

This example highlights how an employee experience can be tracked and assessed during a shorter time frame, like a typical workday. As employee needs are identified, and we find pain points caused by employer systems, the experiences create positive or negative patterns.

Often intertwined with user journey mapping, a service blueprint is service-focused and maps out the full details of how a service does or could work. It’s all the steps of a service with the employees, customers, tools, and systems involved. A service blueprint’s goal is to help us understand what enables and supports a service, what is inconsistent, and what isn’t working like it’s supposed to.

This example of a service blueprint—a visual representation of all people, content, and processes in large projects or service design initiatives—shows another way to map experience when the details are more complex and involve many touchpoints. In this instance, all people involved in a roof installation project can see roles and responsibilities alongside a timeline with corresponding requirements and content needs.

In the context of digital strategy, user journey mapping is a valuable decision-making tool. A journey map helps your team understand what’s going well within your users’ experiences and where adjustments to your products can make them more helpful to the user.

By thinking about this user journey within a larger digital strategy, you can help your digital tools function within the larger environment and fit into your internal flows. It can also help you think through how your team works from design to development and where product owners fit in.

At Think Company, our teams use journey mapping to understand how users are actually using and experiencing a tool—and how that real-world experience can be adjusted to better align to the design’s intention and the client’s overall goals. But more importantly, user journey mapping empowers our team to understand the high-level, real-world experience the tool fits within. By zooming out of the digital into the real world and then zooming back in to specific touchpoints with the tool, we can create more successful experiences overall.

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User Journey Map Guide with Examples & FREE Templates

11 May, 2023

Senior UX Researcher

Customer journey mapping is also a popular workshop task to align user understanding within teams. If backed up by user data and research, they can be a high-level inventory that helps discover strategic oversights, knowledge gaps, and future opportunities.

Yet, if you ask two different people, you will likely get at least three different opinions as to what a user journey looks like and whether it is worth the hassle. Read on if you want to understand whether a UX journey map is what you currently need and how to create one.

What is user journey mapping?

Imagine your product is a supermarket and your user is the person wanting to refill their fridge. They need to: 

Decide what to buy, and in what supermarket will they be able to find and afford it

Remember to bring their coupons

Park there 

Find everything

Save the new coupons for the next shopping trip

Now, there are at least three ways to look at this journey.

Three ways to understand customer journey maps

1. workflow maps for usability optimization .

Some imagine a user journey map as a wireframe or detailed analysis of  specific flows in their app . This could be, for example, a sign-up flow or the flow for inviting others to a document. In our supermarket example, it’s a closer look at what they do inside your supermarket, maybe even only in the frozen section. Or you could define what you want them to do in the frozen aisle.

.css-61w915{margin-right:8px;margin-top:8px;max-height:30px;}@media screen and (min-width: 768px){.css-61w915{margin-right:38px;max-height:unset;}} The focus here is on getting the details of the execution right, not how it fits into the bigger picture of what the user needs.

It is more or less a wireframe from a user perspective. Such a product-focused understanding is not what we want to discuss in this article, though many examples for the best user journey maps you might come across are exactly this. There are good reasons to do such an analysis as well, since it helps you smooth out usability for the people who have already found their way into your supermarket because of your excellent ice cream selection. Workflow maps won’t help you notice that your lack of parking spots is one of the reasons why you are missing out on potential customers in the first place. By only looking at what they do inside the supermarket, you might also miss out on an opportunity for user retention: You could help them get their ice cream home before it melts.

2. Holistic user journey maps for strategic insights

With a more holistic view of what people experience when trying to achieve a goal, product makers gain strategic insights on how their product fits into the big picture and what could be in the future. Because this journey document covers so much ground, it is usually a linear simplification of what all the steps would look like if they were completed. Going back to our supermarket example, it would start from the moment the person starts planning to fill the fridge and ends when the fridge is full again — even if the supermarket building is only relevant in a few phases of this journey. Creating this version of a user journey map requires quite some time and research effort. But it can be an invaluable tool for product and business strategy. It is an inventory of user needs that can help you discover knowledge gaps and future opportunities.  Service blueprints   are the most comprehensive version of a user journey map  since they also lay out the behind-the-scenes of a service, usually called backstage. In our supermarket example, that could be:

the advertising efforts

logistics required to keep all shelves stocked

protocols the staffers follow when communicating with customers

3. Journey mapping workshops as an alignment method

In a user journey mapping workshop, stakeholders and team members share their knowledge and assumptions about the users. Some of these assumptions might need to be challenged — which is part of the process. The goal is not the perfect output, but rather to get everyone into one room and work out a common understanding of the users they are building products for. It forces everyone to organize their thoughts, spell out what they know and assumed was common knowledge — and ideally meet real users as part of the workshop. If done right, this establishes a more comprehensive understanding of what users go through and helps overcome the very superficial ideas one might have about the lives and needs of people outside their own social bubble.

Hence, such a workshop helps create aha moments and gives the consequences of great and poor product decisions a face. So at the end of the day, it is one of many methods to evangelize user-centricity in an organization.

What are the benefits of user experience (UX) mapping?

We already discussed the benefits and shortcomings of workflow maps, but what are the reasons you should consider a UX journey map and/or a journey mapping workshop ?

1. Switching perspectives

Empathy:  Like any other UX method and user research output, user journey maps are supposed to foster empathy and help product makers put themselves into the shoes of a user. Awareness:  It creates awareness of why users do all the things they do. And it challenges product makers to resist the temptation of building something because it’s feasible, not because it’s needed that way.

2. Aligned understanding

Given the team is involved in creating the user experience map (either as a workshop, in expert interviews, observing the user research, or at least as a results presentation), it forces a conversation and offers a shared mental model and terminology — the foundation for a shared vision. 

3. Seeing the big picture

Imagine the vastly different perceptions Sales reps, Customer Support teams, C-level, and backend engineers might have since they all meet very different segments at very different stages of their journey. Day-to-day, it makes sense to be an expert in the stages of a user journey you are responsible for. A journey map helps to step back from this and see the bigger picture, where your work fits in, and where assumptions about the majority of users were wrong. It might even help define KPIs across teams that don’t cancel each other out.

4. Uncovering blind spots and opportunities

A user journey map gives you a structured and comprehensive overview of which user needs are already tackled by your product and which ones are either underserved or solved with other tools and touchpoints. Which moments of truth do not get enough attention yet? These are the opportunities and blind spots you can work on in the future.

When is customer journey mapping just a waste of time?

In all honesty, there are also moments when creating a user journey map or running a journey mapping workshop is destined to fail and should better be put on hold. It’s a lot of work, so don’t let this energy go to waste.  User journey maps only make sense when there is an intention to collaboratively work on and with them.  Here are some of the scenarios and indicators that it’s the wrong moment for a journey map:

No buy-in for the workshop: The requirements of a successful journey workshop are not met, e.g., there is not enough time (60 minutes over lunch won’t do the trick), only a few team members are willing to attend, and/or key stakeholders refuse to have their assumptions challenged.

Isolated creation: The whole creation process of the user journey map happens isolated from the team, e.g., it is outsourced to an agency or an intern. Nobody from the team observes or runs the user research, or is consulted for input or feedback on the first drafts. There is no event or presentation planned that walks the team through the output. Finally, a very detailed, 10-foot-long poster appears in a hallway, and none of the team members ever find time to read, process, or discuss it with each other.

UX theater: For one reason or another, there is no time/resources allocated to user research or reviewing existing insights whilst creating the map (usability tests with non-users do not count in this case, though). Such an approach, also known as, can do more harm than good since the resulting user journey may only reinforce wrong assumptions and wishful thinking about your users.

Unclear objectives: The user journey map is only created because it is on your UX design checklist, but the purpose is unclear. If you are unsure what you or your stakeholders want to achieve with this journey map, clarify expectations and desired output before investing more energy into this. E.g., there is a chance you were only meant to do a usability review of a bumpy app workflow.

The good news is: UX maturity in an organization can change rapidly, so even if you run into one of the obstacles above, it is worth revisiting the idea in the future. Once you’re good to go, you can get started with the user journey map examples and templates below.

User journey mapping: examples, templates & tools

There is more than one way to do it right and design a great user journey map. Every organization and industry has its own templates, tools and approaches to what elements are most important to them. The following examples and template will give you an idea of what a user journey map can look like if you decide to create one yourself. Make it your own, and change up the sections and design so they make sense for your product and use cases.

User journey map template and checklist

To give you a first orientation, you can use this user journey template and check the two fictional examples below to see how you could adapt it for two very different industries: instant meal delivery and healthcare.

Click here to download a high-resolution PDF of the user journey map template. 

While there is no official standard, most other user journey maps contain the following elements or variations of them:

Key phases (or ‘stages’) start when users become aware of a problem they need to solve or a goal they want to achieve and may end when they evaluate whether they achieved their goal or enter a maintenance phase. E.g., user journeys for e-commerce could be structured along the classic funnel of:

Consideration

Delivery & use

Loyalty & advocacy

2. Jobs to be done

Whilst some other user journey templates might call this section ‘steps’ or ‘tasks’, it can be very beneficial to structure the stages into ‘jobs to be done’ (JTBD) instead. This framework helps you distinguish better between the actual goal of a user vs. the tasks required to get there . For example, safe online payments are never a goal of a user, this is just one of many jobs on the long way to get new sneakers on their feet. Ideally, users ‘hire’ your product/service to assist them with some of the JTBD on their journey. Phrase your JTBD as verb + object + context . Examples:

Install app on phone

Tip delivery driver

Buy new shoes

Naturally, the stages closest to your current (and future) solution require a more detailed understanding, so you might want to investigate and document deeper what JTBDs happen there.

3. Needs and pains

Users have needs and pains every step along the journey. Use this section to collect the most important needs and potential pains, even if not all apply in all cases. Ask:

What are the repeating themes, even the ones you are (currently) not able to solve with your product?

Phrase pains and needs as I- or me-statements from the user perspective, e.g., ‘I forgot my login details, ‘I am afraid to embarrass myself’ or ‘My day is too busy to wait for a delivery.’ 

Which are the pains and needs that are so severe that, if not solved, they can become real deal-breakers for your product or service?

On the last point, such deal-breaker and dealmaker situations, or ‘ moments of truth ’, require particular attention in your product decisions and could be visually highlighted in your journey. In a meal delivery, the taste and temperature of the food are such a moment of truth that can spoil the whole experience with your otherwise fantastic service.

4. Emotional curve

An emotional curve visualizes how happy or frustrated users are at certain stages of their journey. Emojis are commonly used to make it easy to understand and empathize with the emotional state of the user across the whole journey. It can be a surprising realization that users are not delighted with your witty microcopy, but you already did a great job by not annoying them. It is also a good reminder that what might personally excite you is perceived as stressful or overwhelming by most other users. Strong user quotes can be used for illustration.

5. Brand and product touchpoints

Here, you can list current and planned touchpoints with your brand and product, as well as. Whilst the touchpoints when using your product might be obvious, others early and late in the journey are probably less obvious to you but critical for the user experience and decision to use or return to your product. This is why it is worthwhile to include them in your map. Make sure your journey does not get outdated too soon, and don’t list one-off marketing campaigns or very detailed aspects of current workflows — just what you got in general so there is no major revision needed for a couple of years.

6. Other tools and touchpoints

This may seem the least interesting aspect of your journey or a user interview, but it can tell you a lot about blind spots in your service or potential partnerships or APIs to extend your service. E.g., Google Maps or WhatsApp are common workaround tools for missing or poor in-app solutions.

User journey map example 1: health industry

The following example is for a fictional platform listing therapists for people in need of mental health support, helping them find, contact, schedule, and pay for therapy sessions. As you can see, the very long journey with recurring steps (repeated therapy sessions) is cut short to avoid repetition. 

At the same time, it generalizes very individual mental health experiences into a tangible summary. While it is fair to assume that the key phases happen in this chronological order, JTBD, timing, and the number of sessions are kept open so that it works for different types of patients.

You can also see how the journey covers several phases when the platform is not in active use. Yet, these phases are milestones in the patient’s road to recovery. Looking at a journey like this, you could, for example, realize that a ‘graduation’ feature could be beneficial for your users, even if it means they will stop using your platform because they are feeling better.

Click here to download a high-resolution PDF of this template.

This user journey map is fictional but oriented on Johanne Miller’s UX case study  Designing a mental healthcare platform . 

User journey map example 2: delivery services

What the example above does not cover is the role of the therapist on the platform — most likely they are a second user type that has very different needs for the way they use the platform. This is why the second example shows the two parallel journeys of two different user roles and how they interact with each other. 

Nowadays, internal staff such as delivery drivers have dedicated apps and ideally have a designated UX team looking out for their needs, too. Creating a frictionless and respectful user experience for ‘internal users’ is just as critical for the success of a business as it is to please customers.

User journey map example: meal delivery. Please note that this fictional journey map is just an example for illustrative purposes and has not been backed up with user research.

For more inspiration, you can find collections with more real-life user journey examples and customer journey maps on  UXeria ,  eleken.co  &  userinterviews.com , or check out free templates provided by the design tools listed below.

Free UX journey mapping tools with templates

No matter whether you’re a design buff or feel more comfortable in spreadsheets, there are many templates available for free(mium) tools you might be already using. 

For example, there are good templates and tutorials available for  Canva ,  Miro  and even  Google Sheets . If you are more comfortable with regular design software, you can use the templates available for  Sketch  or one of these two from the  Figma (template 1 ,  template 2 ) community. There are also several dedicated journey map tools with free licenses or free trials, e.g.,  FlowMapp ,  Lucidchart  and  UXPressia , just to name a few.

Be aware that the first draft will require a lot of rearrangement and fiddling until you get to the final version. So it might help to pick where this feels easy for you. 

How do I collect data for my app user journey?

User journey maps need to be rooted in reality and based on what users really need and do (not what we wish they did) to add value to the product and business strategy. Hence, user insights are an inevitable step in the creation process.

However, it’s a huge pile of information that needs to be puzzled together and usually, one source of information is not enough to cover the whole experience — every research method has its own blind spots. But if you combine at least two or three of the approaches below, you can create a solid app user journey .

1. In-house expertise

The people working for and with your users are an incredible source of knowledge to start and finalize the journey. Whilst there might be a few overly optimistic or biased assumptions you need to set straight with your additional research, a user journey mapping workshop and/or  expert interviews  involving colleagues from very different (user-facing) teams such as:

customer service

business intelligence

customer insights

will help you collect a lot of insights and feedback. You can use these methods to build a preliminary skeleton for your journey but also to finalize the journey with their input and feedback.

2. Desk research

Next to this, it is fair to assume there is already a ton of preexisting documented knowledge about the users simply floating around in your company. Your  UX research repository  and even  industry reports  you can buy or find with a bit of googling will help. Go through them and pick the cherries that are relevant for your user journey. Almost anything can be interesting:

Old research reports and not-yet-analyzed context interviews from earlier user interviews

NPS scores & user satisfaction surveys

App store feedback

Customer support tickets

Product reviews written by journalists

Competitor user journeys in publicly available UX case studies

Ask your in-house experts if they know of additional resources you could check. And find out if there’s already a  long-forgotten old journey map  from a few years ago that you can use as a starting point (most organizations have those somewhere).

3. Qualitative user research

Qualitative research methods are your best shot to learn about all the things users experience, think, and desire before and after they touch your product.  In-depth interviews  and  focus groups  explore who they are and what drives them. You could show them a skeleton user journey for feedback or  co-creation . 

This could also be embedded into your user journey mapping workshop with the team. Alternatively, you can follow their actual journey in  diary studies ,  in-home visits  or  shadowing . However, in all these cases it is important that you talk to real users of your product or competitors to learn more about the real scenarios. This is why usability testing with non-users or fictional scenarios won’t help much for the user journey map.

4. Quantitative research

Once you know the rough cornerstones of your user journey map,  surveys  could be used to let users rate what needs and pains really matter to them. And what their mood is at certain phases of the journey. You can learn how they became aware of your product and ask them which of the motives you identified are common or exotic edge cases. Implementing micro-surveys such as  NPS surveys , CES , and  CSAT  embedded into your product experience can give additional insights.

5. User analytics

User analytics is a beautiful source of information, even if it has its limits. Depending on what tools you are using (e.g., Google Analytics, Firebase, Hubspot, UXCam), you can follow the digital footprints of your users before and when they were using the product. This may include  acquisition channels  (input for brand touchpoints and early journey phases),  search terms  that brought them to your product (input for needs and pains), and how they navigate your product. 

Unlike a usability test, you can use  screen flows  and  heatmaps  to understand how your users behave naturally when they follow their own agenda at their own pace — and how often they are so frustrated that they just quit. Knowing this gives you pointers to negative user emotions at certain journey steps and even helps identify your product’s moments of truth. Whilst you cannot ask the users if your interpretations are correct, checking analytics already helps you prepare good questions and talking points for user interviews or surveys.

Curious to know how heatmaps will look in your app?  Try UXCam for free — with 100,000 monthly sessions and unlimited features.

How can I utilize UXCam to collect App User Journey data?

If you have UXCam set up in your mobile app, you can use it to support your user journey research. You can find many of the previously mentioned  user analytics  features ( screen flows  and  heatmaps , including  rage taps ) here as well. 

UXCam can also be an  invaluable asset for your qualitative research . Especially for niche products and B2B apps that normally have a lot of trouble  recruiting real users  via the usual user testing platforms. 

UXCam’s detailed segmentation options allow you to  identify exactly the users you want to interview  about their journey — and  reach out to them via either email or UXCam push notifications , which can include invitation links for your study, a survey or an additional screener.

Where can I learn more?

Don’t feel ready to get started? Here are a few additional resources that can help you dive deeper into user journey mapping and create the version that is best for your project.

Creating user journey maps & service blueprints:

Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach

Journey Mapping 101

How to create customer journey maps

Customer Journey Stages for Product Managers

The Perfect Customer Journey Map

Planning and running user journey mapping workshops:

Journey mapping workshop

Jobs to be done:

The Theory of Jobs To Be Done

Moments of truth in customer journeys:

Journey mapping MoTs

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map is a visual representation of the process that a user goes through to accomplish a goal with your product, service, or app.

What is a user journey?

A user journey refers to the series of steps a user takes to accomplish a specific goal within a product, service, or website. It represents the user's experience from their point of view as they interact with the product or service, starting from the initial contact or discovery, moving through various touchpoints, and leading to a final outcome or goal.

How do I use a user journey map in UX?

User journey maps are an essential tool in the UX design process, used to understand and address the user's needs and pain points.

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Mapping User Journeys: A Guide for UX Designers and Product Managers

Discover the importance of mapping user journeys in UX design and product management with our comprehensive guide.

Posted May 15, 2023

Featuring Daniel M.

Breaking into Product Management

Tuesday, may 7.

6:00 PM UTC · 60 minutes

In today's digital age, user experience (UX) has become a critical component of product design, and mapping user journeys has emerged as a powerful tool for UX designers and product managers. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the importance of user journeys in UX design, how to conduct effective user research, creating personas, identifying pain points and opportunities, designing touchpoints, measuring success, collaborating effectively, using tools and techniques, case studies, tips for iterating and evolving, common mistakes to avoid, and the future of user journey mapping. Whether you are new to UX design or an experienced professional, this guide will provide you with valuable insights and practical tips to help you enhance your user experience strategies.

Understanding the Importance of User Journeys in UX Design

User journeys refer to the paths that users take when interacting with a product or service. By mapping these journeys, UX designers can gain a comprehensive understanding of how users interact with a product, identify pain points and opportunities, and design solutions that enhance usability, functionality, and overall user satisfaction. User journey mapping is essential for creating products that meet the needs and expectations of users. By understanding the user's experience, UX designers and product managers can create products that are user-centric and customer-focused.

Moreover, user journey mapping can also help UX designers identify areas where users may drop off or abandon the product or service. This information can be used to optimize the user journey and improve conversion rates. Additionally, user journey mapping can provide insights into the user's emotional state and motivations, which can be used to create more engaging and personalized experiences. By understanding the user's journey, UX designers can create products that not only meet functional needs but also emotional needs, resulting in a more satisfying user experience.

The Benefits of Mapping User Journeys for Product Managers

Mapping user journeys provides numerous benefits for product managers. By analyzing user journeys, product managers can gain insights into how users perceive their products, identify areas of improvement, and design solutions that meet real customer needs. User journey mapping is also useful for identifying opportunities for innovation and differentiation. Product managers can use the information gained from user journey mapping to optimize the product roadmap, prioritize feature development, and make data-driven decisions.

Another benefit of mapping user journeys is that it helps product managers to understand the context in which users interact with their products. This includes understanding the user's goals, motivations, and pain points. By understanding the context, product managers can design products that are more intuitive and user-friendly, leading to increased user satisfaction and loyalty.

Furthermore, user journey mapping can help product managers to identify gaps in their product offerings. By analyzing the user journey, product managers can identify areas where users are dropping off or experiencing frustration. This can help product managers to identify new features or products that can fill these gaps and improve the overall user experience.

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How to Conduct User Research for Effective Journey Mapping

User research is a critical component of journey mapping. It involves gathering data and insights about users, their needs, pain points, and goals. User research can be conducted using a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys, and usability tests. The key to effective user research is to ask the right questions and observe user behavior in a natural setting. User research is an ongoing process that should be integrated into the product development lifecycle.

Creating Personas to Enhance Your User Journey Maps

Personas are fictional representations of users that help UX designers and product managers better understand their customers. A persona should be based on real data from user research and represent a specific segment of the user population. Personas enable UX designers and product managers to empathize with users, create user-centric solutions, and tailor products to the needs and preferences of specific user groups. Personas should be updated regularly based on new user research and feedback.

Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities in User Journeys

Pain points refer to the problems and obstacles that users encounter when interacting with a product or service. Opportunities refer to areas where a product can be improved or expanded. By identifying pain points and opportunities in user journeys, UX designers and product managers can create solutions that meet real customer needs and provide a better user experience. Pain points can be identified through user research, customer feedback, and data analytics. Opportunities can be identified through market research, competitive analysis, and customer needs assessment.

Designing Touchpoints to Improve User Experience

Touchpoints refer to the points of interaction between users and a product or service. Touchpoints can be physical, digital, or emotional. By designing touchpoints that meet user needs and expectations, UX designers and product managers can create a seamless and intuitive user experience. Touchpoints should be designed with the user journey in mind and should be consistent with the brand and product vision. UX designers and product managers should also consider the accessibility and usability of touchpoints for all users, including those with disabilities.

Measuring Success with KPIs and Metrics for User Journeys

Measuring success is critical to the ongoing evolution of a product. This involves setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics that track user behavior, engagement, and satisfaction. KPIs and metrics should be aligned with business goals and customer needs. They should also be regularly monitored and analyzed to identify trends and opportunities for improvement. Common KPIs and metrics for user journeys include conversion rates, bounce rates, time on task, net promoter score, and customer satisfaction.

Best Practices for Collaborating on User Journey Mapping Projects

Collaboration is key to the success of user journey mapping projects. UX designers and product managers should work closely with stakeholders, developers, and other team members to ensure that user journeys are accurately represented and that solutions are aligned with business goals and customer needs. Best practices for collaborating on user journey mapping projects include using agile methodologies, breaking down silos, fostering communication, and leveraging collaboration tools.

Tools and Techniques for Creating Effective User Journey Maps

There are numerous tools and techniques available for creating effective user journey maps. These include user journey mapping software, flowcharts, diagrams, and visualizations. The key is to use the tool or technique that best represents the user journey and enables collaboration with stakeholders and team members. User journey maps should be regularly updated based on user research, feedback, and data analytics.

Case Studies: Successful UX Designers and Product Managers Share Their Journey Mapping Strategies

Case studies provide valuable insights into the strategies and techniques used by successful UX designers and product managers. By analyzing case studies, we can learn from the experiences of others and avoid common pitfalls. Successful UX designers and product managers prioritize user research, collaborate effectively with stakeholders, and use data-driven decision-making to optimize user journeys and create products that meet real customer needs.

Tips for Iterating and Evolving Your User Journey Maps Over Time

User journey mapping is an ongoing process that should evolve over time. UX designers and product managers should regularly update their user journey maps based on new user research, customer feedback, and data analytics. Tips for iterating and evolving your user journey maps include setting clear goals and objectives, involving stakeholders and team members, using feedback loops, and incorporating data analytics.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Mapping User Journeys

Mapping user journeys can be a challenging process, and there are several common mistakes that UX designers and product managers should avoid. These include assuming user behavior, focusing too narrowly on touchpoints, failing to collaborate effectively, using generic personas, and neglecting to measure success. By avoiding these mistakes, UX designers and product managers can create user-centric solutions that meet real customer needs and provide a better user experience.

The Future of User Journey Mapping: Trends and Predictions

The world of UX design is constantly evolving, and user journey mapping is no exception. The future of user journey mapping is likely to be characterized by new technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality, as well as increased emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity. Other trends and predictions include the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze user behavior, the integration of user journeys with business intelligence and analytics, and increased focus on customer experience and engagement.

Conclusion: Key Takeaways for UX Designers and Product Managers Looking to Improve Their User Experience Strategies

Mapping user journeys is a critical component of creating user-centric products and services. By understanding the user's experience, UX designers and product managers can create solutions that meet real customer needs and provide a better user experience. Key takeaways from this guide include the importance of user research, creating personas, identifying pain points and opportunities, designing touchpoints, measuring success with KPIs and metrics, collaborating effectively, using tools and techniques, iterating and evolving over time, avoiding common mistakes, and staying abreast of trends and predictions. By following these best practices, UX designers and product managers can create products that delight their customers, achieve business goals, and drive growth and revenue.

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Product Management

The 5 Stages of User Journey in Product Management

Associate Product Marketer at Zeda.io.

Mahima Arora

June 1, 2023

6 mins read

Transform Insights into Impact

Build Products That Drive Revenue and Delight Customers!

Product journey or user journey in a product is the consumer’s discovery of the product and how they interact with the company and other elements during the purchase cycle. Users come across varied information and factors, which help them in decision-making during their customer journey.

Mapping the user journey in product management is an essential activity. It enables development teams to be user-centric. Product managers keep the knowledge within a company, navigate cross-functional teams, and collaborate with everyone to achieve the ultimate goals of product reach, acquisition, activation, retention/engagement, and loyalty. Product managers are also involved in the creation and sharing of journey maps.

The Five Stages of User Journey in Product Management

When a customer makes the first purchase from your company, they may subscribe to your company newsletter and decide to make a purchase. Subsequently, they may turn into a repeat customer and become a brand advocate over time. It is nothing but the customer lifecycle and the product management process they go through while building a relationship with your company. To remain competitive in the market, it is crucial to manage and maintain the customer lifecycle.

Understanding the customer lifecycle starts by familiarizing yourself with the five stages of the product user journey, which helps your company maximize revenue for potential and existing customers through reach, acquisition, activation, retention/engagement, and loyalty . Let us further discuss each of these in detail.

Stage 1: Reach

Reach is the first stage in a user journey in which the user comes in touch with you and your company. It is also called the “awareness” or “discovery” stage. Further, it can originate from a Facebook ad or even a referral given by a friend.

Hence, your business must market well in places where people may get to know your company’s offerings. It is also critical to have the apt metrics to track the customer touchpoints and check on your marketing efforts. Some product management metrics are the number of website visitors, social analytics, customer reviews, polls, pay-per-click (PPC), AdWords, and data from surveys.

However, at this stage, most people will not convert to customers. You are simply capturing your potential customer’s attention and developing a relationship with them.

Stage 2: Acquisition

After the first stage, when the user has learned about your product, the acquisition period starts, where they decide to try or buy it. The phase happens on email, in person, on the phone, or through a Web page. In this phase, people rarely become customers. A new user might need to sign up first, which involves filling a registration form and email validation .

For products such as enterprise software, acquisition can involve a sales team that pitches the product, a technical implementation team that answers technical questions, and a training team. The stage invokes hope that your website visitors will get converted into subscribers or customers. Thus, you must have a process to guide them toward conversion by helping them to meet their needs.

Note. The customer can also abandon your company at this point if they do not find your services interesting or useful enough to hold their attention. Therefore, the first contact must have enough value for the potential client.

Stage 3: Activation

The outcome of the activation stage is to reduce any friction that may occur during user onboarding. You must explain the value proposition of your product and make them invest in it. Activation refers to minimizing user churn during onboarding in the first few days or hours. Studies have shown that reducing customer churn by just 5% can increase your profits by 25% to 125%.

Some standard activation techniques involve reducing onboarding complexities, discarding forms to be filled unnecessarily, and helping users to perform relevant initial product activities, such as sending their first message or inviting their friend.

Stage 4: Retention/Engagement

Customer retention must be the top priority for businesses. It is more profitable for businesses to continue to sell to the existing customers than to search and market to new customers. You can opt for up-selling or cross-selling at this stage to maintain the customer relationship. To do so, make contact from time to time in valuable ways so that customers keep coming back to you every time they need to make a purchase. You can also make use of free chatbot for website to engage effectively with your customers.

In a sense, there is a thin line between customer retention and engagement while buying a product. For some, retention refers to an act of making customers come back, while engagement is a measure of how much and how often they use your product at any one time.

Depending on the nature of your product, every company has its cutoff point at which you can consider if customers are active or have abandoned your product.

Stage 5: Loyalty

It is the final stage of a user journey in a customer lifecycle. Here, the client becomes your loyal ambassador and recommends your company offerings to others. Every buyer will not reach this stage and become a long-term customer. However, you should always aim to acquire more and more customers with every lifecycle of a product.

For a successful user journey, it is crucial to develop a better understanding of the customer lifecycle, from making contact and the sale to retaining loyal customers who keep coming back. If you are not capable of bringing more customers to this point, you must reflect upon the previous stages to see if you are failing in any of them.

Note that 25% to 40% of the total revenue of the most stable businesses comes from returning customers who drive three to seven times the revenue per visit as one-time buyers.

User Journey in Product Management: Final Words

The user journey in product management describes the different steps a customer goes through when considering, buying, availing, and remaining loyal to a particular product or service.

All the five distinct stages of the user journey, namely, reach, acquisition, activation, retention/engagement, and loyalty, affect the marketing efforts, product design, and operation support in product management. While it is obvious that sound marketing can bring product awareness, sometimes, the product features and customer support can drive awareness and acquisition too. How a business turns the interested users into customers depends on its ability to market and draw the attention of the right consumers.

An essential point to consider is that the customer lifecycle follows a cyclical pattern, which never ends. The ultimate goal of the user journey model is to build strong brand loyalty and convert customers who will become brand advocates for your company and refer your product or service to others in their circle. In the effort, companies should make sure that they stay relevant and are successful in offering value to their customers.

Suggested Read: Driving Product Success with Customer Insights

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The Complete Guide to Mapping and Optimizing Critical User Journeys

• Introduction – Product Management Metrics
• Chapter 1 – Enterprise Product Metrics
• Chapter 2 – Product Analytics Tools
• Chapter 3 – Product Metrics Framework
• Chapter 4 – Adoption Metrics
• Chapter 5 – User Segmentation
• Chapter 6 – User Engagement Metrics
• Chapter 7 – Critical User Journeys
• Chapter 8 – Product Launch Metrics
• Chapter 9 – Retention Analysis
• Chapter 10 – Product Stickiness
• Chapter 11 – The DAU/MAU Ratio

Struggling to grow your user base? Try mapping out your critical user journeys.

This is the approach that teams at Google and Pinterest use to reignite growth . Critical user journeys enable you to visualize aspects of a user’s experience that impact business revenue and customer satisfaction.

In this guide, you’ll learn what critical user journeys are, how they are used, and how you can create and improve your critical user paths to grow your product.

TL;DR (too long, didn’t read):

• Critical user journeys are used to reignite growth.
• They enable you to visualize aspects of the user experience that impact revenue and customer satisfaction.
• They can be used to drive alignment, decrease churn, and increase customer loyalty.
• In this article, we spend some time focusing on different types of critical user journeys: high-traffic, high-dollar, and overall evaluation criterion (OEC).
• The main difference between critical user journeys and user experience maps is the narrowed scope of a critical user journey.
• Driving user adoption and setting users up for success is paramount to improving a critical user journey.

Summary of key critical user journey concepts

Here is a quick overview of the key concepts.

When are critical user journeys used?

Critical user journeys are typically used to improve the product, enhance product metrics, and create team alignment.

• Product improvements: When there’s a need to develop a new product, feature, or enhancement, a critical user journey can be used to identify where to focus or promote the improvements.
• Team and business alignment: Critical user journeys can be used to drive cohesiveness across teams by allowing them to visualize current customer interactions, identifying areas of success and failure.
• Improving product metrics: A critical user journey map is a great starting point for identifying what influences metrics like activation rates, retention, and churn.

How are critical user journeys used?

Critical user journeys are used to highlight points of friction and moments of delight in an experience. They show the necessary steps a user must take to complete their goal.

Armed with insight into what can negatively and positively impact the journey, you can use a critical user journey to:

• Improve the user experience: Knowing the main areas of friction in the journey allows you to focus on solutions that fix these pain points.
• Improve customer satisfaction and revenue: Customers who are satisfied with the experience are more likely to be retained. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95% .
• Decrease user churn and increase customer loyalty: Optimizing the portions of the user experience that impede users from achieving their goals can lead to repeat business.
• Drive company and team alignment: Achieving team- and business-wide cohesiveness allows individuals and departments to work toward a common goal, resulting in greater autonomy and productivity.

Types of critical user journeys

As mentioned above, the three main types of critical user journeys are high-traffic, high-dollar, and overall evaluation criterion. Each can benefit your business in a different way, so let’s dive in!

High-traffic critical user journeys

High-traffic user journeys have a high level of user volume (e.g., SaaS landing pages navigating to demo requests) or lots of interactions (e.g., core product features like sending an email or creating a survey).

These are the journeys you’ll want to optimize for the “aha moment”: the point at which a new user realizes the value of your product.

High-dollar critical user journeys

These are the journeys that either generate the highest revenue or put the most revenue at risk. For example, the checkout experience is the touchpoint that likely creates the most revenue for an ecommerce company. Issues with this portion of the product can result in significant risk to this company’s ability to generate revenue.

For a B2B SaaS product, this journey can be the path from a trial sign-up to a subscription.

Overall evaluation criterion (OEC) critical user journeys

The OEC critical user journey, also known as “the one metric that matters most,” focuses on the journey that improves your business OEC. An OEC is a metric that measures user satisfaction and long-term business value.

Ultimately, when you aim to optimize your OEC critical user journey, you’re aiming to increase user satisfaction while delivering long-term business value.

Overall evaluation criterion examples

The difference between high-dollar and OEC critical user journeys

Let’s examine a real-life example. The team behind Bing, the second-largest search engine in the world, started by focusing its goals on increasing queries per unique user. The Bing team rationalized that more queries per user would result in more ads shown, ultimately increasing revenues.

The result, however, was not what was expected. Focusing solely on high-dollar critical user journeys drove users to execute more searches to find the content they were looking for, thereby decreasing user satisfaction. 

When the team at Bing shifted its focus to sessions per user, the result was an increase in user satisfaction, leading to more revenue.

What can we learn from this example?

Users who return for multiple sessions with your product likely have higher levels of satisfaction, leading to more retention.

When users returned to Bing over multiple sessions, they naturally saw more ads, which led to more revenue for the business unit.

Put another way, the OEC critical user journey drives a balance of user satisfaction and business revenue.

Critical user journeys vs. user experience maps

Critical user journeys and user experience maps are similar in nature, so it’s easy to confuse them. However, there are some key differences between the two to keep in mind before creating a map.

A critical user journey map is tied to a business goal and has a specific focus on a “critical” aspect of a user journey.

A user experience map is more general, visualizing the entire end-to-end journey of an average user. These maps are typically used to create a baseline understanding of user needs and behaviors.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using either, but both should be perceived as tools used for an intended purpose.

Creating critical user journey maps

Mapping a critical user journey can be broken down into five steps:

• Get stakeholder buy-in
• Select the journey stage
• Narrow the scope
• Identify the “happy path”
• Map the journey

Let’s get started!

1. Get stakeholder buy-in

Buy-in from stakeholders can lead to a better understanding of how journey maps will impact them and their teams. At times, this can encourage other teams to devote resources to the project, increasing successful outcomes.

Likewise, a critical user journey map may reveal unexpected results, so it’s important to come to consensus with stakeholders on why journey maps are important and which journeys are the best candidates for mapping.

Potential stakeholder teams include product leadership, marketing, sales, customer success, and support.

2. Select the journey stage

Unlike user experience maps, critical user journey maps zero in on an aspect of the journey, focusing on a specific stage of the customer’s lifecycle.

One popular tactic for defining a customer lifecycle is to use acquisition, adoption, retention, and expansion categorization.

Begin by answering the following questions:

• Are your current goals to improve product engagement, revenue, or the overall user experience? The answer will help you understand which critical user journey to focus on: high-traffic, high-dollar, or OEC.
• Which stage of the lifecycle has the highest impact on traffic, revenue or user experience?
• Which stage of the journey impacts your business objectives the most?

3. Narrow the scope

User journeys can be complex, but narrowing your scope can drive clarity.

Consider the number of touchpoints within the journey. If there are more than three, it’s best to narrow your focus to a specific aspect.

As an example, for a new user, you would primarily focus on the critical journey of getting to the “aha moment,” the one where the user realizes your product’s value. On the other hand, a retained customer critical journey may focus on encouraging referrals and discouraging churn.

4. Identify the “happy path”

The “happy path” is an error-free path that your users take to get to their end goal. This is the reason why they chose your product in the first place. 

Here are some quantitative research methods you can use to identify the “happy path”:

• Funnel analysis allows you to visualize the series of events and steps users take toward a defined goal, like a successful sign-up. In addition, funnel analysis can highlight points of friction, since you will see where along the “happy path” users dropped off.
• Path analysis , much like funnel analysis, allows you to also visualize the series of events and steps a user takes in your product. However, the steps are not predefined and allow you to discover common user journeys or where users are deviating from your defined “happy path.”
• Customer surveys used throughout a critical journey enable you to quantify satisfaction ( CSAT ), effort (CES) needed to complete a goal, or loyalty (NPS). These are all important signals to consider when mapping a user’s “happy path.”

5. Map the journey

With stakeholders on the same page and key insight in hand, you’re ready to visualize the critical user journey with a map.

Start with a template that suits your needs. Luckily, there are plenty to pick from. Here are our recommendations:

• Customer user journey map by Miro
• Customer user journey template pack by Miro
• UX journey map template by Nigel for Figma

Customer journey map example in Lucidchart (free download here )

Once you’ve decided on what your map will look like, plot the key actions and events that define your user’s critical journey. Leverage funnel analysis to highlight key pathways and dropoffs. Overlay CSAT, CES, and NPS scores to provide additional context for delight and points of friction in the journey.

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Best practices for creating and improving critical user journey maps

Ready to create your first critical user journey map? Here are a few tips and best practices to help you get started.

Take steps to get stakeholder buy-in

Getting buy-in is easier said than done. Here are some tips that can help:

• Engage stakeholders (product leadership, marketing, sales, customer success, and support) as early as possible in the process.
• Provide clarity on how the work affects they stakeholders and connects to what they find important.
• Provide reassurance by identifying risks and showing how they’ll be mitigated.
• Set expectations by clearly articulating the goal, what you expected from the stakeholders, and how they’ll benefit

Segmentation and propensity scores

Segmentation and propensity scores can assist in narrowing the focus of your critical user journey maps by reducing the pool of users (or traffic) to analyze.

For example, you could segment traffic from your funnel analysis that has a low propensity for becoming customers. Doing so could be useful in reducing noise from data and making “happy paths” easier to identify.

Understand users and how they define success

To ensure that users can complete their goals, we need to understand their definition of success. Ask each new user what they value and what they’re trying to achieve with your product or specific feature. This will provide insight into their functional goals (e.g., saving time), personal goals (e.g., feeling empowered), and social goals (e.g., impressing the boss).

Utilize the TRUSt framework

To ensure that communication is highly valued, and even welcomed, it’s best to utilize a consistent framework, such as the TRUSt framework :

• St raightforward

The TRUSt framework provides structure when crafting messages to improve your critical user journeys.

For example, let’s say you’re focused on increasing customer engagement for a new feature. Just follow the steps outlined in the TRUSt framework to develop your messaging strategy:

• T imely: When is the best time to message customers about the new feature? The message needs to be delivered based on the customer’s timing, not yours.
• R elevant: Who should receive the message about the new feature? The message needs to be relevant, taking the customer’s usage patterns into account, i.e., it wouldn’t be relevant for a customer already engaged with the feature.
• U seful: How do you best help your customers with this message? The message must provide value to the customer.
• S traightforward: How do you ensure that the message is clear, concise, and unobtrusive of the customer’s experience? You wouldn’t want to tarnish the user experience with distracting and convoluted messaging elements.

As you devise a communication strategy to improve your critical user journeys, it’s important to remember the outcome you’re hoping to achieve. The TRUSt framework helps craft communications with a purpose, but implementing quality user experiences will further encourage users to follow a journey.

Implement proven UI design patterns

Standard UI design patterns can be a significant driver of product goals. Here are some examples of powerful design patterns that can help guide users and improve their critical journeys:

• Welcome message: A considerate welcome message helps set the tone for your product. First impressions count, and this is your chance to greet your new users.
• Empty states: How your product looks before users fill it with their content is referred to as the “empty state.” They can be confusing for new and existing users, often lacking contextual information. Pre-filling content or providing hints within the empty space can offer reassurance by guiding the user through important steps.

• Inline hints and tips: A subtle but powerful UI pattern, inline hints and tips provide additional information or best practices within elements on the screen. As an example, upon sign-up to Slack, the user is asked to invite teammates. At this stage, a very subtle inline hint shows sample email addresses in the “add teammates by email” field.

Inline hint and tips on Slack

• Tooltips: Labels that provide additional context about UI elements, often triggered when hovering over a hotspot or shown as part of a product tour. Tooltips can be effective for explaining complex features or functionality. Conversely, extensive usage of tooltips may be an indicator that your interface is too complex because a well-designed experience should be self-explanatory.
• In-App Engagements : These are useful for orienting new users and overcoming initial friction after sign-up. In-app engagements get users to take action by pointing out areas of the product that users need to interact with to realize value. An example would be a UI element that drives users toward activating a feature or engaging with a new product release.

Provide contextual content and communication

To be most effective, in-app engagements, welcome messages, and tooltips should be triggered contextually and personalized to each user’s actions (e.g., after they activate a feature or hit a specific milestone).

Utilizing the TRUSt framework for contextual communication can increase the likelihood that your message will be valued by minimizing message fatigue.

Use A.I.-powered product feature mapping to eliminate manual work, drive data accuracy and accelerate your time-to-value.

Dive into deeper adoption and user-retention insights with feature-level analysis to uncover parts of your product that are making the biggest impact.

Target users with in-app guides and emails, and then analyze how those engagements move the needle on KPIs.

Critical user journey maps are a core method for visualizing customer interactions, highlighting moments of delight, and identifying points of friction.

Planning user journeys can create team alignment, build customer empathy, and reignite growth by shining a light on where to focus product development efforts.

Double down on user adoption, customer experience, and revenue by mapping and improving your product with critical user journeys.

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Chapter 1: Why Digital User Journeys Are Essential for Driving Product Experience

Author: Zaina Alhmoud

Updated: January 24, 2024 - 11 min read

Welcome to "Digital User Journeys: The Key to Winning the Product Experience Game" an exclusive blog series created in collaboration with Gainsight . For the past decade, Gainsight has been a trusted partner helping businesses build cohesive digital user journeys and customer experiences, with an integrated tech stack of digital self-serve, customer success, and product experience technologies.

Join us as we explore the core principles and strategies that drive product experience through digital user journeys. Over the course of five insightful blog posts, we'll delve into every stage of the user journey, from onboarding to advocacy. 

By subscribing to this series, you'll gain access to invaluable industry expertise and receive the final downloadable compilation as a Playbook. Don't miss out on this opportunity to elevate your product experiences and take your user success to new heights!

Let’s dive in!

Creating exceptional product experiences in today's competitive digital landscape is pivotal for driving user engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. A positive user experience is no longer optional; it's essential for your product's success. It's here that digital user journeys step in.

In this Playbook series, you'll dive into the world of digital user journeys, exploring their importance in shaping product experiences and leveling up their potential in driving business success and gaining a competitive edge. Fasten your seatbelts and let’s get started!

What is a Digital User Journey?

Digital user journeys refer to the end-to-end digital experiences that users have while interacting with your company, product, or service. They cover various touchpoints, interactions, and steps that users go through from their initial discovery of the product to their ongoing usage and engagement. Starting from awareness or discovery, moving up to consideration, leveling up to purchase then retention, and ultimately reaching the end goal of the quest with loyalty.

Digital user journeys enable you to:

Map out onboarding processes, ensuring a seamless and user-friendly experience for new users.

Identify intuitive and critical feature adoption points relevant to finding value, and guiding users to activate and adopt your product's capabilities and functionality.

Maximize user engagement and input by utilizing targeted digital communication, personalized recommendations, notifications, self-service content, and other strategies to continuously keep users engaged and ensure they extract maximum value from your product.

Utilizing real-time data insights and synthesizing user feedback from user journeys will help you continuously refine and improve your overall product experience. 

Your goal? Align user journeys with user expectations, meet business goals, and drive long-term success for your product.

Now let's take a closer look at an example that demonstrates the effective implementation of user journeys. As a Product Manager for a B2B analytics platform, your goal is to align user journeys with user expectations, meet business goals, and drive long-term success. Let's explore how you achieve this by leveraging targeted digital communication, personalized recommendations, notifications, self-service content, and more.

During the onboarding phase of the user journey, you understand the importance of guiding users to their next best action. To accomplish this, you implement push notifications or in-app dialogs that proactively engage users and provide step-by-step guidance. For example, if a user needs to connect their data sources to unlock the full power of the analytics platform, a push notification can be triggered, guiding them through the process and highlighting the benefits of doing so. By offering clear and timely guidance, you ensure that users progress smoothly through the onboarding phase, reducing friction and maximizing their onboarding experience.

Targeted engagements play a crucial role in encouraging users to adopt features they may be missing. Leveraging user usage data, you can identify patterns and behaviors that indicate a user is not taking full advantage of specific features or functionalities. With this knowledge, you can send targeted notifications or in-app messages that promote the adoption of these features. For example, if a user frequently exports data but has not yet utilized the data visualization capabilities, a personalized notification can be triggered, explaining the benefits of visualizing data and providing guidance on how to get started. By nudging users towards features that result in sticky experiences, you increase their engagement and help them derive more value from your analytics platform. 

Beyond the onboarding phase, your B2B analytics platform continues to provide valuable engagement throughout the user journey. For instance, you deliver personalized recommendations based on the user's data analysis patterns, suggesting relevant insights or advanced features that can enhance their analytical capabilities. These recommendations not only drive user engagement but also encourage users to explore new ways to leverage the platform's capabilities, ultimately maximizing the value they derive from it.

If a user stumbles upon any issues or has questions, you can enable comprehensive self-service content such as community forums that include tutorials, knowledge base articles, and FAQs. This empowers users to independently find answers to their questions or learn how to use advanced features. By providing easily accessible and well-organized self-service content, you reduce reliance on customer support and enable users to resolve their queries efficiently, promoting a seamless user experience.

Navigating the Digital Landscape: The Importance of User Journeys

With current market conditions and shifting user expectations, meeting the demand for personalized experiences that cater to unique needs is a no-brainer. You'll need to design digital user journeys that not only provide a seamless experience from start to finish but also anticipate users' needs and offer tailored solutions.

But wait, what’s the difference between digital user journeys and customer journeys?

Customer Journey vs User Journeys

While they are interconnected, customer and user journeys serve distinct purposes within the larger context of product adoption and usage.

The customer journey refers to the overall experience of the organization or account as they engage with your product or service. It overlooks the end-to-end process, starting from the initial awareness and consideration stages to adoption and ongoing usage. From an enterprise perspective, usually, there is one main customer journey that focuses on key milestones and objectives that the organization needs to adopt within the product to get value from the product. 

On the other hand, user journeys zoom in on the specific experiences of individual users or user personas within the customer journey in ways that are key for their specific tasks within that larger customer journey. They highlight the unique needs, preferences, and tasks that different users have while interacting with the product. User journeys are more granular and detail-oriented, aiming to address specific pain points and optimize the user experience for each user persona.

As a Product Leader, you should strive to build products that deliver the best possible user experience. This means designing effective digital user journeys that guide users through your product in a way that is intuitive, seamless, and enjoyable.

Just as a map or GPS guides a road trip, user journeys serve as navigational tools guiding users through your product. They allow you to understand how users interact with your product, identify pain points, and create meaningful experiences that keep them engaged and satisfied.

How Digital User Journeys Drive Adoption, Engagement, and Retention with Product-Led Growth

Now, let's shift our focus to the tangible impact that digital user journeys have on product adoption, engagement, and retention. Additionally, we'll explore the key metrics that you should track to evaluate the success of your product.

Driving product adoption, fostering user engagement, and enhancing user retention are all possible through well-designed digital user journeys, especially in the context of Product-Led Growth (PLG) . PLG emphasizes leveraging the product itself as the primary driver of user acquisition, activation, and expansion.

Facilitating Onboarding: Through a well-orchestrated onboarding process, introduce users to key product features, guide them step-by-step in setting up their account, and enable participation in interactive tutorials or training sessions. This comprehensive approach ensures that users not only understand the product's value but also have the necessary guidance to navigate potential friction points. This becomes particularly crucial for enterprise organizations with complex products, where effective onboarding is paramount.

Driving Product Adoption: To drive product adoption, product managers can address pain points by providing in-app help resources, delivering context-specific guidance, and enabling timely support options. This user-centric approach includes knowledge bases, FAQs, pop-ups, notifications, interactive tutorials, and how-to videos. These strategies create a smoother adoption phase, enhance user engagement, and address challenges effectively.

Fostering User Engagement: Digital user journeys involve personalized recommendations and notifications that inspire users to explore additional features and join communities where they can ask questions from other users, share feedback, and stay updated about any product releases. By steering users towards valuable interactions, you amplify user engagement.

Enhancing User Retention: Retention happens when customers continuously get value from your product and engage with its sticky features over time. It involves fostering a seamless user experience and encouraging deeper usage. One way to enhance retention is to guide inactive users back to the product using emails or in-app contextual engagement. 

Focusing on each stage of the customer journey allows teams to optimize and leverage the product itself as the primary driver of user acquisition, activation, and expansion. By adopting this Product-Led Growth mindset, you gain a deeper understanding of how users interact with their product at various touch-points. 

To truly unlock your product's potential, leveraging product analytics and insights is crucial. They enable you to make informed decisions, prioritize features, address unknown problem areas, and uncover valuable usage patterns.

For example, in Gainsight PX, the analytics capabilities empower you to adopt a data-driven product mindset, shaping roadmap decisions and driving long-term success. 

In the following blog, we will delve into the essential metrics and KPIs that you should track to evaluate the success of their digital user journeys and make data-driven optimizations. 

Designing User-Centric Product Experiences: Steps for Success

To successfully design user-centric product experiences, follow these 2 core steps:

1. Map the digital user journey

Mapping is the first step in crafting effective digital user journeys. Suppose you're a Product Manager building a project management tool. By tracing the user journey from project initiation to task assignment and completion, you get to pinpoint pain points such as complex navigation or ambiguity in task instructions. Such insights empower you to refine the user experience, simplify steps, and introduce intuitive features, thereby enhancing user satisfaction and productivity.

You stand to gain by adopting frameworks to guide the formulation of effective user journeys. The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework is one such popular tool. This concentrates on comprehending the underlying motivations and goals of users. By identifying the "jobs" users are seeking to accomplish, you, as a Product Leader, can determine what customer needs are unmet and design user journeys that highlight features to address those needs.

It’s helpful to visually map the customer journey to represent the user's end-to-end journey with the product. This visual helps you identify pain points, moments of delight, and opportunities for improvement throughout the user journey. 

2. Run iterative testing, refinement, and data analysis

Having data insights equips you to optimize user journeys over time and make the correct decisions in crafting a seamless product. By perpetually monitoring user behavior, executing A/B tests, and dissecting data on user interactions, you can make data-informed decisions to boost the journey. For instance, scrutinizing drop-off points during the onboarding process can reveal areas where users may struggle.  Then, you should streamline the onboarding flow, offer additional guidance, or tackle common pain points.

Influencing the Product Journey: The Role of Gainsight 

Gainsight offers a suite of powerful tools to shape the user journey and elevate the product experience. Gainsight PX users can create in-app engagements like guides, surveys, and dialogs, capture and analyze product data, and even launch a Knowledge Center Bot surfacing essential content and FAQs. Gainsight PX puts the power of influence in your hands. We'll explore how these capabilities can supercharge your onboarding, adoption, and retention strategies.

Key takeaways

Exceptional product experiences are essential for user engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty in the digital landscape.

User-centric design principles, including simplicity, personalization, and seamless transitions, are vital necessities to product experiences.

Guiding user journey mapping via data-driven, personalized in-app content is key to product success.

Gainsight PX offers powerful tools to shape user journeys and elevate product experiences, enabling you to drive onboarding, adoption, and retention strategies.

Coming Up in Chapter 2

In the next chapter of the playbook , you'll delve into the role of Product Leaders to design impactful product experiences that resonate with users.

Updated: January 24, 2024

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User Journey

Relevant templates

A user journey is the path a person takes when interacting with a product or service, from initial engagement to the desired outcome. It's a critical aspect of user experience design and optimization.

Meaning of User Journey in Agile and Why It's Useful

In the realm of Agile development , the concept of a User Journey takes on a particular significance. A user journey in Agile refers to the path a user follows while interacting with a product or system, emphasizing their experiences, interactions, and emotions at each stage of the journey.

It serves as a valuable tool for Agile teams as they work to deliver customer-centric solutions efficiently. Let's delve into why user journeys are useful in Agile methodologies.

Understanding User Needs

One of the core principles of Agile development is prioritizing customer needs and delivering value to them. By mapping out user journeys, Agile teams gain deeper insights into how users engage with a product or system. 

This understanding helps identify pain points, user preferences, and opportunities for improvement.

Aligning Development with User-Centric Goals

User journeys provide a clear visual representation of the user's path, enabling Agile teams to align their development efforts with user-centric goals. When everyone on the team has a shared understanding of the user's perspective, it becomes easier to make decisions that prioritize features and improvements that matter most to users.

Enhancing User Stories and Features

In Agile, user stories and features are the building blocks of development. User journeys complement these by providing a broader context. They help in breaking down user stories into smaller, actionable tasks and ensure that the team remains focused on delivering features that contribute to a seamless user experience.

User Journey vs. User Flow

While user journeys and user flows are related concepts, they serve different purposes in Agile development.

A user journey is a high-level view of the user's interactions and experiences throughout their engagement with a product or system. It focuses on the user's emotions, goals, and key touchpoints.

User flows, on the other hand, are more detailed and specific. They outline the precise steps a user takes to complete a particular task or achieve a specific goal within the product or system. User flows are often used to design and optimize individual processes, such as a sign-up process or a purchase flow.

User Journey Examples

Let's explore a few examples of user journeys to illustrate their practical application:

E-commerce User Journey

Goal: Purchase a product online

• User lands on the e-commerce website.
• User searches for a product or browses categories.
• User selects a product and adds it to the cart.
• User proceeds to the checkout process.
• User provides shipping and payment information.
• User reviews the order and confirms the purchase.
• User receives an order confirmation.

Social Media User Journey

Goal: Share a post on a social media platform

• User logs into the social media platform.
• User navigates to the "Create Post" or "Share" option.
• User types or uploads content.
• User adds tags or mentions other users (if desired).
• User selects the audience (public, friends, etc.).
• User clicks "Post" to share the content.

How Usersnap Templates Can Help with User Journey Mapping

User journey mapping often involves visual representations and collaboration among team members. Usersnap offers templates and tools that streamline this process in Agile development.

Collaborative Features

Usersnap's collaboration features allow Agile teams to work together in real time on user journey maps. Team members can add comments, annotations, and feedback directly to the maps, facilitating communication and decision-making.

Feedback Collection

Usersnap's feedback widgets can be embedded in the product or system, enabling users to provide feedback at specific touchpoints in their journey. This feedback is invaluable for Agile teams looking to improve the user experience continuously.

In conclusion, user journeys are a fundamental concept in Agile development, enabling teams to gain insights into user experiences, align development efforts with user-centric goals, and enhance user stories and features. 

When used in conjunction with tools like Usersnap, the process becomes even more efficient, collaborative, and user-focused, ultimately leading to the creation of products and systems that delight users and drive success.

Relevant terms

• Books & Reports
• Product-led Growth
• Pricing & Positioning

The New User Journey: Follow Your Users to Understand how to Excel at Go-to-Market

Sam Richard

June 7, 2022

This blog post was originally published in January 2022 and updated in June 2022 with new data. 

Product-led growth (PLG) is an end-user-focused growth model that relies on the product as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. Workers have shifted from working in defined workplaces to working on-the-go, and they seek to buy and use software on their own terms. Now, anyone can discover software . This means that the product is doing some of the heavy-lifting that used to belong to marketing and sales and giving them new areas of focus. 

This also means that the typical go-to-market playbook SaaS experts used to follow (below) isn’t as relevant as it used to be. Why? Because it assumes that prospective customers will only encounter the product with a sales or customer success representative alongside them. Since users now expect to discover, try, and buy products on their own terms, the standard “sales funnel” is no longer accurate. 

Based on interviews with B2B SaaS experts who have built and scaled product-led businesses, we designed a new user journey. It consists of five stages, but like any good epic, it starts in the middle and then moves backward. We will touch on each stage and its importance for founders in this article:

• Discover : this is the step in the users’ journey where they first hear about or encounter your product
• Start : the step where a user decides to sign up and get started
• Activate : the “aha” moment when the user uncovers reasons to keep using the product
• Convert : what we’re all after–when a user trades money for the value your product offers
• Scale : how to keep users happy and capture more value

How this framework can help you build your PLG business

It’s most important to note that this framework is a user journey—not a customer journey. For most PLG businesses, everyone starts out as a user of the product, and a small subset of those users eventually become paying customers. It’s important to focus on those users who become customers from the beginning because their usage of the product, and where they fall off in this user journey, will help you prioritize where your team spends the most time and resources to convert at the highest rate. 

As with anything, frameworks aren’t universal. While this framework is a practical guide, innovation and creativity is the key to growing a product-led business and keeping users engaged.

The New User Journey is made up of five steps that follow how a user finds, decides to use, discovers value, pays for, and scales usage of your product. 

The hardest part of building a product-led business? Getting users. 

At this point, it’s a trope—”If you build it, they will come.” Right? Crickets. 

Hundreds (maybe thousands) of founders out there have built a beautiful product that solves a challenging problem in a new and sophisticated way. The problem is, no one knows about it. Sure, you can launch it on Product Hunt, to friends, to a few hand-selected influencers in your space, but that’s how you build a lifestyle business, not a large and enduring company. 

You need marketing, right? Hard to know. The type of marketing you’re used to is too sales-y, or maybe you experimented with a few things and they didn’t work. At this part of your journey as a founder, you might feel like you’re plateauing—but you need user growth in order to understand what to build next in your product. What a pickle.

Discover: How users find your product

Discovery is how users find your product. It’s the first step that they encounter, and often top-of-mind for founders in the early days after the product has been built. Discovery for product-led products is interesting because traditional SaaS models don’t typically work, especially in the early days.

Imagine what you’d search for in 2010 to find Slack. How could they have scaled keyword advertising? What type of large-scale industry events would Calendly have attended in 2012 in order to get more users? It’s not clear because these approaches just don’t make sense in the New User Journey. 

Here are three ways Discovery happens for product-led tools: 

• Organic discovery 
• Drop-in discovery
• Strong need-based discovery

Each of these ways brings in a different type of user into your product and has different tactics associated with them.

Here are some tactics you can use to attract different users:

• The Elite Approach: Some companies will only offer their services to influencers, or they’ll create a waitlist. A modern example is Superhuman , but G Suite used this approach back in the day, too. 

Viral Use Cases

• Exposure Virality: Every time a user interacts with your product in some way, they expose your brand, and they are happy to do it because it makes them look good. An example of this is Mailchimp . 
• Collaborative Virality: Users who want external parties to view their work can interact with them and invite them, driving user addition and awareness. Some examples of this are Slack and Figma . 

Solves a Need

• Discoverable in Context: Through documentation or support content, users discover the product trying to find a solution for a need. Some examples are MongoDB and snyk . This is covered in-depth in the Developer Go-To-Market-Playbook . 

Many businesses spend the majority of their energy on driving discovery of their product, especially in the early days. But without virality and strong organic discoverability, this will continue to be an uphill battle for your team. According to our 2022 Product Benchmarks report , standout PLG companies (those with over $30m in ARR) index heavily on product-driven and organic traffic—both channels make up the majority of their average traffic. By leveraging these examples, you can automate organic discovery and focus your efforts on experimenting with new channels to acquire users through other tactics.

Start: The step in which you discover your users

The Start phase is the bridge that connects the discovery with the usage of the product. This can sometimes be the toughest step of the user journey for early startups to tackle, especially if they don’t invest in design or messaging. That’s why it’s so important to hire UX early . Messaging makes a difference, too. We found that companies that hire marketing before Sales and Growth tend to see higher web-to-visitor conversion rates. Consider that before you let your product manager design your next website. 

The three levers that drive the likelihood of users to get started with your product are:

• Brand/Community

The most important metric to measure this step of the journey is the conversion of website visitors to free account sign-ups. OpenView compiles benchmarks on this metric annually , so check out the report if you want to see how your business stacks up. 

Here are some tactics to increase conversions from website visitor to signing up for your product:

• PLG websites revolve around people, not product features. Users want to know how your product will make them look good. Make sure you’re telling the story of the product from their point of view. 
• Great websites use an inverted pyramid to tell their story. The most critical, convincing line of copy that answers, “Why should I try this product?” must go at the very top, otherwise skeptics will bounce. 
• Show, don’t tell. When possible, show the product in action using a video or animation that plays on page load and loops. Walls of copy aren’t fun for anyone. 
• Create FOMO. Messaging must imply that the most intelligent, most in-the-know people in the industry rely on your product—and if you want to keep up with them, you’ve got to get on board. This can be done with testimonials, tweets, and company logos. 

>> Are you a PLG imposter?

PLG Discovery: More than “going viral”

If you build it, people will unfortunately ignore you. Growth isn’t dumb luck. Great businesses put forth a proactive effort around product discovery even in the early days. Most tactics continue to pay dividends in growth over time. 

Growth is everybody’s job, but it’s helpful to have a quarterback. Here’s how to find that person.

Activation: Delivering on the promised value (MOST IMPORTANT) 

Activation is the moment when your product delivers on the promised value. There’s more than just getting people to sign up for your tool, 40% to 60% of all users who sign up for a free tool never return. Yikes. 

According to OpenView’s 2021 product benchmarks , the majority of businesses still don’t measure activation. One of the reasons for this is that activation is specific to the product—it’s not a one-size-fits-all metric, it needs to be created by leveraging product analytics data and user feedback. In fact, we didn’t publish public activation benchmarks until 2022 , when we felt that we had enough respondents with product-focused activation metrics. Prior to 2022, many responses were merely vanity metrics like DAU, or even worse, just a user’s conversion to paid. 

I vaguely remember reading Dave McClure’s pirate metrics SlideShare (circa 2007!) when I started a new job at a startup and was struck by his “Activation” metric, that is, the measurement of when visitors have a “happy” experience with the product. 

For many businesses, especially at that time, activation seemed to be secondary since most USERS weren’t having ANY experiences with the product prior to becoming customers. Fast forward to the past few years, where product-led models have not only emerged, they’ve shown the market that it’s an excellent way to build a software company.

In a product-led motion, that first “happy” experience between a user and a product isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s crucial. As a result, activation is having a moment.

The product metric everyone thinks they need but can’t seem to define

Creating an activation metric for your business should be straightforward. If you’re hiring a data scientist for it, you’re probably trying too hard. This simple framework is useful for filtering which actions in your product make sense to use as a metric. 

Finding your product’s activation:

• Easy to achieve by the average user
• Can be completed relatively quickly
• Predictive of user retention
• Correlated to business performance—improvements to activation should flow through to conversion, expansion, and virality

Once you have a few core actions lined up, see how they score within the framework. We included some example actions below in this table:

After you have an activation metric, that’s where the real work starts. This metric should become a rallying point for your entire team.

For example, your product team should be interviewing users who have reached activation and identifying the qualitative and quantitative factors that drove them there. Your marketing team should be measuring the success of their campaigns based on how many new users were not only driven to sign up, but also to activate. Finally, customer success and support teams should also be pushing users toward this “aha” moment in their touch points, too. 

It’s not rocket science

Your product is supposed to be doing the heavy lifting, right? There’s no better way to enable this natural rate of growth than by identifying and empowering its engine: the value your product provides to users. 

The only thing getting in the way is finding that metric and rallying behind it. The product you’ve built is certainly much more sophisticated, and the problems you’ve solved to get here are much more challenging. Carve out a week or two of your teams’ time to find your activation point, and spend the next six months arranging your business around it. You won’t regret it.

Convert: Where users exchange money for the value your product provides 

Because PLG software typically has some sort of freemium, self-serve element, pricing and packaging are some of your biggest growth levers. If it feels easy to set up a paywall for your product, you’re probably forgetting something: Pricing and packaging incorrectly doesn’t just mean leaving money on the table.In the worst case scenario, poorly placed paywalls can inhibit user engagement, growth, and potentially virality . 

The lesson? Be very careful when it comes to placing that paywall in your product, and never rest on your laurels. Every time you release a product or feature, you’ll need to consider its place in your monetization strategy.

Conversion is a dance between value, pricing, and understanding how users engage with your product. 

Three drivers for improving users’ conversion into customers are:

• Activation: The value a user has received
• Packaging: Are there strong guardrails that follow the user journey and drive them to pay?
• Pricing: Is the product as it is packaged perceived as a good value?

So how do you combine these 3 key factors into a conversion point ? 

Common hooks to convert users into buyers are:

• Trials: These timeboxed sessions with the tool drive product use and help create a sense of urgency for users to understand the value of a tool. In the 2020 Product Benchmarks , trials converted better, but didn’t convert as many users over time as free models.  
• Volume of usage : Usage-based models create a free offering for users who have a casual need, but price and package based on increased engagement and success from users. These models also enable pay-as-you-go for users that don’t want a contract and need pricing that scales with their use. With these plans, make it easy to put a card on file and charge for usage every month. 
• Feature-based: Feature-based plans make the product accessible for everyone to get them engaged, then price up for power users and teams that use deeper features. 

Keep in mind that sales still plays a crucial role in most self-serve businesses. Product qualified leads (PQLs) can be a great way to apply sales pressure in freemium and self-serve environments. According to our 2022 Product Benchmarks survey , organizations that use PQLs see free-to-paid conversion rates that are 20% higher than peers without PQLs. So what happens after you’ve converted a user into a customer?

So what happens after you’ve converted a user into a customer?

“The beauty of product-led businesses is the growth that comes from retaining paying users indefinitely.” — Sam Richard

Scale: Keeping users happy and growing your business

Once a user converts to a customer, your work isn’t done. The beauty of product-led businesses is the growth that comes from retaining paying users indefinitely—as well as the pool of engaged users on your freemium plan that could eventually convert. What do you have to do to drive scale?  Provide continuous value AND expand the spend of some customers by providing additional value over time. Everyone likes revenue and usage retention, no one likes churn.

Which of these should your team tackle first? For a product-led business, providing value to all users—even free ones—is key. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Even standout PLG companies struggle to keep users engaged with their products at a rate about 20%. 

From a commercial perspective, Blake Bartlett, Partner at OpenView, explains how terrible bad retention rates can be for a business , and how strong net dollar retention (NDR) unlocks exponential growth:

• Improving retention gives you much more leverage on the go-to-market front (you’re fighting against a leaky bucket)
• The one-two punch of a growing front-end and a healthy back-end is the magic formula for exponential growth and lots of VC love.

So, how can you level up your retention?

Three tactics to consider are: 

Applying these tactics is unique to each company. However, there are some tremendous present day examples of how these tactics have driven retention for companies such as HubSpot and Asana . 

Read more on how to reduce churn here .

Monetization: More than a paywall and a checkout

In a product-led business, monetization is a company-wide effort, not just a number for sales and marketing teams to hit. The best performing product-led businesses are obsessed with ensuring that their monetization strategy not only enables them to make payroll, but also helps them grow user engagement.

Don’t set-and-forget the tools you use to convert users into customers, or else you’ll be leaving more than money on the table.

VP of Growth<br>OpenView

Sam Richard is VP of Growth at OpenView, helping our portfolio accelerate top-line growth through establishing best practices and processes to support product led growth. At OpenView, Sam works closely with portfolio leadership teams to discover and implement the most impactful strategies for growth, including onboarding and retention optimization, expansion strategy, funnel optimization and channel/partner strategy.

What’s in store for B2B marketing in 2024. Marketing expert Jon Miller shares his eight game changing predictions here.

Software buying has evolved—and companies are moving to a usage-based pricing model to stay ahead of the curve. Get started with this playbook.

Enzo Avigo, former product manager at Intercom and CEO of product analytics startup June, unpacks how to accelerate your path to product market fit. Get the guide here.

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17 SaaS Lead Generation Strategies For Driving Business Growth

11 min read

Regardless of your product’s stage, getting your SaaS lead generation strategies right is crucial to successful product growth .

As the competition for the SaaS market surges, an effective lead generation strategy will ensure you continue acquiring new customers at a low cost.

In this article, we examine what B2B SaaS lead generation involves, how you can create an effective strategy, and sample strategies to get you started.

• SaaS lead generation involves attracting potential customers to your SaaS business and nurturing them into paying customers.
• There are three main types of leads in SaaS: Sales-Qualified Leads, Marketing-Qualified Leads, and Product-Qualified Leads.
• To create effective SaaS lead generation strategies, you’ll need to set SMART goals and clearly define your target market and buyer personas .
• You’ll also map the key touchpoints customers follow within your product and identify the best acquisition channels for your target audience.

The top 16 SaaS lead generation strategies you can implement for growth include:

• Host industry webinars to generate leads .
• Use the “engineering as marketing” approach to generate leads .
• Use content marketing and SEO to reach relevant audiences .
• Optimize your landing pages to improve conversions .
• Connect with your target audience on relevant social media channels .
• Reach your potential customers with email marketing .
• Implement a referral program to streamline your SaaS lead-generation efforts .
• Leverage Product Hunt to find high-quality leads .
• Build trust with potential customers on 3rd party platforms .
• Create efficient lead magnets .
• Use YouTube video marketing to reach relevant audiences .
• Share case studies and testimonials from existing customers to build trust .
• Complement your marketing efforts with cold calling .
• Utilize chatbots to nurture website visitors .
• Showcase your product value with live demos .
• Offer free trials to generate product-qualified leads .
• Organize offline events in your target market .
• Want to turn your product into the ultimate lead magnet? Book a Userpilot demo today to learn how it can improve your overall product experience.

Try Userpilot and Take Your Product Experience to the Next Level

• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required

What is SaaS lead generation?

SaaS lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers to your product. It involves converting strangers who show an interest in your product into potential customers (known as leads), with the goal of converting them into paying customers.

What are the different types of leads?

Before implementing any lead generation strategy, it’s important to understand what qualifies as a lead and what doesn’t. You should also be able to distinguish the different types of leads to avoid confusion and inaccuracies.

Here’s a breakdown of the key players:

• Sales-qualified leads (SQL) : SQLs are the hottest types of leads in the traditional market. Due to their interaction with a sales representative, these leads typically understand their needs and your product’s value . This makes them more likely to convert.
• Marketing-qualified leads (MQL) : MQLs, on the other hand, are warm leads. They may have shown some interest in your product by signing up for a free trial or downloading your content, but they need further nurturing.
• Product qualified lead (PQL) : PQLs are unique to the SaaS market and just as hot as SQLs. These are users who have engaged with your product through a free trial or freemium plan and have indicated a strong appreciation for your product’s capabilities.

4 Steps to create a lead generation strategy for your SaaS business

Leads can be generated through a variety of methods, from advertising to email marketing , social media marketing, and more. To successfully generate leads, though, you need a well-defined strategy.

1. Set SMART goals

Your first step is to decide on your business goals. Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals fills your lead-generation efforts with purpose and clarity.

For example, rather than vaguely hoping to increase your leads, you can aim to “increase the number of MQLs by 25% over the next quarter.” You can tie these goals to relevant KPIs , such as “running paid ads on LinkedIn and getting 10,000 impressions over the quarter.”

These could provide you with even more measurable targets, such as conversion rates , customer acquisition cost (CAC), return on investment (ROI), and customer lifetime value (CLV).

2. Define the user and buyer personas of your SaaS company

Once you’ve defined your goals, you need to determine your audience. To do this, you must consider the demographics, pain points , needs , goals, and buying behaviors of your target customer.

The more thoroughly you understand your perfect customer, the easier it’ll be to tailor your messaging and marketing efforts to address their specific needs and preferences.

Note that personas are not static and should be regularly updated. This is especially important in B2B SaaS lead generation, where users’ needs and motivations change based on emerging technologies; keeping them accurate increases your chances of converting leads.

3. Build a customer journey map to understand the lead generation process

Before diving into specific lead-generation strategies, it’s crucial to understand your ideal customer’s journey. Customer journey mapping helps you do just that – create a visual map of the customer’s progress from initial awareness to conversion.

Customer journey mapping visualizes the key touchpoints a user follows – the moments where they interact with your brand. The touchpoints vary, from reading a blog post to attending webinars, downloading your app, etc.

Once you know how customers progress, you can create targeted lead-generation strategies for different customer journey stages. This should also help you create an effective sales funnel.

4. Decide on the acquisition channels

Armed with all the info, you must now choose the channels that align with your ideal customers’ behavior and preferences.

Here, the question you need to answer is simple: Based on my ideal user’s behavior, where and how am I more likely to reach them?

For example, SaaS businesses may find LinkedIn to be a better source of leads than social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram. You may also need different channels for different journey stages.

17 Effective B2B SaaS lead generation strategies

Now that we’ve explored the different types of leads and how to create a winning lead-generation strategy, let’s examine how you can generate leads for your SaaS business using industry examples.

Host industry webinars to generate leads

Webinars are a great way to interact with potential customers and generate leads for your SaaS business. These events enable you to educate your audience and build relationships with them.

By offering valuable insights to attendees, you position yourself as an industry leader. You’re also able to showcase your product’s features , foster engagement through Q&A sessions, and more.

You must be intentional, however, to ensure your webinars drive your B2B SaaS lead generation efforts. First, you’ll need to promote your webinars to the right audience.

You must also optimize your landing page to capture leads (contact details) during registration. Finally, send a thank you email after the event and invite attendees to take the next step (free trial, demo, etc.).

Use the “engineering as marketing” approach to generate leads

Another way to ensure you are generating leads is by creating free useful tools that provide value to your target audience. This is known as the “ engineering as marketing ” approach.

For example, Moz has a suite of pro-level tools designed to improve SEO rankings, boost domain authority, and track your rankings. In addition to these tools, they also offer a suite of complementary free tools for link building, keyword research, and more.

The idea is simple: a person who begins using any of their free tools will likely need even more features provided only by the paid tools. Thus, the free tools become lead magnets for the paid ones.

Use content marketing and SEO to reach relevant audiences

There are few better ways to generate organic leads than content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

Content marketing involves creating informative content, such as blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, and other resources, that address your target market’s pain points and showcase your expertise.

By providing your potential customers with helpful content, you build your credibility and trust with them. Paired with a good SEO strategy, it improves your brand’s visibility and boosts your conversion chances.

Optimize your landing pages to improve conversions

Landing pages are critical to most lead-generation processes. It’s important, therefore, that you have a high-converting landing page to capture traffic and generate leads.

Landing page optimization is a whole subject of its own, but there are simple ways to approach it, including:

• Use compelling content with a clear value proposition.
• Avoid ambiguous or unclear language in your write-up. For example, a referral landing page should clearly state how the program works and what the rewards are.
• Include a clear call-to-action (CTA) on your landing page so there’s no uncertainty about the action visitors need to take.
• Ensure your landing pages capture contact details for future follow-up and lead nurturing.

Connect with your target audience on relevant social media channels

The one unmissable secret to effective lead capturing? Be where your potential customers are. The success of your social media marketing efforts, therefore, will only be as good as your ability to find the right channels .

For example, LinkedIn is a great platform for reaching business decision-makers and showcasing company culture; Twitter is effective for thought leadership and product updates; and TikTok is excellent for reaching the younger generation.

Wherever your customers may be, find them, engage with them, and build relationships .

Reach your potential customers with email marketing

Email marketing remains an effective tool for nurturing and converting B2B SaaS leads. They can be utilized in a variety of ways, depending on the customer and your business.

For instance, MQLs may receive information that addresses their pain points, while PQLs who have engaged with your product receive emails highlighting advanced features or case studies similar to their use case.

You can also craft nurturing email sequences to educate leads about your product and guide them through the sales funnel .

Implement a referral program to streamline your SaaS lead-generation efforts

A referral program is a great way to incentivize your existing customers to bring in new business. You can incentivize customers by offering them discounts, redeemable points, or extra features.

Referrals are a great source of organic, high-quality leads as they come from friends, colleagues, and family members. The word-of-mouth marketing by these satisfied customers can supercharge your lead-generation efforts and foster a sense of community.

Leverage Product Hunt to find high-quality leads

One of the best ways to generate warm leads is to find and interact with niche communities. That’s exactly what Product Hunt is, a niche community of techies who come there looking for the latest tech product.

You can leverage this community to create a buzz around your product. The community engages with your product, leaving votes, reviews, feedback, and praise, all of which are essential to your growth.

You also have a chance to be recognized as the top product of the day and get even more reach.

Build trust with potential customers on 3rd party platforms

Speaking of online communities, platforms like G2 and Capterra have built a reputation for credible product reviews . You can, thus, drive your SaaS lead generation efforts by listing your product on these platforms.

Once that’s done, encourage (or incentivize) loyal customers to leave public reviews on these platforms and boost your social proof.

Create efficient lead magnets

A lead magnet is an incentive offered in exchange for someone’s contact information. There are various incentives you could offer, including:

• Infographics
• Certifications, etc.

For example, Userpilot’s Product Adoption School highlights valuable lessons on successful user onboarding and product adoption. You’ll need to provide your email address to enroll, though. 😉

Use YouTube video marketing to reach relevant audiences

YouTube is a powerful tool for reaching relevant audiences and generating leads. It is one of the least used SaaS lead generation strategies on this list.

To harness its potential, you’ll need to craft a diverse video library targeting different stages of the buyer journey. This can be explainer videos for new audiences, product demos for MQLs, and more.

This is your chance to position your brand as a thought leader through valuable content creation and capture a new market.

Share case studies and testimonials from existing customers to build trust

Much like third-party reviews, case studies and customer testimonials serve as social proof for your product.

The power of social proof is unrivaled. As social beings, we are moved to take action if others are doing so. By showcasing the success others have had with your product, you encourage others to try out the product.

In addition to writing case study articles, you can boost your brand’s social proof by encouraging loyal customers to share their successes on your social media account.

Complement your marketing efforts with cold calling

All of the approaches we’ve discussed so far have targeted those with some interest in your product or service. But what about those who may have an interest but aren’t actively searching online?

This is where cold calling excels. It enables you to directly target decision-makers who aren’t actively seeking you out. It’s simple – reach out to them, discuss, gauge their interest, and qualify the lead.

The goal here is to build rapport with the lead, understand their needs, and potentially schedule a follow-up demo session to provide them with in-depth information.

Utilize chatbots to nurture website visitors

Live chat is a great way to engage with potential customers when they are most interested in your product. Chatbots make your job easier, offering 24/7 interaction with visitors.

Chatbots provide immediate and personalized responses to visitors’ inquiries. They can also pre-qualify your leads and direct them to the appropriate resource or personnel for their needs.

Showcase your product value with live demos

Offering a demo is a no-brainer for SaaS businesses. On the one hand, it provides a chance to collect emails from warm leads.

On the other hand, though, product demos are an opportunity to demonstrate your product’s features and benefits. Live demos also help you engage with prospects, showing them how your product solves their problems.

Ultimately, good demos help you close deals, turning warm prospects into paying customers.

Offer free trials to generate product-qualified leads

Most SaaS products today offer free trials or freemium packages. Both of these offer potential customers a hands-on experience with your software, without any initial monetary commitment.

This direct product interaction is critical to the product-led growth strategy for a SaaS company, as it turns your product into its own marketing tool.

As users engage with the product, they assess its value and are encouraged to convert to paid plans.

Organize offline events in your target market

Finally, you can expand your reach by participating in or hosting industry events. These events are a great opportunity to showcase your product, meet customers, and build relationships.

For example, Userpilot hosts a yearly Product Drive Conference where SaaS leaders discuss all things product marketing and growth for free.

Although the event has typically been organized virtually, in 2024, it’ll be held both online and offline, enabling even more interaction between product growth enthusiasts.

To be truly successful, you need a mix of varied SaaS lead generation strategies. Go through the strategies on this list again, then experiment with them (mix and match) to find your ideal combination.

Whatever your approach to lead generation, though, an excellent product experience is the best lead magnet. Book a demo to learn how Userpilot helps you create the ideal experience.

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Common user charge: rates and eligibility

Common user charge rates and how the charge will apply to imports entering Great Britain through the Port of Dover and Eurotunnel from 30 April 2024.

Applies to England, Scotland and Wales

The common user charge will be introduced on 30 April 2024 for commercial movements of animal products, plants and plant products through the Port of Dover and Eurotunnel. The charge applies to:

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As part of changes to import controls under the Border Target Operating Model ( BTOM ) , from 30 April 2024 the common user charge will apply to commercial imports entering or transiting through Great Britain through the Port of Dover and Eurotunnel from all countries.

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The following rates will be charged for each commodity line in a CHED .

The maximum charge for one CHED will be limited to 5 commodity lines, even if there are more than 5 commodity lines present in the CHED . This means that medium and high-risk CHEDs will be capped at £145. Low-risk POAO CHEDs and POAO transits will be capped at £50.

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Apple's new AI aims to take on GPT-4 with its ability to understand context clues

• Apple researchers developed a new AI system to "see" and interpret context from on-screen content.
• The "Reference Resolution As Language Modeling" system allows for more natural interactions with AI.
• The researchers behind ReaLM say it outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4 in understanding context.

Apple's new development in AI aims to take on OpenAI's GPT products and may make your interactions with virtual assistants like Siri more intuitive.

The ReaLM system, which stands for "Reference Resolution As Language Modeling," understands ambiguous on-screen images and content and conversational context to enable more natural interactions with AI.

The new Apple system outperforms other large language models like GPT-4 when determining context and what linguistic expressions refer to, according to the researchers who created it. And, as a less complex system than other Large Language Models like OpenAI's GPT series, researchers called ReaLM "an ideal choice" for a context-deciphering system "that can exist on-device without compromising on performance."

Related stories

For example, let's say you ask Siri to show you a list of local pharmacies. Upon being presented with the list, you might ask it to "Call the one on Rainbow Road" or "Call the bottom one." With ReaLM, instead of getting an error message asking for more information, Siri could decipher the context needed to follow through with such a task better than GPT-4 can, according to the Apple researchers who created the system.

"Human speech typically contains ambiguous references such as 'they' or 'that,' whose meaning is obvious (to other humans) given the context," the researchers wrote about ReaLM's abilities . "Being able to understand context, including references like these, is essential for a conversational assistant that aims to allow a user to naturally communicate their requirements to an agent, or to have a conversation with it."

The ReaLM system can interpret images embedded in text, which the researchers say can be used to extract information like phone numbers or recipes from on-page images.

OpenAI's GPT-3.5 accepts only text input, and GPT-4, which can also contextualize images , is a large system trained mostly on natural, real-world images, not screenshots — which the Apple researchers say hinders its practical performance and makes ReaLM the better option for understanding on-screen information.

"Apple has long been seen as a laggard to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon in developing conversational AI," The Information reported. "The iPhone maker has a reputation for being a careful, deliberate developer of new products — a tactic that's worked well to gain the trust of consumers but may come to hurt it in the fast-paced AI race."

But with the teasing of ReaLM's capabilities, it appears Apple may be getting ready to enter the race in earnest.

The researchers behind ReaLM and representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

It remains unclear when or whether ReaLM will be implemented into Siri or other Apple products, but CEO Tim Cook said during a recent earnings call that the company is "excited to share details of our ongoing work in AI later this year."

Watch: What is ChatGPT, and should we be afraid of AI chatbots?

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