The email marketer’s guide Mapping a course for

success throughout
to the customer journey the buying cycle

Insights

What’s in this report
How email marketers are
pinpointing each phase of the
customer journey to connect
with audiences at ideal
moments
How marketers are building
customer journey maps to
connect with buyers at ideal
touchpoints
How marketers are using
automation tools to personalize
customer journeys
Why marketers are looking
to partners to customize
customer journeys
The email marketer’s guide to the customer journey
01
Mapping a course for success throughout the buying cycle
As email marketers search for new ways to engage with their audiences, it remains
essential that teams pay close attention to the customer journey. The model of
the journey, and the experiences that occur throughout it, represent the ideal
framework for marketers working to align their campaigns with the audience’s
preferences, behaviors and expectations.
The customer journey consists of actions customers take before and after
purchasing. Successful email marketers are using technologies to map out these
moments, going beyond open rates to see what steps customers take before and
after interacting with emails. This helps them predict consumer behavior to ensure
long-term campaign success — a task made easier by email’s relatively linear
framework compared to other marketing channels.
“You have a clearer starting point as a marketer,” said Nina Zhang, associate
marketing manager at Mailchimp. “It makes it easier for you to map out the
journey and personalize touch points along the way. Email marketing is a perfect
opportunity for marketers to communicate one-on-one with customers and
prospects. Using customer journeys for email, marketers can provide a very
personalized experience and send relevant messages to customers .”
With that goal in mind, customer journey maps are helping marketers gain a
uniform view of customer experiences from the moment they connect with the
brand to the actions they take after engaging, making purchases, etc. This helps
brands identify discrepancies within their campaigns, predict future customer
behaviors and offer a roadmap to success for stakeholders.
In this Tactics+Insights guide, Digiday and Mailchimp put a lens on the strategies
and technologies email marketers are employing to analyze, map and enhance
customer journeys. The strategies, frameworks and automation capabilities
successful marketers are using to win over consumers at every stage are
transforming the customer experience.

Email marketers are pinpointing
each phase of the customer
journey to connect with
audiences at ideal moments
The email marketer’s guide to the customer journey
02
Customer journey frameworks outline the steps audiences are taking to become
customers — from research to consideration and, ultimately, purchase. Email
marketers are finding it increasingly effective to view the customer experience
holistically via the journey model rather than focusing only on specific outcomes,
such as getting customers to open emails.
The stages of the email customer journey include:
Awareness: Potential customers discover a company by viewing product
or service ads via search engines, social media, etc. If they navigate to the
website, they move on to the next phase.
Acquisition: In an email marketing context, this is the phase where a customer
signs up for email lists after purchasing to learn more about the company and
its products.
Onboarding: Once customers have signed up for emails, brands can onboard
audiences by showcasing products, events, offers, discounts, etc.
Engagement: The consumption of content and interactions with the brand
constitutes the engagement stage.
Advocacy: When customers are happy with their experiences with a brand,
they’ll likely begin recommending it to others.
Outlining each phase of the customer journey — and tailoring each piece of
the outline to their unique offerings — is helping email marketers plan out the
touchpoints that will be used to connect with customers at ideal moments. The
most successful teams include specific conditions/parameters to connect these
stages more closely to particular KPIs.
“If you’re creating a customer journey for abandoned carts, the starting point
would be triggered when a contact abandons a cart on your website,” Zhang said.
“You might then send a follow-up email after a certain time delay. And then, you
want to think about what might incentivize the customer to take action after you
approach them with an abandoned cart email reminder. That might be a discount
code, free shipping or something of that sort.”
“Think about how you want to personalize the journey to appeal to the needs
of the customer you’re targeting — how you can nurture and incentivize them
through the process,” she added.
From there, marketing teams working with the customer journey model are
putting in the time to create the customer journey map.
The email marketer’s guide to the customer journey

03
Tactics and insights

Framing the customer experience via journeys with specific phases is helping
email marketers learn what factors lead customers to interact with brands and
make purchases.

Successful email marketers include specific parameters — time delays, for

example — within their customer journey frameworks to pinpoint where
audiences are taking actions that align with KPIs.

Marketers are incentivizing customers to take action after connecting with

them at each phase, offering discount codes, free shipping and other perks to
keep them engaged.

“Email marketing is a perfect opportunity for

marketers to communicate one-on-one with
customers and prospects. Using customer
journeys for email, marketers can provide a
very personalized experience and send relevant
messages to customers .
— Nina Zhang, associate marketing manager, Mailchimp
@

Marketers are building customer
journey maps to connect with
buyers at ideal touchpoints
The email marketer’s guide to the customer journey
04
To make the most of customer journeys, brands are using interactive mapping
tools to understand audiences and fuel conversion efforts more effectively. These
technologies integrate customer data across platforms and channels, matching
profiles with each journey stage, and can pinpoint disruptions across channels,
helping marketers optimize each area.
Key elements within these maps include:
Buyer personas: These are models of the characteristics of a brand’s average
customer, with the traits based on market research and audience experiences.
Customer touchpoints: Marketers pinpoint where customers connect with
them (aside from the email itself), whether it’s an online store, social media or
digital ads.
Goals for the campaign in each phase: By aligning each stage with relevant
KPIs, marketers can more easily identify which factors fuel success.
Customer journey maps are helping marketers gain more accurate insights into
the abstract features of customer journeys, constructing a visual representation
that brings their details into focus, including each journey stage.
For example, these visualizations often offer marketers drag-and-drop dashboards
that allow them to place specific customer actions — such as “opens email” — in
relevant journey phase groups, then place their brand’s ideal response following
the actions in question. Marketers can also break up listed customer groups into
different phases based on detailed audience demographics, preferences and
more.
Some mapping tools include pre-built templates, which allow marketers to
choose from libraries of customer journey maps tailored to specific KPIs and
campaign tasks, such as nurturing leads, finding and managing contacts,
engaging contacts at various stages, and more. These are particularly useful for
marketing campaigns that run primarily on popular commerce platforms such as
Shopify, Stripe and the like.
Tactics and insights
Customer journey maps take the abstract features and construct a
visualization that brings email campaign details into focus.
After getting started with pre-built customer journey maps, marketers are
turning to customer journey builder tools to replicate these elements and
tailor their models to reflect each phase of the customers’ experiences.

Marketers are using automation
tools to personalize customer
journeys
@
The email marketer’s guide to the customer journey
05
At the heart of the tools that help build customer journey maps lies automation,
which enables marketers to combine multiple data points into a cohesive
visualization, making their maps more effective. Solutions like these enable
brands to plot each touchpoint, revising the visualization as the journey evolves.
“Automation helps you collect customer data and analyze customer data from
various touchpoints throughout the customer journey,” said Zhang. “It helps you
understand trends, patterns and segments of customers’ behavior. And being
able to collect that data can help you understand how you can better target those
customers in the future.”
Marketers know it’s essential to focus on the customer journey, resulting in a
positive brand impression. Each stage must be personalized, including tailored
messaging, product recommendations, offers and the like.
Using customer journey visualizations as templates, teams are employing
automation technologies to ensure they’re offering customers personalized
experiences at every digital touchpoint before and after opening the email.
Many of these tools enable marketers to integrate data from external apps,
web services and other digital platforms to gain greater insight into customer
behaviors. This often involves tailoring email messaging to customers’ specific
preferences and actions.
“Most of the personalization process wouldn’t be possible without automation,”
said Zhang. “It helps you deliver the right targeted messages when a customer
performs a certain action, or it recognizes certain customer characteristics.”
Once data points and KPI triggers are set up within these tools, marketers
activate personalization automations whenever and wherever customers engage
with the brand. This always-on approach helps brands maintain a consistent
digital presence that aligns with consumers’ preferences, guiding them along the
purchase journey.
The email marketer’s guide to the customer journey

06
“Most of the personalization process wouldn’t be possible without automation,”
said Zhang. “It helps you deliver the right targeted messages when a customer
performs a certain action, or it recognizes certain customer characteristics.”

Once data points and KPI triggers are set up within these tools, marketers
activate personalization automations whenever and wherever customers engage
with the brand. This always-on approach helps brands maintain a consistent
digital presence that aligns with consumers’ preferences, guiding them along the
purchase journey.

Tactics and insights

Using customer journey visualizations as templates, marketers are then

employing automation technologies to ensure they’re offering customers
personalized experiences at every digital touchpoint before and after opening
emails.

Automation tools collect and analyze customer data from various touchpoints
throughout the email journey, enabling marketers to understand trends,
patterns and segments of customers’ behavior.

Email marketers use KPI triggers to activate personalization automations

when customers engage, helping their brands maintain an always-on digital
presence to guide customers through the purchase journey.

High-quality partners and
solutions are helping email
marketers customize customer
journeys to their needs
The email marketer’s guide to the customer journey
07
At some point, most email marketing teams will need to work with external
resources and partnerships to create effective customer journey maps and make
the most of automation solutions.
Zhang recommends marketers seek partners with automated solutions that can
be tailored to their brands’ specific campaign needs. For instance, if the email
campaign calls for sophisticated tagging or the ability to add specific contacts
to certain audience groups, marketers should look for solutions that tie these
criteria to each stage of the customer journey.
What’s more, the ideal solution will be able to grow with the marketer’s brand.
According to Zhang, this can help ensure that as audience behaviors change over
time, the brand will be able to continue to draw insights and enhance customer
journeys for years to come.
“You’ll want a tool that’s scalable,” said Zhang. “As your business grows, your
audience will grow. You want a tool that can just as effectively personalize
customer journeys for audiences of a thousand contacts as it were for audiences
with a million contacts.”
“You want something intuitive and seamless,” she continued. “Using automation
for customer journeys can save time and enable marketers to focus on other
business needs. It also helps avoid stress while creating more personalized
customer experiences.”
The customer experience has become increasingly complex as digital channels
evolve and consumer behaviors and preferences shift. With a thorough
understanding of the customer journey via mapping — and the automated
campaign personalization this fuels — email marketers are gaining greater
awareness of customer trends and crafting digital experiences that are set to
remain relevant as the journey takes new forms in the future.
The email marketer’s guide to the customer journey