Digital Customer Journey: What It Is + How To Create One

Knowing what customers think, feel, and do online can help you exceed their expectations. Customers have infinite options at their fingertips, so delivering personalized, high-quality digital customer experiences tailored to their needs and interests is crucial. Poor online experiences will result in customers abandoning a purchase—or, even worse, your brand. 

To keep customers engaged, providing a seamless and easy path to purchase across all devices is crucial. Digital customer journey mapping helps businesses identify touchpoints, fix pain points, and improve the journey for better experiences and stronger brand loyalty.

What Is a Digital Customer Journey?

A digital customer journey is all online interactions with a brand. It runs from initial awareness to post-purchase. The five key stages of a digital customer journey include:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision
• Retention
• Advocacy

These stages exist across various digital touchpoints like websites, social media, and emails.

How to Create a Digital Customer Journey Map

Mapping out the customer digital journey means anticipating customers’ paths and supporting their goals at each stage of the sales funnel — from awareness to interest, decision, and action. By looking at things from the customer’s point of view, businesses can identify and customize the touchpoints that matter most, like social media, online reviews, purchase processes, and loyalty programs.

 Making customer personas and using journey mapping software helps see the customer’s path, spot problems, and set goals. Then, checking resources and simulating the customer journey improves contact points for a better customer experience (CX).

Why Optimize Your Digital Customer Journey?

Consumers no longer compare their experiences with competitors. They compare companies to the best experiences they’ve ever had. And, more and more, there is a gap between what the consumer wants and what they actually experience:

Optimizing a digital marketing customer journey is vital for all companies. From small businesses to corporate giants, they must create an effortless user experience. This can result in various benefits for customers and businesses alike.

Here are some of the key benefits:

• Create seamless customer experiences: Understand touchpoints to remove friction. This ensures a smooth, enjoyable experience across channels, keeping customers engaged.
• Increase sales: An optimized journey eliminates conversion barriers. Design touchpoints to guide purchases, and sales will naturally rise.
• Predict customer behaviors: Analyze journeys to spot patterns. This helps anticipate needs and tailor marketing and support.
• Internal awareness: A digital customer experience map is a great training tool. It shows new team members their CX roles.

Related: 4 Proven Strategies for Optimizing Your Customer Journey

The 5 Stages of the Digital Customer Journey

The digital customer journey tracks online interactions with your brand. It starts from awareness and aims to eventually foster loyalty. Here are the five key stages.

1. Awareness

This stage of the customer digital journey is when customers first notice your brand and recognize a need or problem you can solve. This might happen while browsing online, using a search engine, or consuming social media content. This is where you can make a strong first impression, raise brand awareness, and build a positive brand reputation.

2. Consideration

Now that the customer has identified their problem, they start actively looking for solutions. They will compare your brand with competitors, read reviews, and assess your offerings. This stage allows you to educate the customer and show them why your product or service is the best fit. You can also engage in online review management to elevate your online reputation in customers’ eyes.

3. Decision

The customer is ready to buy and is weighing their final options. They might explore your website, compare prices, or contact support with questions. At this stage, you can make buying easy and clear and address any final doubts.

4. Retention

The customer has purchased your product or service. Now, you need to deliver a great experience after the purchase and focus on keeping them satisfied to prevent churn. This will help nurture the customer relationship. It will encourage repeat purchases and boost customer retention.

5. Advocacy

At this stage, the customer becomes a loyal supporter of your brand. They recommend your product or service to others. Here, you build brand trust and turn satisfied customers into ambassadors who share positive reviews.

How to Learn From the Digital Customer Journey

The digital customer journey shows how people interact with your brand online. By analyzing it, you gain insights into behavior. This can improve customer experience, boost sales, and enhance brand loyalty.

Here’s how to unlock the power of your customer journey.

1. Gather data to understand your customers

Use different types of analytics tools to learn more about your customer’s behaviors and preferences:

• Website analytics tools track user behavior on your website, including page visits, time spent on each page, and click-through rates.
• Call center analytics software provides real-time insights into customer service and agent performance.

Combine these tools with customer surveys (via email, live chat, or on-site pop-ups) and social media listening tools to gather data on customer sentiment, preferences, and pain points. Pay attention to the keywords and phrases customers use to describe your brand and identify common themes or frustrations.

2. Create a customer journey map

Visualize your customers’ experience by identifying the touchpoints (like your website, social media, and email marketing) they interact with at each stage. Since their experiences may vary slightly, you may want to create separate customer journey maps for different customer personas.

Include the emotions and motivations customers might have at each touchpoint. This map will show you the strengths and weaknesses of your customer experience, helping you identify areas that need improvement.

3. Identify customer pain points and opportunities for improvement

Analyze your customer journey map and data to identify areas where customers struggle. Some examples of this include:

• Confusing website navigation
• Lack of information on a product page
• Slow checkout process
• Unresponsive customer service team

Check for drops in engagement at specific touchpoints. They may show where customers lose interest or face issues.

4. Focus on your website’s user experience

Focus on optimizing your website, the primary touchpoint for most customers. Some ways to enhance your website experience include:

• Creating a clear navigation structure
• Ensuring mobile responsiveness
• Using heatmaps and session recordings to find points of frustration on your website
• Conducting A/B testing to optimize your website

Optimizing these elements will make your website easier to use and drive traffic toward conversion.

5. Personalize the customer experience

Personalization is key to a positive customer experience and can significantly boost engagement and conversions. Using the data gathered from CX tools allows you to tailor website content, product recommendations, and marketing messages to match individual customer needs and preferences. 

For example, returning customers might receive different product recommendations than first-time visitors. Segment customers to create communication strategies for different demographics, purchase histories, and online behaviors.

6. Continuously improve and refine the map

The customer journey isn’t something you set and forget. It’s a fluid concept that you must adapt to changing business goals, customer needs, and new technologies. Some best practices include:

• Regularly gathering data to find opportunities to improve
• Updating your customer journey map regularly to reflect these changes
• Testing improvements to your website, marketing campaigns, and customer service interactions to see what resonates best with your audience

For long-term success, you can optimize the customer experience by learning and adapting continuously.

Digital Customer Journey Examples

Knowing how customers interact with your brand online across different industries gives you valuable insights to optimize your customer journey. Here are some examples.

Retail and e-commerce 

A good digital customer journey boosts sales by easing the process and offering personalized suggestions. It also improves customer satisfaction and loyalty with positive experiences and proactive service. This, in turn, builds a positive brand reputation as happy customers become advocates. 

This digital customer experience journey for retail and e-commerce collects valuable data, which you can use to refine and personalize each touchpoint even further. Tablez manages customer interactions across touchpoints for 17 global brands and found it difficult to keep track of customer journeys. Then, they streamlined customer service and review management to get sharper insights and provide better support coverage. They are now averaging a Net Promoter Score of 90%.

Data to collect:	Elements to add:
🔹 Product page views 🔹 Abandoned carts 🔹 Website traffic 🔹 Email open rates 🔹 Click-through rates	🔹 High-quality product images 🔹 Detailed descriptions 🔹 Clear size charts 🔹 Secure payment options 🔹 Hassle-free returns

Healthcare

A well-crafted digital journey in healthcare enhances patient experience. It makes processes easier and more accessible and improves communication, resulting in better outcomes and less stress. It also streamlines operations, cuts costs, and strengthens ties between patients and providers with personalized care. Moreover, a seamless digital experience boosts the organization’s reputation and attracts new patients.

Businesses can use patient data from the healthcare digital journey to help them streamline the process and improve the customer experience. Believe, Ltd. has over 50 healthcare support channels for customers across Asia and has struggled to meet the demand. That is, they struggled before they adopted customer service software to help them widen the visibility of the customer experience. Now, they have a 99% higher visibility rate of customer messages, so CX is more seamless.

Data to collect:	Elements to add:
🔹 Patient information via online forms 🔹 Appointment booking behavior 🔹 Patient feedback surveys 🔹 Website traffic sources used to find your business	🔹 An easy-to-navigate website  🔹 Clear information about services and insurance 🔹 Secure online appointment booking 🔹 Online patient portal access for self-service 🔹 Convenient communication channels for questions or concerns

Media

Media companies need a good digital customer journey, which is vital with many content options. A smooth journey makes it easy to find content, provides personalized recommendations, and simplifies subscriptions. As a result, ad sales and subscriptions increase, leading to higher revenue.

Collecting data throughout the customer’s digital journey is important in the media industry to keep the user experience engaging. WorldLink ISP, Nepal’s largest internet provider, used social media and reputation management tools to gain a more complete customer view and increase survey response rates by 40%. Overall, they also saw CSAT increase to 78% once they started collecting and analyzing customer data this way.

Data to collect:	Elements to add:
🔹 Content consumption behavior (such as articles read and videos watched) 🔹 Time spent on the platform 🔹 Source of website traffic 🔹 Subscriber demographicsUser preferences	🔹 High-quality, engaging content across various formats 🔹 Clear subscription options and benefits 🔹 Personalized content recommendationsIntuitive user interface

Create the Ultimate Digital Customer Journey

You can create the greatest digital customer journey the world has ever seen. Okay, that may be hyperbole — but we know (and our customers know) what our solution is capable of.

Our customer experience management platform brings together all customer interactions across channels, providing agents with the context and history they need to reduce friction. Proactive workflows and AI-powered tools automate the next steps, providing real-time assistance and intuitive guidance to boost customer satisfaction.

By anticipating customer needs and streamlining engagement, you can continuously improve customer experience, increase loyalty, and reduce churn. We’ll help you transform your customer experience one step, or touchpoint, at a time.

Related: How to Improve Your CX With Digital Customer Engagement

Digital Customer Journey FAQ

If you still have questions about digital customer journeys or journey maps, check out the most frequently asked questions about these topics below.