What is a Customer Journey?

The customer journey can be described as a series of stages that a customer moves through during their stay on your website or during their purchasing process of your brand. There are many stages of interaction a person can have with a brand which could represent different consumer decision journeys.

The average customer journey looks like this:

You notice an advertisement on your way home on a bus stop. Then you go on the product’s website and find a discount code in some forum that further entices you to purchase. You browse reviews and previous purchases and add one or two items to the cart on the website.

Then you get a personalized offer of an even bigger discount if you add more items to your cart. You use the code and proceed to checkout.

Entirely Online Journey looks like this:

A user searches for a specific long-tail keyword and eventually clicks on the top, sponsored result. They then compare different products on a category page before finally clicking on one item to add it to their cart.

Proceeded to the register, and made a purchase.

The two journeys show different stages in the customer journey, as well. The first is at the awareness phase and requires more points of contact and interactions to buy while the second one already shows intent and moves more quickly through the lifecycle towards conversion.

As the costs to acquire customers continue to rise, brands are focusing more on retaining their current customers while simultaneously targeting new prospects.