Event Marketing Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide for Event Success
Whether you’re a marketer or business owner, knowing your audience inside out is a superpower.
But how do you achieve it? One of your best allies is the customer journey map. Using a customer journey map helps you understand your customers' experience with your brand, tune in to their needs and address them.
Creating a customer journey map takes effort and preparation, but with the help of pre-built templates, much of the guesswork is eliminated. With templates, it’s easy to visualize, collaborate and unify the journey across all involved departments.
In this guide, we share 12 customer journey map templates that will not only define your customer journey but also improve your customers’ experience.
Here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit customer journey map templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. View more templates below:
A customer journey map is a tool that visualizes a customer's end-to-end experience with your product or service and their interactions at various touchpoints. The customer journey spreads across several stages, starting from when the customer is first aware of a brand to when they become loyal users.
This map is critical as it helps you analyze the present state of your customers’ experiences. It can also help you build a future experience before launching the product or service.
According to Kalyn Lewis, a customer experience expert, "not only is customer journey mapping important in understanding where your team can support your users, but it’s important also for mapping the product-based journey."
Customer journey maps comprise many parts that work together to visualize the process, from the first touchpoint to brand loyalty.
These are the six essential elements you’ll need to include in your customer journey map.
Customer personas, also referred to as buyer personas, represent your target audience. They include demographics, preferences and pain points.
Each customer journey map represents one customer persona. If you have more than one customer persona, you need a journey for each.
Aside from customer journey maps, Visme also has templates for building your customer or user personas.
Visualizing customer personas helps team members across departments understand how to better communicate with customers through sales, social media and other channels.
Here’s a template to help you visualize your customer personas.
The traditional customer journey is divided into five stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention and brand loyalty. Through each stage, the journey pinpoints interactions, sentiments and opportunities regarding the customer and their experience with your brand.
Let’s dig deeper into each one:
This infographic visualizes the base five stages of your customer journey.
Keep in mind that not all customer journey maps use every single stage. Some will show only the buyer's journey and stop at conversion; others will separate a journey into two sections for more granular analysis; others will condense two phases into one.
You can even rename the journey stages based on your understanding of your customers and their buying process.
Ultimately, your choice depends on what you need to visualize and analyze for your team.
A touchpoint is every moment that a customer interacts with your company. Whether online or offline, each touchpoint is an opportunity to shape the customer experience.
Including detailed touchpoints in the customer journey from the beginning can help steer your business strategies—like lead generation, user experience, marketing (content, digital, social media) and customer support—in the right direction.
Create content and experiences for each touchpoint, aligning them with the sales and marketing funnel. It’s crucial to know your customer and their pain points in order to build the right language and content.
Integrate your Visme account with your HubSpot or Salesforce accounts to have access to all sales and marketing content for different touchpoints—on one platform.
Here are some examples of digital and in-person touchpoints you can include in your customer journey map.
It’s essential to pinpoint the emotional highs and lows throughout the customer journey. By recognizing these emotions, your team is empowered to:
To truly understand your customers’ emotions during their journey, you’ll have to build the customer journey map using accurate data gathered from existing customers. You can achieve this via surveys and quick questionnaires at different touchpoints.
Check out how this customer journey map indicates users' reactions at every stage of their journey: Neutral, Happy, Not Happy
Use Visme's online feedback forms and survey integrations to gauge emotions and thoughts about your brand across different content types.
Include the goals, expectations and needs that customers have about the entire journey and at each stage, if applicable. Align marketing efforts with these aspirations to ensure a customer-centric approach that builds trust and satisfaction. Meeting or exceeding their expectations creates a positive brand and encourages long-term loyalty.
The goals, expectations and needs you set should be a combination of assumed and research-backed data, ensuring that most possibilities are considered.
Use surveys to ask your existing customers about their goals associated with your brand or the customer journey.
Add the survey at touchpoints to find out their needs or what they want to achieve. For example, upon checkout, you can ask them why they need your product or service. Or you can put a small customer success survey on your website, asking what they’re looking for.
Kayln Lewis believes "the core focus of customer journey mapping is to break down any barriers that help your current and potential customers get the most out of your solution or offering. Reducing barriers can be achieved by ensuring your products, services, and potentially your overall UI/UX are sound for your customers to intuitively achieve their goals."
There are four main types of customer journey maps: current state, future state, day in the life and service blueprint.
Current state customer journey maps focus on visualizing the existing customer experience by capturing the customer’s interactions, emotions and touchpoints as they occur. This customer journey map is valuable for identifying challenges, optimizing existing processes and understanding the present customer journey dynamics.
A future state customer journey map envisions the ideal customer experience by outlining the desired interactions, emotions and opportunities your customer will have with a new product or service.
This type of journey map communicates a vision of the ideal customer journey and can help marketing professionals set goals and craft strategies that enhance the customer journey.
The day-in-the-life customer journey map zooms in on a specific day in a customer’s life, sometimes highlighting their interactions with your product or service. This customer journey map type provides detailed insights into daily routines, challenges and opportunities for touchpoints that trigger emotions and is instrumental to understanding how a product or service might integrate into a customer’s everyday life.
The basis of this customer journey map is a current or future state upon which you add the resource system responsible for carrying out the experience.
A current state service blueprint helps identify root causes for existing customer frustrations and aligns cross-functional departments within an organization. It creates connections between the teams and backend systems that support the journey.
Now, it’s your turn to create a customer journey map for your brand. Here are 12 of the best templates to help you get started.
Pro Tip: If you’re looking for a faster way to create any type of business document, why not try the AI Document Generator? With this tool, you can create customer journeys, proposals, plans, media kits and much more, all from a text prompt. The Visme AI chatbot asks you a few questions for reference and then suggests several styles to choose from. Select your favorite and watch the AI magic happen in seconds.
Keep your sales and marketing teams aligned with a customer journey map in an infographic layout that includes a user personal section at the start.
This template visualizes the user persona with images that represent the buyer in their current state. It also highlights the user’s goals, needs and expectations for their business as well as important demographic information.
The header has a logo, catchphrase and a relevant background image that helps visualize your story. You can switch the layout of this template and the colors, fonts, textures and shapes to match your branding.
When incorporating photographs and images in your projects, use the Visme AI Edit Tools to remove unwanted objects from the photos to make your design look cleaner.
Align your customer journey touchpoints with the buyer’s goals and expectations. This way, you can improve the customer experience, from awareness to loyalty. It has a clear user persona highlighting key demographics and a set goal.
The second section is for touchpoints, while the third is for weaknesses gathered from existing customers. The fourth section is a sentimental analysis per user action at each stage. Finally, an improvements section addresses both customer pain points and weaknesses along the journey.
Use Visme’s face emotion icons to visualize the user's reactions in the fourth section. Use the color picker to make them match the color for each column.
Guide your team through the customer journey map by visualizing it as a roadmap that moves from one phase to another, as if they were destinations on a map.
This customer journey mapping template highlights the following stages: awareness, research, conversion, revenue and retention. Each phase has its own section and color to differentiate them from each other and make the content easy to follow.
At each stage, the user, Sarah, follows a set of actions related to brand touchpoints. This template doesn’t show emotional factors; you can add them with interactive hotspots. Turn the title of each section into a button, design a pop-up window,and input the user's reactions or weaknesses in the journey.
Visualize your customer’s journey linearly using a future state map. This is the ideal choice for an app in development that hasn’t been launched. A map like this one can help plan and strategize touchpoints that align with customer pain points.
This template highlights each stage with a colored column and shows the relevant touchpoints at each phase. It uses arrow shapes to show the progression from one to another, visualizing the journey in order.
Take advantage of the Visme AI Writer to write descriptions of each stage in the customer journey, outlining what customers are doing, thinking and feeling at each point.
The tool can also assist you in crafting personalized messages to customers at each stage of the journey, including welcome messages, transactional emails and follow-up surveys. The AI Writer is at the bottom of each text box for easy access and ensures that you provide the right message to every customer at the right time, leading to improved engagement and loyalty.
Some customer journey maps align with one buyer persona, while others are more generalized and tailored to match an extensive selection of potential buyers. These maps are vital for the beginning stages of a strategy or for an overview that highlights the most critical touchpoints and user actions.
This customer journey map template is an excellent example of a generalized view. Each target user group is visualized by a representative icon and a descriptive title.
As this template is perfect for a base customer journey map, it offers a great opportunity to take advantage of Visme’s Dynamic Fields feature. From just one template, you can create any number of tailored customer journey maps for specific audiences using default and custom fields.
In a future state customer journey map, the buyer’s hypothetical goals transform into assumed actions that define experiences. Your customer journey map visualizes this transformation to help you build touchpoints proactively.
This five-phase customer journey map template uses a spreadsheet-style layout to set up an ideal customer journey for a user who needs formal wear. This type of customer journey map is what you need when building a new product; after testing and launching, you can update it to a current state map.
Creative businesses deserve creative internal communication. Work together with your team to visualize an overview of what the customer journey will look like when you launch your mobile game or app.
Start with this buyer journey template, separated into four stages: awareness, search, consideration and conversion. It outlines the main touchpoints for each phase, what the ideal customer reaction is and what improvements you could include to make the experience better for the customer.
Use the Visme mockup maker to showcase your app inside a device as part of the header or the overall design.
Sometimes, your customer journey map can have two buyer personas with different goals but similar needs. In this case, one person wants to learn new things, while the other wants to expand his skills in management.
They both share that neither of them has time to join in-person courses. By putting these different personas together, you can create a customer journey map that covers a broader audience. This template is a good option for other industries like a mobile app or e-commerce store.
The customer journey map itself consists of four columns with three phases: awareness, consideration and decision. In the header, above the buyer personas, add a relevant image or video as a background. You can find many options in Visme’s stock photo and video library. The same goes for the pictures that represent the buyer personas.
Keep your customer journey map simple and to the point with a clean cut layout and brief text. This customer journey workflow template outlines the journey across four columns, going from top to bottom.
The engagement column, for example, starts with the buyer persona following website links from ads and emails, continues with the buyer asking for a demo and ends with them opting for a 48-hour trial.
Try combining user actions with touchpoints to create clear and concise customer journey maps that everyone on your team can reference. Take advantage of Visme’s interactive features to add supplemental content in pop-ups that offer more information.
Shed some foresight into how your nonprofit can grow with a donor journey map. Lay out all steps and touch points towards a person making a one-time donation or becoming a regular donor.
Personalize this template easily by adding the steps and touchpoints that make sense to your nonprofit. Stretch the canvas vertically to add more content to each section. You can turn this future state map into a service blueprint once you have more information from existing donors.
In this customer journey map template, the buyer's goal is to choose a cable television provider. The stages visualized in this whiteboard template are awareness, consideration, acquisition, service and loyalty.
In this case, the map covers all five stages while also highlighting what the buyer is thinking and doing at each step.
The bottom two sections showcase the pain points and relevant opportunities for this journey. To add more sticky notes, pull them from the toolbar. Place anyone you don’t want to include outside the map in the surrounding whiteboard area.
Working on a collaborative whiteboard is a great way to get started with a customer journey map. Sticky notes are easy to move around, change and edit without messing up the overall design. Additionally, the Visme whiteboard supports real-time collaboration, so there’s less back and forth with your team.
A customer journey can be separated into two sections: the buyer journey and the user journey. In the buyer journey, the customer is still considering their options, researching and making decisions. Once they buy or convert, they’re considered users. Since each company is different, sometimes the steps are also different.
In this customer experience journey template, a restaurant uses the following stages: decision-making, entering the restaurant, ordering food, payment method and post-process.
Visualizing your customer journey map is the best way to unify the vision with everyone involved in guiding the customer through the journey. You can get started with that right now using a Visme template.
Visme is a customer journey map tool that helps with all your content-authoring needs. These step-by-step instructions begin once you’ve already done all the research and preparatory work for your customer journey. If you look at this infographic below, our tutorial starts on step 8 of this roadmap.
With your customer journey analysis document or spreadsheet ready, it’s time to continue inside the Visme dashboard. Log in and click on Create New -> Project -> More! and search for “customer journey maps.”
Select the template that best matches your vision or the map you plan to create. Don’t worry if you change your mind later; you can switch to another template inside the editor.
The next step is to switch out the placeholder content for your own text.
Try to keep the amount of text the same as the placeholders so the template design doesn’t change too much. Some templates have more space than others; consider that when choosing one.
Upload your images, search the vast image library available or generate unique visuals with the Visme AI Image Generator. Use icons, illustrations or characters to visualize different aspects of your journey map. Bring everyone on the same page with charts, graphs, maps, widgets and other data visualization tools.
For example, you can use a map—which reveals locations when clicked or hovered on—to illustrate buyer persona demographics.
Once you have all your content placed into the template, it’s time to customize the colors and fonts to match your brand or a color palette of your choice.
Click on any color theme to see it applied to your customer journey map. To add your brand colors to the entire design, first use the Visme Brand Wizard to extract the colors from your website and then create a custom theme.
To change the fonts, select all text boxes that need to be changed and click on Edit on the top left. To have your brand font available in the dropdown, you can upload it to the brand kit or use the brand wizard.
While working on your customer journey map, invite your team members to collaborate and leave feedback or comments to the editor.
This tool is ideal if you’re looking for a way to create or update a customer journey map collaboratively with your team. By working on it together, you’ll all be on the same page and have a more efficient customer journey map that helps with sales and customer retention.
Another collaboration tool you can use within Visme is the workflow feature. It makes it easy for you to assign projects or tasks to specific team members in the workspace. You can set due dates and track what is still pending by referencing the content calendar.
Once the customer journey map is finished, it’s time to share it across departments. Visme offers you several options to share and publish projects internally, externally, publicly or privately.
Customer journey maps are typically an internal content type and it’s probably best not to share them publicly outside the company. The best option, in this case, is to share the map as a digital document with a live Visme link. This file type can include interactive content, like engaging animations or video walkthroughs.
Even if you've published live links to the Visme server, you can choose not to be tracked by web crawlers. If you want to be even more private, you can add a password entry. You can check who has opened the customer journey map using the integrated analytics dashboard.
Still not sure if you should use Visme for your business content creation? Then check out what a marketing manager, Ruby P., has to say:
Saas Business Owner
Do you still have pressing questions about customer journey maps? These answers to frequently asked questions will clear up your doubts.
The five critical components of a customer journey map are the five stages.
These are the most impactful and actionable benefits of using a customer journey map.
There is no hard and fast rule as to how often you should update your customer journey maps. It depends on internal and external changes.
But we recommend you update your customer journey maps at least every quarter or six months or whenever a significant internal or external change occurs.
A good customer journey map is characterized by its ability to effectively visualize the customer’s interactions and emotions across key touchpoints. It provides actionable insight for businesses to optimize the customer experience.
The best customer journey maps go beyond a visual representation to align with the organization’s goals, foster cross-departmental collaboration and serve as a dynamic tool that adapts to customer expectations. Its ultimate goal is to drive positive business outcomes through analysis and foresight.
Journey maps are visualized scenarios describing sequences of events a person goes through to accomplish a goal. A customer journey map is one type of journey map. Others include user journey maps and buyer journey maps.
Visme’s customer journey map templates are pre-designed with placeholder content from real-world examples. They help you build a customer journey map from an established foundation that you can grow from.
Using a template eliminates the guesswork for the design stages, especially for non-designers. Designers use templates as well because they save so much time.
Customer journey maps are an essential part of any company’s strategies towards customer experience success. Not only that, but they’re also a vital tool for growing a business that aligns with customer goals and expectations while staying true to brand values and objectives.
In this article, we’ve shared 12 customizable customer journey map templates to help you visualize your customer’s experience with your brand. You can collaborate with others on the analysis using our online whiteboard with sticky notes that you can easily move around the board.
That’s not all Visme can do. Our content authoring tool has many business features and templates to help you create multiple internal and external business content.
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Work in Visme collaboratively with your team and gain insight into how customers experience your brand from start to finish.
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