Hey, Jacalyn here 👋

Hope you had a great holiday break!

Now that we’re all (kinda) ready to get back to work, I wanted to make the first issue of 2025’s newsletter all about the customer journey 😊 

After all, 2025 appears to be the year every company is focusing on one thing: nurturing customers (and other stuff, like upselling ‘em, lol).

So, I’m sharing my step-by-step guide to building a customer journey, below!

Now, I won’t lie—there’s a lot of info in here 😅 

But it’s all incredibly helpful and, more importantly, tactical advice that you can use whenever you’re ready to build a customer journey of your own.

Gird your loins, folks, we’re in for a bit of a ride 🐎 

Oh, and if you just want to skip to the tactical stuff—follow the ToC below to jump around 😉 

Table of Contents

• Why bother with a customer journey map?

• Step 0.5: Pick your tool

• Step 1: Research

• Step 2: Map out your personas

• Step 3: Audit your actions vs. your customer’s act …

• Step 4: Identify + map your key interactions

• Step 5: Determine channels and intent

• Step 6: Outline any potential or realized objectio …

• Steps 7 & 8: Create your brief and brainstorms

What the heck is a customer journey map?

Soooo glad you asked 😄 

A customer journey map is basically a visual “map” or representation of the interactions your customers have with your brand.

It forces you to consider how your customer actually interacts with you versus how who think they do.

For example, when you think about onboarding a user to your product or platform, you probably have a “map” or path you want them to take.

That’s your onboarding journey, which is just one part of the broader, overarching customer journey 🛣️ 

💡 Keep in mind: you could have more than one type of journey, depending on your industry, customer, or even product catalogue/portfolio.

Why bother with a customer journey map?

There are a lot of varied definitions out there for what a customer journey map is—let alone why you even need one 😆 

But I’m (personally) a big believer in understanding the whole odyssey your customer embarks on to, well, become a paying customer!

In a nutshell: a customer journey map takes into account:

• Your customer’s full lifecycle (from pre-acquisition, to post, and beyond)

• The experiences your customers have along the way (ex. across multiple channels, multiple touch points, over a span of time)

• The smaller touch points or interactions that feed insights and data into your broader journey

The way I see it, there are 3 core reasons you need to build a customer journey:

1. Marketing can no longer skate by on personas and ICPs alone as the “north star” of who their customers are, and how they need to serve them—personas are just one piece of the broader pie.

2. Despite what we like to think, most of us don’t actually understand the journey our customers take to, well, become customers 🤷‍♀️ 

3. Having a journey map can help visualize where and when customers truly find value—and thus decide to become customers!

The only problem? We tend to default to stuff like “stages of awareness” in place of building out an actual customer journey 🫣 

What do you need to get started with building a customer journey?

Shockingly, you don’t need to purchase fancy tooling or tech 😲 You can use whatever you’ve already got in your tech stack.

Example: Miro or Figma, which most companies use anyway, work just fine for visualizing your customer journey map.

What you need to do beyond the tool/app piece, is:

• Get started with research

• Then, pull in what you know about your personas and ICPs

  • Remember when I said personas are just one piece of the bigger pie? This is where personas can play a role!

• Audit your customer’s core actions vs. your company’s

• Map out key interactions customers have with you throughout their journey

• Determine channels and intent

• Outline any potential or realized objections

• And, finally: create your brief!

Okay, so that all sounds like a lot, I know 😅 

Let’s dive in and break it down step-by-step

Step 0.5: Pick your tool

You don’t need fancy tooling or tech, but you do need some sort of tool or platform that lets you visually map out what your journey looks like.

For me, that tool is Miro—our company already used it when I joined, and it met all of my needs, which meant I could skip onboarding a costly or additional tool.

If you don’t already have a tool like Miro, don’t sweat it—you can also use a Google Slides deck, or even a Canva deck. As long as other stakeholders can collab on it, you’re good to go 👍️ 

Example: I made my Lifecycle Upsell Strategy Deck in Google Slides (which you can grab the template for here, btw) 🤷‍♀️ 

Step 1: Research

Before I dove into mapping out Copy.ai’s customer journey, I focused on 3 kinds of research or analysis:

• SWOT analysis

• JTBD analysis

• SCAMPER

Start with a SWOT analysis

You need to understand what your solution’s core strengths and weaknesses are—and you can do this either individually, or with your team, as a SWOT exercise.

Performing a SWOT analysis lets you:

• Understand where you’re winning (and losing) with your customers

• Outline where you may be at risk of losing out to competitors

• Identify priority areas for improvement

You get the picture 😉 Most of us have done a SWOT analysis or two!

But the greatest benefit is that get to break down what you need to do to help your customer become a hero with your product.

Look at your customer’s JTBD

The “jobs to be done” framework is a pretty classic approach to understanding the “why” and “when” of your customer’s buying decision but, more importantly, how your solution can/will help them.

In Copy.ai’s customer journey map, for example, part of the JTBD portion is understanding how people may move closer to, or further from, their main goals.

Perform a SCAMPER analysis

If you’ve never done a SCAMPER analysis before, you’re about to realize just how crucial it is 👀 

In a nutshell, this kind of analysis:

• Requires you to look at your solution and customer journey objectively

• Brainstorm ways to improve on what you already have

• Look at potential areas where you can adapt, replace, or use aspects of your offering differently

In other words: looking at your product from different perspectives to see where you can improve how you position and market it to your customers.

Here are a few example from our own SCAMPER analysis to get you started!👇️ 

Combine: Enterprise customer support playbooks with Enterprise admin product update emails.

Substitute: Open office hours for segmented, technical webinars.

Modify: Existing monthly newsletter to be focused on recommendations and technical, how-to content, segmented by customer type.

SCAMPER may be a new concept for your team, but honestly, these kinds of analyses are actually pretty fun—and you’ll find that other teams, like Product, will have valuable input on ‘em, too 😉 

Step 2: Map out your personas

The research and analysis you do helps inform what you know of your customers’ experience—and also, who the heck are 😂 

While personas are just one piece of the customer journey pie, you do have to factor them in!

At Copy.ai, we did a persona + experience deep-dive, to focus not only on who our customers are, but what their experiences are from the moment they hear about us, all the way through to onboarding our tool (and beyond).

When building out your personas + experiences, keep in mind:

• Your personas should dive deeper than just likes, dislikes, and typical behaviours.

• Including various touch points, interactions, and teams your personas may engage with, helps with the experience piece.

• You can make some safe assumptions at this stage, based on things like your current sales, lifecycle, evaluation, and other processes.

Take a look at this example of an Enterprise persona we fleshed out 👇️ 

During various stages/phases, I included elements like…

⚡️ The customer’s emotions at various stages of their journey
⚡️ Common questions (I assume) they may ask
⚡️ Opportunities we have to help the customer make an informed buying decision

I then shared the persona “boards” or “cards” with teams like Sales, Product, CS, and Marketing to get their take on any missing insights/touch points/interactions.

Step 3: Audit your actions vs. your customer’s actions

Tbh, this is where it gets really good 😄 

At this point, you want to look at who our customer is today, and who they want to be tomorrow—then map out how you’ll make that happen.

Look at your customer’s core actions

During this step, you want to get your team brainstorming and talking—asking questions like, “What happens when someone discovers us?” and, “What steps do they take before they start using our product?”

For example, at Copy.ai, we want to ensure our customers move from:

Wanting to be an innovator with AI ➡️ becoming an innovator with AI

Knowing that, we mapped out the core steps or actions we believe our customers take from discovery through to onboarding, and beyond, in order to get to that goal or outcome.

Look at your core actions

What does your team need to do to help customers go from Point A to Point B?

To answer that, we looked at:

• What our customers do at each level/stage their journey with us

• What our team does at each level/stage

• The insights we had to measure (to ensure the journey is consistently optimized)

This helped us understand what happens when a customer engages with us pre, post, and beyond acquisition 💡 

Once you’ve looked at both your company’s, and your customer’s core actions, you’re in a better position to:

⚡️ Identify gaps, misalignments, and areas of improvement for helping your customers
⚡️ Apply your learnings from activities like your SCAMPER analysis
⚡️ Dive deeper into Product needs that are potentially not being met right now

And, in some cases, even pinpoint where customers may start disengaging, or are likely to churn altogether 😲 

P.s. if you want a very quick way to map out your customer’s core actions, grab the template below—you can build on this later!

Step 4: Identify + map your key interactions

Next, you’ll want to map out the key touch points customers have throughout their journey with you.

Key interactions don’t refer to just marketing activities alone.

When mapping out key touch points or interactions, don’t forget to focus on other teams—for example, look at the touch points customers have with Product, Sales, Customer Success, and other departments outside of marketing.

In our case, I wanted to make sure we had an understanding of:

• TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU activities through which customers are most likely to engage with us (Marketing)

• The stages at which customers are being activated, informed, educated, and supported (Lifecycle, Product, CS)

• When customers are most likely to demo, or talk to us about custom use cases, before they buy-in (Sales, Marketing, Solutions)

Doing this exercise, and mapping these key interactions out visually, helps you level-set and determine where your assumptions about your journey prove true—or false.

💡 Similar to stages of awareness, you can map key interactions back to when certain teams (like Product, or Lifecycle) play a role in engaging with customers.

Speaking of, you’re gonna want to map out what some of your core channels (and intent) look like—you know, the marketing side of this whole thing 😉 

Step 5: Determine channels and intent

In step 4, you’re focusing on the smaller, more specific touch points or interactions customers have with you—think of those as micro.

Macro would be the channels your customers engage across with you—and each of those channels is used with different intent 👀 

Let’s say, for example, that in-app, email, and events are 3 major channels where customers engage with you.

Here’s an example of how I think of those channels and their intent at Copy.ai 👇️ 

• Channel: In-app

  • Intent:

    • Use AI to automate/streamline work

    • Learn how to master features/functions for more productivity

    • Get work done faster using AI

    • Get relevant, timely tips, tricks, advice on using our product

• Channel: Email

  • Intent:

    • Receive direct guidance, answers, and solutions

    • Exclusive access (events, education)

    • Engagement with brand/person at the company

    • Targeted onboarding

• Channel: Events

  • Intent:

    • Learn about the product (features, releases, functions, etc)

    • Learn from company SMEs/experts

    • Solve a product-related problem/challenge

    • Explore other use cases

You can map out channels + intent however you’d like, but I did it quickly with a spider-like model 👇️ 

Why bother with channels & intent?

⚡️ By understanding why and how a customer uses one channel vs another, you can provide better experiences for them in those channels. 

⚡️ When you break down what a customer’s objectives are for each channel, the tactics you work on to meet those objectives, and what you can measure, you’re better positioned to provide the most relevant, timely value customers are looking for.

Step 6: Outline any potential or realized objections

The one area of most customer journey maps I see go complete ignored, is potential or realized objections.

💡 Aka: what would stop your customer from onboarding, using, and/or keep your solution?

For example, if you gather insights from user feedback, customer surveys, NPS, and retention + churn reporting insights, you can map out both perceived or real objections you need to address.

Personally, I map out these two types of objections by looking at existing data to understand why customers would use a tool…and why they wouldn’t.

When you map out perceived and real objections, it helps you further rationalize the reasons behind things like churn, poor NPS, or common support ticket inquires (to name a few) 🤔 

• Knowing what objections could come up, helps you mitigate them ahead of time

• Understanding existing objections allows you to pivot things like positioning, messaging, and even your product roadmap, tbh!

In Sales, they call this “objection handling,” something your Sales team can probably give you some really helpful input on! 😉 

Steps 7 & 8: Create your brief and brainstorms

By now, you’ve got the key components of your journey map down.

So it’s high-time you brief it out 😄 

Create your brief

I always create an accompanying brief for any visual map I put together — and this customer journey map is no exception.

At Copy.ai, for instance, my brief lives in a Notion project within my Lifecycle roadmap 👇️ 

Schedule frequent brainstorms

Once you’ve got your map and brief, you should make a plan to have 2-3 team brainstorm sessions, as a group exercise 💡 

Few reasons for this:

1. You want to treat the customer journey as a team objective—not as solely a “lifecycle thing”.

2. There should be ample opportunity for your team, and other stakeholders, to contribute to the journey map.

3. Not everyone is going to look at the map, let alone approach customer journey building the same way!

Here are my tips for getting the ball rolling productively:

⚡️ Set up a recurring meeting once/week for three weeks, with an agenda that breaks down your map walkthrough and the goal of meeting.
⚡️ Give your team access to the map and the brief in advance, so they know what they’ll be diving into.
⚡️ Use your SWOT, JTBD, and SCAMPER analyses as a chance to get teammates ingratiated with your map!

🔥 Hot tip: it helps to have your direct leader’s buy-in for these meetings ahead of scheduling them, so no one has an excuse not to contribute 😉 

Let’s sum it all up, shall we?

Just like that, you’ve got your very own customer journey map 🥳 

I’m super proud of you for making it to the end of this newsletter—seriously, there’s a lot packed in here!

But, if you take nothing else away from this newsletter, I hope you’ll remember this…

A customer journey map can help you realize, and solve for, the most common challenges that keep your customers—and therefore, your company—from being champions 🥰 

It’s also a really, really good team exercise every marketing org should be doing 😄 

Now that you’ve got everything you need to build your own customer journey in 2025, I wish you the best of luck! Go forth and prosper with that 💩 🤍 👏 

I’ll be in touch next month with another issue of That Marketing Newsletter!

P.s. here’s what I’m drinking & reading this week

P.p.s. have feedback about this newsletter, ideas to share for future issues, or any gripes? I’m all ears—shoot me an email at [email protected] 👋