An Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing and Customer Journey

What a customer journey is and why it matters

A customer journey is the series of interactions of a person with your brand, products, or services. It includes direct interactions, like engaging with a customer support agent, and indirect ones, such as discovering your business at an event or because their friend recommended it.

Here’s what an email customer journey can look like:

1. A potential customer subscribes to a brand’s newsletter after downloading a free guide. 
2. Right after, this customer receives a welcome email, followed by a personalized email sequence recommending relevant products.
3. After browsing an item but leaving it in their cart, they get a timely reminder email with a discount offer.
4. Post-purchase, they receive follow-ups like product care tips or exclusive offers, persuading the customer to purchase again.

The takeaway is that the customer journey covers everything from learning about your brand to opting out forever. It helps marketers understand what happens to a customer before and after the purchase, catch them at every stage, and nurture long-term relationships.

Stages of the email marketing customer journey

You can introduce customer journeys to your marketing strategy by building a customer journey map. Outline each stage and plan how to move your subscribers further, turning them to customers, regulars, and advocates. For example, mapping transactional emails helps you find opportunities to strengthen customer relationships. 

Now, let’s take a closer look at each stage separately.

Awareness

First of all, your customers must learn about your products and services somewhere. That’s why you need an awareness strategy. Here is a list of methods, situations, and platforms to make your audience aware of your catalog of products and services using email marketing:

• Bring new subscribers. Your brand’s newsletter should have a constantly growing list. To achieve that, make sure that all your brand channels and social media promote the newsletter. You can also plan some posts addressing the content of your next email so you can lure more people into subscribing.
• New launch announcement. Use all your communication platforms every time you have something new to sell. This applies to social media but it’s relevant for emails as well since it’s it is a good chance to make subscribers feel special. Give your subscribers a sneak peek before everyone else— and make sure they know that they’re prioritized. You can also give them special discounts, gifts, and other exclusive bonuses.
• Content marketing with storytelling. Storytelling is a marketing tool for engaging customers emotionally. So, it creates a connection. When customers feel connected to a brand, they see it as relatable. In email marketing, there are endless techniques to use storytelling in customer communication. We wrote a guide on storytelling in email marketing — check this out!
• Social media aligned with emails. Promote your newsletter across social media channels. Build some intrigue around your newly launched products, newsletter content, exclusive offers, and other things — use this strategy to raise awareness about your releases and your email marketing list.
• Social media ads. You can make use of paid advertisements to spread the word. Don’t hesitate to go after demographic-driven audiences that your organic reach would not hit. This is a good way to make your brand noticed by a broad public and also a valid strategy to increase your subscriber list.
• Landing page. If you have a lot of products, choose a few to invest in creating landing pages. These pages will be indexed by search engines, so you’ll get free organic views. Another perk is, you’ll get a beautiful promotional page to link to in your emails.

Consideration

Consideration is the stage at which your customers are only thinking of buying your product — they already know about your brand but they keep picking, choosing, and comparing. At this point, you need to show that your product is the best option on the market.

The consideration stage is the perfect time for social proof and testimonial emails. Feel free to use all kinds of email marketing social proof from customer reviews to endorsements by experts in the niche. 

We love this social proof email from Suds we found on Really Good Emails — adding a discount for maximum efficiency is a great strategy.

Decision and Purchase

At this stage, your subscriber becomes your customer, and your main objective is ensuring a smooth experience and showing that being your client is good and has benefits.

Transactional emails such as order confirmations, receipts, and shipping updates improve customer experience and reinforce trust in the brand. These emails guide the customer to complete their purchase and set the tone for a positive relationship. That, in its turn, will make your customers more likely to keep purchasing from you.

You can also warn your customers about an abandoned cart so they make a purchasing decision faster. In such emails, choosing a friendly tone and using a bit of humor if your brand allows it is a great strategy — take a look at this amazing example from Meow Meow Tweet.

Post-Purchase and Retention

Focus your email efforts on repeat purchases and loyalty at the Post-Purchase and Retention stages. Depending on your goals, your strategy to keep building a good relationship with customers can be in your email marketing. Here’s what you can do:

• Offer relevant content and good quality information, like blog articles, drive competitions, quizzes with discounts and gifts as prizes, etc
• Invite your customers to loyalty programs
• Send personalized thank you emails offering all sorts of bonuses from discounts on the next purchase to free shipping and other stuff
• Send upsell emails with personalized recommendations
• Ask your customers to leave a review so you have social proof to use in other emails and even other marketing channels

The options are endless and you can be very creative at this stage. One solid strategy is making customers interact with you — give you feedback, share their experiences and success stories, and so on. That way, they will feel special and cared about, which ensures coming back for more later.

How to align email marketing and customer journeys

Email marketing is also good for creating a more personal experience with clients. Being more personal is a goal for most brands today, since it makes your customers build trust in you, and creates a sense of confidence that your services deliver what clients want. 

Emails as a medium, along with the website and the landing page, are one of the best places to express your brand identity. Emails are easily customizable, you own your content and your subscribers’ list — and the personal nature of emails allows you to build a better rapport with your audience compared to social media.

Create a compelling welcome email

The welcome email is the first contact that your subscriber has with your email strategy. It is your chance to make a good first impression. A common practice is giving something for a subscription like all sorts of gifts or discounts, like in this email from Fishwife.

Segment your audience

Segmentation is a great tool that allows you to send more targeted content to the subscribers who actually need it. You can align email segmentation with customer journeys by using the journey stage as the criterion. 

You can even go beyond the stages we already mentioned but also apply a more detailed categorization. Take the Awareness stage. Here, you can create segments based on:

• The channel where subscribers came across you — social media, website, word of mouth, etc.
• The engagement with your welcome email — ignored, opened, clicked through, converted to customers

Use personalization

The difference is simple: segmentation caters to many, email personalization caters to one. It goes beyond addressing recipients by first names — you can fill the entire email with content meant just for this particular subscriber.

You can use personalization at each stage of the email customer journey — including retention. Check out this email from Duolingo: personalized recaps are a great way to keep app users motivated, for example.

Add social proof

Social proof is the use of evidence that your product is good, namely testimonials, positive reviews, case studies, key opinion leader marketing, and so on. It can be incredibly convincing — who knows, maybe a couple praises are the only thing stopping your long-term subscribers from adding your stuff to cart!

With good email marketing management, you can collect the social proof necessary for such campaigns via emails too — for example, ask your customers to write reviews in exchange for discounts, cashback, loyalty program points, and other bonuses.

Pay attention to CTAs

Calls-to-action, or CTAs, in email marketing, encourage customers to click the button and perform an action like browsing a certain page or purchasing something from your online store. To be effective, CTAs should be clear and specific, such as “Shop T-shirts now” instead of generic “Buy now” buttons that may come off as repetitive and boring.

Avoid overloading emails with CTAs, as too many can overwhelm your readers. Instead, focus on placing one meaningful CTA per email, ensuring it aligns with the customer journey and offers value to the recipient.

Set up transactional email campaigns

Transactional campaigns like order confirmation and shipping update emails are essential for building trust and responsibility with customers. The key to success is, don’t let these functional emails feel impersonal — keep the brand’s style and voice alive. At the same time, don’t forget about the functionality — transactional emails should be sent on time, contain all the necessary information, and be designed in a way that doesn’t interfere with email accessibility.

Don’t neglect cross-selling and upsells

Another solution that can enrich your email customer journey is using cross-selling opportunities. For example, offer last-minute discounts for products complementary to something your subscriber already bought or put in a cart.

This strategy can also be applied during the decision stage when clients are nearing the end of the checkout process but are still deciding whether they want something else at the abandoned cart stage.

Emailify your loyalty program

If you already have a running loyalty program, adding emails to the equation will drastically improve user experience. You can send notifications concerning points and earnings, updates, bonuses, etc. That way, your subscribers will know how many points they own, what they can spend the points on, and the transaction history. 

You can also use your loyalty program contact list to send exclusive member-only offers.

Run re-engagement campaigns

To reconnect with old clients, use re-engagement strategies. Check the least active users in your email list and send a special offer only for them, with an expiration date, and wait to see the magic happen. This type of campaign aims to remind subscribers of your business and the connection you once had with them. Show that the spark is still there and bring their interest back. 

Here’s a good example from AllTrails — the company creates intrigue and sends a subtle message like “Wait, you haven’t experienced our benefits in full glory”.

Maintaining a good email customer journey

Emails are one of the, if not the best way to track how your audience behaves at every customer journey stage — no other marketing medium can provide you with this much data. Here’s how to keep your emails working for your business:

• Keep clear goals and update them when needed. Clear SMART goals can provide you with a better customer journey map and a clearer plan on what to do with emails. However, these can change from time to time, so don’t forget to update your objectives according to the situation.
• Monitor metrics. Even the best email marketing service you can get your hands on won’t provide all the data you need simply because many things happen outside of the email itself. That’s why you need to use an external tool like Google Analytics and apply UTM tags to your email links so the customer journey is tracked properly.
• Do continuous testing. If something has been working for a month or two, it doesn’t mean it will keep working until the year’s end. To keep your email customer journey efficient, regularly check your metrics including conversion rate and run A/B tests to improve the situation if needed.