How to create a customer journey map effectively for small business owners

From the first click to the final purchase, every customer interaction is a chance to make — or lose — a sale. By understanding each of those critical moments, businesses can improve their chances of getting results.

Enter customer journey mapping: a tool that helps businesses see this process from the customer’s perspective. It visualizes the steps shoppers take as they research, engage with, and ultimately purchase from a business, showing where things go right (or wrong).

Wondering “How can I create a customer journey map for my business?” Read on as we dive into what customer journey mapping is, how it works, and how to use it to improve customer experience and drive good results.

What are the different customer journey stages, and why do they matter to businesses?

Every purchase is the result of a journey, not a single moment. Customer journey stages help businesses understand how people move from awareness to action, and what influences their decisions along the way.

Most customer journeys follow five key stages:

• Awareness: This is the stage where a potential customer first discovers a need or your brand. It might come from a social media post, a friend’s recommendation, or a Google search.

• Consideration: Now that they know about you, they’re weighing their options by comparing prices, reading reviews, or checking your website.

• Decision: The customer is ready to buy, but only if the path is clear. Small hiccups here (e.g., unclear CTAs, lack of customer support, or clunky checkouts) can cause big drop-offs.

• Retention: A sale may feel like the end, but in reality, it’s the beginning of a relationship. Following up with thoughtful emails, loyalty programs, or great customer service can turn a one-time buyer into a regular.

• Advocacy: Happy customers can become your great marketers. If someone loves your product or service, they might spread the word through reviews, referrals, or social media shoutouts.

What is a customer journey map and how can it enhance the user experience for a company’s customers?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the stages we’ve just outlined, from first discovering a product or service to becoming a repeat buyer or advocate. It highlights every touchpoint, emotional response, and potential friction along the way.

By mapping out this experience, businesses can view their operations from the customer’s perspective. That outside-in approach can reveal blind spots that internal teams may overlook, like confusing website flows, missing follow-ups, or inconsistent messaging.

Used well, a customer journey map becomes more than just a diagram. It’s a tool to enhance the user experience, helping companies:

• Identify where customers drop off or lose interest

• Pinpoint areas where support or communication could be improved

• Personalize interactions based on what each customer actually needs

• Align internal teams around a shared understanding of the customer experience

Examples of customer journey maps

There are several types of customer journey map templates. Four of the main variants include:

• Current state: This focuses on how the business is working today, visualizing the experience a customer would have when attempting to accomplish their goal with the business.

• Future state: This map outlines how the business wants to perform in the future, outlining the best-case customer journey scenario.

• Day-in-the-life: This maps out a customer’s entire day or daily routine outside of how they interact with the business.

• Empathy maps: These track how people think and feel when interacting with the business and its products or services.

But what does this look like in practice? Here are some examples of customer journey maps to draw inspiration from:

• Abandoned cart recovery for an e-commerce brand: Say you're a small online retailer noticing that lots of customers add items to their carts but don’t complete their purchases. By mapping out the customer journey, you discover that unexpected shipping fees and a clunky checkout process are driving people away. You simplify the checkout flow and show shipping costs earlier, leading to fewer abandoned carts and more completed sales.

• Onboarding process for a service-based business: A consulting firm might notice that after signing a new client, there’s often a gap before the first meeting — and in that time, clients feel a bit unsure of what’s next. By mapping the journey, they realize this drop-off in communication creates friction. So, they introduce a welcome email, a clear onboarding timeline, and a prep checklist to guide them. Clients are now likely to feel confident and satisfied with their experience.

• Trial-to-paid conversion for a tech company: After analyzing their journey map, a software business may notice that most users don’t discover the most valuable features until late in the trial. To fix this, they might redesign the onboarding experience to showcase key tools within the first few days, increasing the likelihood that users see the product’s value and convert to paid customers.

• In-store experience for a brick-and-mortar store: Picture a small boutique that’s popular during weekends. By mapping the in-store customer journey, they spot a recurring issue: long checkout lines. They may decide to rearrange the store layout for better flow and bring in extra staff during peak hours, and it could result in shorter waits, happier customers, and more sales.

How to create a customer journey map

To understand how to create a customer journey map there are several steps you can take:

Understanding customer personas

The first step to creating a customer journey map is understanding who your customers are. This begins with developing customer personas — fictional but research-based representations of ideal clients. The goal here is to clarify who your business is speaking to, what motivates them, and what barriers they may encounter along the way.

A strong persona typically includes:

• Name and demographics: Age, gender, location, and other relevant background details.

• Job and lifestyle: Information about occupation, daily routines, and lifestyle factors that may influence buying decisions.

• Goals and motivations: What they hope to achieve or solve by purchasing a product or service.

• Pain points: Challenges or frustrations that the business can help address.

• Shopping behavior: How they prefer to research, evaluate, and purchase.

You’re not just making stuff up here. Learning how to create customer personas involves analyzing real customer data and gathering insights through surveys, interviews, and reviews.

To deepen this understanding, many businesses also use empathy maps. These tools help visualize what a customer persona thinks, feels, hears, says, and does throughout their journey. Empathy maps highlight emotional triggers and unmet needs, helping teams align messaging, design, and support strategies.

Defining customer journey touchpoints

Once you’ve developed your customer personas, the next step in customer journey mapping is identifying how these personas first interact with your business. These interactions, known as customer journey touchpoints, may be different for each persona.

Not sure how to define customer journey touchpoints? Here are some common ones to consider, along with ways to optimize them using proven customer mapping techniques:

• Search engines: Many journeys start with a Google search. Ensure your SEO strategy aligns with what each persona is likely to search for, and use targeted landing pages to match their intent.

• Social media: Scroll-stopping content can turn passive scrollers into curious browsers. Whether it's a well-timed post or viral video, tailor your posts and promos to what each persona actually cares about.

• Company website: Whether users land on the homepage or a product page, your website should be clear, fast, and easy to navigate. Add CTAs that guide different personas toward the next step in their journey.

• Email campaigns: If the customer has interacted before, emails can re-engage them. Personalize messages based on previous behaviors or persona characteristics.

• Reviews and word of mouth: A rave review or friendly referral often carries more weight than any marketing campaign. Make it easy for happy customers to share the love.

• Customer service: Whether via live chat, email, or phone, service interactions are key touchpoints. Just make sure responses are fast, helpful, and tailored to the persona’s concerns.

Mapping the customer journey

Mapping the customer journey is about turning insights into action. This starts with collecting the right data, then interpreting it in a way that highlights what’s working and what’s not.

Say one persona often clicks on a social media ad. This is reflected in a high click-through rate, a metric that measures how many people click a link out of everyone who sees it. But perhaps once they land on the website, they leave almost immediately without taking further action. That’s called a high bounce rate, and it usually points to a mismatch between customer expectations and what the landing page actually delivers. In this instance, it would be wise to change the landing page to reduce the bounce rate.

By tracking patterns like these across different customer journey stages, businesses can refine each touchpoint, guiding customers forward, not losing them along the way.

How to use customer feedback in journey mapping

As mentioned above, customer journey mapping relies on effective data collection and analysis of the customer journey.

Some common customer data collection methods include:

• Surveys

• Email newsletters

• Blog subscriptions

• Chatbots

• Customer purchase history

• Social media

• Website tracking tools

• Customer relationship management software

Each of the above may be of varying relevance to the specific customer personas developed earlier in the process. They might also be effective at gathering certain types of data over others. For example, surveys are an opportunity to gather information about future state mapping, while purchase history is more applicable to current state maps.

Data from these various sources also represents a good opportunity for identifying customer pain points, or the stops on the customer sales journey that cause obstacles or difficulties for the customer. These can then be addressed and incorporated into mapping in the future.

What are customer pain points?

Customer pain points are specific problems, frustrations, or obstacles that individuals encounter at different stages of the buying journey. These pain points can prevent someone from completing a purchase, damage their perception of the brand, or cause them to abandon the process entirely.

Understanding customer pain points is important for improving the customer experience and making better business decisions. When mapped correctly, these insights help businesses identify where things are breaking down and how to fix them.

Identifying pain points

Pain points are the issues and problems customers face when dealing with a business. These can occur at any stage of the customer journey, whether it’s initial discovery or post-purchase support. For businesses, identifying customer journey pain points is important— left unaddressed, they can reduce loyalty, increase costs, and hurt long-term outcomes.

Here are a few common examples of customer pain points:

• Confusing navigation: A user visits a website but struggles to find the product category or checkout button.

• Unexpected costs: A customer reaches the checkout page only to discover hidden shipping fees or taxes. This surprise often leads to cart abandonment.

• Slow response times: When customer service takes too long to reply to questions or complaints, it erodes trust and may push the customer to a competitor.

• Overcomplicated onboarding: In software or service businesses, a confusing sign-up process or steep learning curve can cause new users to give up before seeing the value.

• Lack of personalization: Customers feel like just another number when emails or promotions don’t reflect their interests, history, or preferences, hurting engagement and loyalty.

KPIs in customer journey mapping

For customer journey mapping to be successful and have a great impact, it needs to be qualified through data. Measuring and tracking success on the customer journey will help small businesses understand if the measures they are taking to enhance the customer experience are working. However, it can sometimes be a challenge to understand the best ways to track success.

An effective way to map and analyze customer touchpoints is to use key performance indicators (KPIs). These are metrics that aim to qualify and quantify specific aspects of the customer journey.

To understand which KPIs to measure, it’s helpful to define the different stages of the journey. A common framework is the ‘AIDA’ model, which breaks the journey into four key phases:

• Awareness: When the customer first discovers the brand, product, or service.

• Interest: When they begin actively learning more, such as browsing the website or reading reviews.

• Desire: When the customer begins leaning toward a purchase decision.

• Action: When the customer takes a specific step, such as completing a purchase or signing up.

Once these stages are defined, businesses can set measurable goals for each one, such as reducing cart abandonment during the Action stage. From there, it becomes easy to identify relevant KPIs in customer journey mapping and track progress over time.

Common KPIs in customer journey mapping include:

• Impressions: The number of times a piece of content, ad, or page is displayed to a potential customer.

• Clicks: How many people engage with an ad or link, indicating interest.

• Visits: The number of times users land on your site or key pages.

• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave without interacting further.

• Time on site: How long users spend on your website, which can reflect engagement or content quality.

• Social media followers: Growth in followers often reflects stronger brand awareness and interest.

How often to adjust KPIs that are tracked

Tracking KPIs is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. As a business evolves — whether through new offerings, shifting customer behavior or changes in marketing strategy — it’s important to regularly adjust KPIs to reflect those updates.

KPIs can be reviewed monthly, quarterly, and annually. Having a regular cadence allows teams to monitor trends, evaluate progress against goals, and respond to seasonal shifts or campaign results.

However, certain events may warrant a fast reassessment, such as:

• Plateaued performance: If metrics have stopped improving despite new initiatives, it might indicate that current KPIs no longer reflect the most meaningful outcomes.

• Major business changes: New products, services, or target audiences may require a fresh look at what success means across the customer journey.

• Data misalignment: If the data being collected doesn’t connect clearly to decision-making or customer behavior, it’s likely time to refine the approach.

• Unrealistic benchmarks: If goals are consistently unmet (or met too easily), they may not be ambitious or grounded enough to drive impact.

Improve customer interactions

Once a business has been able to identify touchpoints and pain points, it is then able to start prioritizing and addressing these issues to improve and increase customer interaction.

Imagine that a business is trying to reduce abandoned customer carts. First, they need to identify why customers are abandoning at this point in the sales process. Is it a lack of payment options or an overly complicated payment process? If so, there are easy payment options available from PayPal. Similarly, are abandoned carts being followed up with reminders? These measures can now be easily automated to limit impact on staff but still reduce abandoned carts.

Similar analysis should be carried out at each touchpoint and pain point across the whole customer journey. This approach can help identify new opportunities to improve the customer experience and build a law friction path from first interaction to final purchase.

Customer feedback and adaptation

Customer journey mapping is an ongoing process that evolves alongside the business and its customers. Success relies on creating a positive feedback loop, with a business being agile and flexible enough to respond to issues and make changes as the customer experience evolves.

Customer feedback plays a major role in this process. Whether it comes from surveys, support interactions, or user behavior, feedback provides the insights needed to refine the journey and improve the customer experience over time.

Ultimately, the journey map should be built into business practice, with continual evaluation of customer journey feedback from both clients and stakeholders. This way, the map can remain current, actionable, and truly reflective of the customer’s experience.

Charting a path to exceptional customer experiences

A well-designed customer journey is important to building strong relationships and driving business success. And like any journey, it’s well navigated with a map. Creating a customer journey map helps businesses pinpoint where customers engage, where they encounter friction, and where improvements can make the biggest impact.

By combining insights from customer feedback and accurate data measured through KPIs, businesses can smooth out pain points and create a low friction path to purchase. The result can be a satisfying, consistent, and ultimately exceptional customer experience.

Once you’ve created a customer map, it’s time to put those insights into action. PayPal offers a variety of payment tools and resources that can help you personalize the customer journey, turning browsers into buyers at every stage.