How To Optimize the Email Marketing Customer Journey (2024)

When you launch an email marketing campaign, you might think about how many new subscribers you can convert in the short term. But an email marketing strategy is more industrious than that.

Over a sustained period of time, your email marketing can guide prospects through customer journeys, where they encounter your brand, learn about its products, make purchases, and perhaps turn into long-term loyal customers.

This sort of email marketing customer journey is a sophisticated form of customer engagement that shapes people’s relationship with your brand. If you’re intrigued by customer journey mapping and want to expand your email marketing efforts, read on for an explanation of how an email marketing journey works.

What is an email marketing customer journey?

An email marketing customer journey is a structured sequence of emails that guide customers through various stages of interaction with a brand. This starts with initial awareness, continues through the buying process, and can extend far beyond if the customer develops brand loyalty.

As an ecommerce entrepreneur, you shape a client’s email journey by determining the frequency and content you share. Your email marketing campaigns can include welcome emails to introduce products, abandoned cart emails to encourage purchases, and post-purchase emails to enhance loyalty. You can also send fun, informative emails that don’t directly relate to a transaction but keep customers engaged and feeling valued. This type of email strategy not only nurtures leads but also boosts conversion rates and customer retention.

“I think people overlook email marketing,” says David Anton Parker, founder of The Body Deli, on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. In the course of running his business, David realized that customers make a proactive choice to engage with your brand when they join your email list. “Someone has opted into your business for a reason—they’re into you or they’re into your product. Once they give you that valuable connection, it’s up to the entrepreneur to use it, to work with them, and to cultivate that relationship.”

Email marketing customer journey stages

1. Brand awareness stage
2. Consideration stage
3. Purchase stage
4. Retention stage
5. Advocacy stage

Customer journey maps traditionally have five stops: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. You can send targeted emails at each of these customer touchpoints, seizing the opportunity to encourage recipients to further engage with your brand. Here are the five stages of email journey mapping:

1. Brand awareness stage

In this initial stage, customers discover your brand, and the focus is on building brand recognition and interest. For example, the eco-friendly apparel brand Tentree sends a welcome email to new subscribers, introducing its brand values and story and offering a discount.

2. Consideration stage

In this email customer journey mapping stage, customers evaluate your products or services and compare them to competitors. The goal is to highlight unique value propositions via personalized emails.

For instance, Pullup & Dip, which sells fitness equipment, sends a product recommendation email with top-rated items, customer reviews, and a comparison chart of product features. The email targets potential customers who have visited the brand’s ecommerce site and have opted into automated email marketing campaigns.

3. Purchase stage

This is the stage where a potential customer is ready to make a purchase, and the goal is to nudge them to finalize the sale. Jewelry specialist Astrid & Miyu sends an abandoned cart email with a reminder of items left behind, a time-limited discount, and free shipping to encourage checkout. This type of message encourages customers to take a desired action—buying a product.

4. Retention stage

After the purchase, the customer journey map shifts to keeping new and existing customers engaged. Often this means fostering loyalty through value-added content and offers. For example, skin care brand Glossier sends post-purchase emails with tips on using the purchased items, links to tutorial videos, and a referral program offering discounts for inviting friends.

5. Advocacy stage

The fifth and final stage in the email journey mapping process is advocacy. If you’ve provided a fantastic customer experience and have a loyal client on your hands, that person may turn into a brand advocate for your business. You can encourage this brand advocacy with emails that request customer testimonials and reviews or that offer rewards to an existing customer if they refer business to friends.

For instance, luxury fashion brand Derek Rose runs automated email campaigns encouraging customers to share referral links with friends. Other options include asking the customer to leave a review or share photos on social media with a branded hashtag. All of these calls to action can enhance customer engagement while leveraging the customer’s experience for new business.

Overcoming barriers within the email marketing customer journey

It would be amazing to steer customer behavior whenever you send out an email. In reality, even the most loyal customer will find some barriers harder to get over. They can be motivational, experiential, or temptation-based. Learning to navigate these and help get your consumers over the finish line is crucial.

You can address these barriers with targeted strategies as you work to improve click-through rates, boost business growth, and help customers interact with your brand in each stage of the customer journey.

Here’s a breakdown of each customer barrier, with tips for overcoming specific obstacles:

Motivational barriers

Motivational barriers arise when customers lack a compelling reason to engage with emails or take action, often due to irrelevant content or unclear value.

How do you help them jump these hurdles? Start by analyzing customer data to segment customers based on their preferences and purchasing history. Create custom email campaigns for each customer segment. Structure these emails with subject lines that address the specific pain points of that segment. For example, using marketing automation, send personalized emails that encourage customers to complete actions, like “Unlock Your 25% Discount!”

Experiential barriers

Experiential barriers occur when customers have negative experiences, such as poor email formatting, broken links, or irrelevant messaging.

The first step toward addressing experiential barriers is choosing a high-quality email marketing platform, such as Shopify Email. Once you’re set up with an email provider, optimize every email for customer satisfaction by ensuring messages are mobile-friendly and visually appealing. Provide your email subscribers with informative content that adds value, like FAQs or product tutorials (a proactive way to reduce the need for customer service interactions).

Use customer feedback to identify areas for improvement. For instance, people may report they’re receiving too many emails, in which case scaling back may be in order. Other tactics like removing invalid email addresses will further streamline your email marketing operations.

Temptation barriers

Temptation barriers arise when competitors distract customers with similar or more appealing offers. You can’t expect to have a market sector all to yourself, and you constantly must work to maintain customer loyalty and distinguish yourself from other businesses. Even your most satisfied customers can be peeled by an aggressive market disruptor.

The solution is strengthening customer relationships by personalizing your email messages and rewarding loyal customers with exclusive deals or early access to sales. You can highlight your unique value propositions with a tailored subject line, crafted with the customer data you’ve collected via your customer relationship management software. You want to ensure your brand remains top of mind so that your customer makes opening your emails a priority.