In email marketing, success comes down to one thing: sending the right message at the right time to the right person. But how can you tell if someone is ready to buy, or if they need a gentle reminder to complete the purchase?

The answer is understanding the email marketing customer journey.

The customer journey is similar to fiction plots, but in real life, it tells the story of how a person discovers your brand, engages with it, decides to make a purchase, and what happens next. And mapping is crucial for encouraging engagement and loyalty. A broken or confusing path leads to unsubscriptions and lost sales, while a smooth email marketing customer journey helps you meet customers exactly where they are.

What is an email marketing customer journey?

The email marketing customer journey is a visual representation of all the touchpoints a customer has with your brand via email. It begins the moment they subscribe to your list and continues through 5 main stages. Instead of letting subscribers wander aimlessly, you create automated email sequences that guide them. 

However, this journey isn’t always plain; there are hurdles customers often face in their tracks, such as:

• The customer doesn’t yet understand why they need your product. 
• Journey can’t even start as the emails land in spam. 
• Emails lack personalization and make customers feel like they’re insignificant, just an email address to sell something.
• Poor timing and frequency lead to unsubscriptions (over 51% of users) or cause customers to forget you.

Good email marketing removes all these roadblocks, ensuring customers are on track and ready to purchase.

Why is the email marketing customer journey important?

Imagine your favorite coffee shop moves across town. A generic email blast with a coupon for their new location, miles from your daily route, is more annoying than helpful. It shows the brand you love doesn’t have mutual feelings for you.

This is the exact problem that mapping the email customer journey solves. This approach, known as customer journey marketing, transforms how you communicate with your audience. It shifts generic broadcasts to personalized conversations. A well-planned email marketing customer journey directly translates to increased revenue.

Stages of the email marketing customer journey

While every client’s path is unique, the general framework typically follows 5 core stages. However, the email marketing customer journey isn't just about defining these stages — it's about implementing the specific triggers, workflows, and templates that support the customer at each step. Here's how to map your email strategy to the customer's lifecycle.

1. Awareness

At this stage, a potential customer has just discovered your brand. They are curious but not yet committed. Your goal is simple: get their email address and make a lasting first impression. 

Triggers: subscription via a popup, footer form, or lead magnet download.

The email moves:

• Double Opt In.
• Welcome series (0-7 days): start with your brand story, then move to best-sellers/categories → add social proof → finish with a personal recommendation.

Examples of a subscription form widget

2. Consideration

The subscriber is now actively evaluating their options. They are browsing categories, comparing prices, and reading reviews... but they haven't decided where to purchase the product yet. Your job is to nurture that interest and prove you're the right choice.

Triggers: viewing a specific category or product card, searching on the site, or adding to "Favorites."

The email moves:

• Abandoned browse within 24-48 hours
• Content guides.

3. Decision

When the customer is ready to make a purchase, your goal is to eliminate any final hesitation. To close the sale, you can create the FOMO effect with promotional offers and “last chance” reminders. 

Triggers: item added to cart, checkout started but not finished.

The email moves:

• Abandoned cart sequence: 
  • 1 hour: a helpful reminder.
  • 24 hours: Social proof or guarantees.
  • 48–72 hours: a limited-time offer to close the deal.

• Transactional emails (a clear Order Confirmation and shipping updates)

4. Retention

The email marketing customer journey never ends after the transaction. The next step is to hold the customer, send something useful, like a tutorial on how to get the most out of the new item.

Triggers: order delivery or a specific time elapsed since purchase.

The email moves:

• Post-purchase onboarding.
• Feedback request via an NPS survey or a review request.
• Cross-sell/Upsell 

5. Advocacy

When all the email marketing customer journey stages go smoothly, your brand has produced satisfied customers. Now you can turn them into loyal advocates. Encourage this by sending an email inviting them to join your VIP club — after all, the top 5% of loyal customers can generate about 35% of ecommerce revenue.

Triggers: high spending threshold (VIP) OR long periods of inactivity (30/60/90 days).

The email moves:

• Exclusive VIP offers, early access, or birthday bonuses for fans
• A structured series: Gentle Reminder → Value/Offer → "Last Chance" → Preference Update for those who are silent 90+ days

How to map the email marketing customer journey

The process of email journey mapping is what turns your customers from complete strangers into loyal fans who wait for announcements and register for every presale. 

Step 1. Create your customer personas

Start by imagining your ideal customer — this is the basis of your customer persona. To define them accurately, you need a customer database, where you can leverage the zero-party and first-party data to get to know your audience. It provides direct, accurate insights into who your customers are, what they want, and how they behave on your website. These direct insights cannot be predicted by generic assumptions. 

A Forbes insight reveals that only 45% of marketers actively use first-party behavioral data throughout the entire email marketing customer journey. This means you can achieve significantly better ROI than your competitors if you use them on every stage.

Step 2. Define the goals for your email marketing journey

Not every business follows identical stages. A B2B journey might involve lead scoring, while ecommerce focuses on product discovery. That is exactly why you need a clear, measurable goal to customize the stages to your business. Having a specific metric helps you know if your map is working or just sending people on a scenic route to nowhere.

Step 3. List all your customers’ touchpoints

A touchpoint is any point where a customer interacts with your brand during their email customer journey. List every single email you currently send (or should be sending), including transactional messages. Does your current sequence have gaps? What could you add to make your customers feel more cared for?

Identifying missing links is the first step toward fixing them and ensuring no customer falls through the cracks.

Step 4. Build the journey with automated workflows

Take the touchpoints you listed and link them in a logical sequence based on customer actions (or inaction). Using a workflow builder, you can set up measurable triggers that signal when a customer is ready to move to the next stage. 

Step 5. Analyze, test, and refine the map

Once your email marketing customer journey is live, a constantly updating process of path optimization begins. Review its performance using analytics and customer feedback. Where do most people drop off? Is there a period of silence after purchase where a helpful email could boost retention?

Use these insights to fine-tune the experience and plug the leaks in your funnel.

Best practices to optimize the email marketing customer journey

The difference between an email marketing customer journey that feels helpful and one that feels like a creepy robot following you around lies in the details. To reduce that feeling and optimize email marketing customer journey, you can leverage best practices. 

Enable Double Opt-in

Protect your sender reputation and GDPR consent from day one by implementing double opt-in. This ensures a healthy subscription base and keeps you out of the spam folder. A study shows that customers who actively confirm their subscription are far less likely to mark emails as spam because they consciously chose to join your list. 

Segment the audience

Instead of sending a single message to the whole base, segment your audience into more relevant small groups and talk to them about something they actually care about. The most effective segmentation strategies include:

• Purchase history
• Customer lifecycle
• Behavioral 

This approach makes customers feel like you remember their unique interests.. Research confirms that segmented campaigns achieve 14.31% higher open rates than non-segmented ones. 

Personalize everything 

Simply using a subscriber’s first name in a subject line can boost open rates up to 35.69%. Dynamic content blocks that change based on personalized product recommendations in emails, and AI-powered predictive analytics to tailor the best offers, make the customer feel like you’re their personal consultant, who remembers everything they’ve ever added to their wishlist or cart.

Optimize for mobile

Litmus reports that 46% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Keep your email concise with short paragraphs, and use bold headers to guide the eye. Most importantly, make sure your call-to-action buttons are big enough for a thumb to tap.

Improve email accessibility

Approximately 15% of the global population lives with a disability. Accessible email design is both an ethical responsibility and a business opportunity to reach a broader audience. Start with Alt-text and high contrast for images, then improve usability with large buttons and a simple structure that reduces cognitive load.

Respect frequency preferences

While every audience is different, a good starting point for B2C is around four emails per month. A study shows that most marketers find a frequency of 2-5 times per month to be the sweet spot. Monitor your unsubscribe and complaint rates to find what works for you.

Maintain sender reputation

Keep an eye on your base health as the more complaints your email gets, the higher the probability that your emails will be considered as spam. The best practice is to stay below a 0.1% spam complaint threshold, but Gmail allows 0.3%.

Always be testing

Brands that use A/B testing see a 37% higher email open rate than those that don’t. You might think that bright red button is a conversion machine, but you don’t know for sure until you test it. Test your subject lines, CTAs, images, and send times. Over time, small tests bring impressive results.

Examples of email marketing customer journeys

Theory is great, but let’s see how well-structured email marketing customer journey works in the real world. Here are a few brands that’ve mastered different stages of the email customer journey.

The holistic approach — MAUDAU

MAUDAU, a Ukrainian retail brand with up to 2 million monthly users, positions itself as a market of “everyday stuff” for a youthful audience. Their entire strategy reflects this, with a creative and easy-going tone. They view the customer journey as a systematic interaction that evolves like a romantic relationship, from the first “hello” to a deep, trusting bond. 

The Consideration stage — Winetime

Winetime, a company with 30+ gastro and wine markets across Ukraine, shows the power of targeting customers in the consideration phase. Their product selection includes thousands of items, meaning customers often browse without purchasing immediately. By implementing automated Abandoned Browse and Abandoned Cart triggers, they were able to gently remind hesitant shoppers of their interest, which led to 8% increase in transactions from the email channel.

The Decision stage — FABO

A beauty ecommerce brand, FABO, demonstrates attentiveness to the Decision stage. Their transactional messages contain only the most necessary information about the ordered products, including their titles, features, and prices, in the emails. It also contains product cards with images, making the emails more visually appealing and convenient for customers.

The Retention stage — AURUM and Zootovary.com

Jewelry brand AURUM excels at the Retention stage through smart segmentation. To encourage repeat purchases, AURUM launched targeted campaigns for specific groups who had previously shown interest in a particular category or made purchases during a specific period. 

Pet supply brand Zootovary.com instead sends a fun, personalized birthday email directly to the customer’s pet, using a questionnaire to get the pet’s name and species. This campaign achieved an incredible Open Rate of 40-70% — far surpassing the standard 28%.

Set up an effective email marketing customer journey with Yespo

Yespo unifies all your customer data from every touchpoint with clients into a single 360° customer profile and is the foundation for true customer journey orchestration.

You can create the entire email marketing customer journey in an intuitive drag and drop workflow editor, set triggers based on user actions, add time delays, and more. And with over 1700+ ready-to-use email templates, you can launch email campaigns in minutes.

You can create journeys that are triggered by a customer’s entire experience with your brand, not just their email actions. This allows you to:

• Send triggered emails based on website activity, mobile app activity or in-store purchases.
• Recommend highly relevant products based on purchasing and browsing history thanks to next-gen Transformer models.
• Create hyper-specific audiences using advanced customer segmentation, with options for both manual and dynamic groups.
• Seamlessly integrate 9 channels into your workflows, including pop-ups and SMS.

Yespo gives you the tools to build the effective email marketing we’ve talked about.

Final thoughts

The email marketing customer journey makes the difference between generic newsletter marketing and a one-on-one conversation. By understanding the building of email customer journey map, you become a helpful guide in their story. 

Book a demo, and we’ll show you how easy it is to launch dedicated workflows that foster the trust and loyalty needed to drive sales and retain customers for life.

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