A Guide to Customer Journey Management

Customer journeys – we hear, read and write about them a lot.

Marketers are expected to understand every stage of their customers’ journeys, to accurately and effectively map them and optimize them to create engagement at every step, through every channel. It’s a lot to manage. And, yes, it does need to be managed. Customer journey management is crucial to making the journey worthwhile for your customers and for your business.

But what exactly does it mean to manage customer journeys? What does it take? And where do you start?

What Is Customer Journey Management?

Customer journey management (CJM) is the strategic effort to curate and optimize customer journeys to guide them towards a purchase. At each stage in the sales funnel, there’s likely some sort of information, content or experience that will move a prospect on to the next stage. CJM is the process of determining and delivering those pivotal deciding factors throughout the journey. It’s intimately tied to your content strategy, your use of data and your understanding of consumer behaviors.

Digital journey management, which covers websites, apps and email, is often where CJM programs start, because those channels already produce the data you need.

What Are the Benefits of Customer Journey Management?

During the course of your customers’ journeys, their experiences matter. More than 60% of consumers are willing to pay an additional 5% or more if they believe a brand will provide a good experience. Conversely, a 2025 Emplifi survey found 70% of U.S. consumers say they’d abandon a brand after just two negative experiences. The impact of a smooth, well-managed customer journey adds up. Consider a few key benefits:

• Reputation: A positive journey leads to a positive perception of your brand.

• Conversion: Targeted, customized campaigns can boost sales.

• Retention: Continued engagement post-sale helps maintain customer loyalty.

• Satisfaction: Better journeys make happier customers. There’s even research indicating that better customer journeys can improve employee engagement.

• Coordination. CJM can bring together disparate channels and operations to make your marketing efforts more organized and efficient, saving time and money.

What Are the Three Parts of Customer Journey Management?

A working customer journey management framework has three parts that work together: journey mapping, analytics and orchestration. Teams that stop after the first end up with a map that describes the journey but never changes it.

• Journey mapping: A map shows what customers do and feel at each stage, and where they run into friction. Built from research and customer feedback rather than assumptions, it gives every team the same picture of the customer experience.

• Journey analytics: Analytics measures how each journey performs: where people drop off, how long each stage takes, how customer satisfaction scores move and how many customers come back.

• Journey orchestration: Orchestration acts on what the analytics shows, in real time. When a customer stalls or opens a support ticket, the next message or offer goes out automatically, tailored to where that person is. Artificial intelligence can help choose that next step.

If you automate before you map, you automate the wrong journey. Without analytics, you can’t tell if a change actually worked.

Who Owns Customer Journey Management?

Customer journey management works best when one person is accountable for each priority journey, backed by an executive sponsor and a team drawn from across the business. A single journey usually crosses several departments. Without a named owner, everyone touches it and no one is responsible for it.

• Executive sponsor: A senior leader ties the program to business outcomes and clears the obstacles no single department can.

• Journey manager: One person is accountable for one end-to-end journey, like onboarding or renewal. They keep the map current, track its measures and decide which fixes come next.

• Cross-functional team: Marketing, sales, customer service, product, data and IT each own their touchpoints on the journey.

At Material, we plan every journey mapping project with ongoing journey management in mind, so clients keep getting value long after we’re gone. That includes building a Journey Atlas, a map of maps that keeps a whole portfolio of journeys aligned.

How Do You Implement Customer Journey Management?

Here’s how to build out a customer journey management process – from defining personas and goals to optimizing experiences and engagement with the help of tech tools or third-party expertise.

What follows are best practices to make the most of your customers’ journeys:

1.   Understand the Journey

The first step in building out a CJM program is understanding the basics of your customers’ journeys. These journeys are typically represented in the following stages of the customer lifecycle.

• Awareness: A prospect realizes they have a need and comes across your brand, often through search or a recommendation.

• Consideration: They compare options, read reviews and look for proof that you understand their problem.

• Purchase: They make the decision. An easy buying process settles it, while a clumsy one gives them a reason to reconsider.

• Retention: After the sale, customers decide if they’ll stay based on onboarding, support and ongoing communication.

• Advocacy: Customers who are happy with the whole experience come back, leave reviews and recommend you to others.

2.   Map the Journey

No two customers will have exactly the same journey, but there will be some starting points and shared experiences along the way. The challenge for marketers is to develop multiple maps based on the segments or personas they want to target. In a sense, mapping is made up of two separate tasks:

• Define your target personas. Who are your customers? What are they looking for from you (or from your competitors)? Bring as much information to the table as you can – demographics, budget, industry, location, goals, challenges and priorities. You’ll have multiple personas – a technical buyer, for example, who needs detailed specifications before they commit to anything; the business buyer who needs to understand how your services can impact their bottom line; the operations chief who wants to understand how you can improve efficiency. These can get granular over time, especially as you gather data on your audience and visitors.

• “Draw” the map. Take what you know about your personas and dig into their behavior. What will likely trigger them to engage more deeply with your brand and continue their journey? What are they thinking about when they first encounter your brand? What experiences might push them away? What about your competitors might be off-putting? What might prevent them from making a purchase? These maps require you to think about consumer motivations and come up with ways to tailor experiences and content to activate those motivations – and to consider what questions your prospects likely have and find ways to offer up answers.

3.   Optimize the Journey

Your personas and your journeys are – and always will be – works in progress. As you learn about your customers and their journeys, you’ll want to update your personas, content, experiences and journeys. This makes it crucial to gather, manage and analyze data.

Journey optimization also includes:

• Setting clear objectives for your customer journey management. Tie your journeys to specific business goals, including revenue generation, operational efficiency, brand awareness, retention and marketing ROI. Without goals, it’s impossible to gauge the success of your efforts.

• Identifying bottlenecks or dead ends. Is there a place in your journey(s) where prospects slow down or drop off? Sometimes content needs to be improved, fine-tuned or replaced; it may be a matter of not delivering the right messaging soon enough.

• Conducting market research. Intuition and expertise can tell you a lot about your customers and your industry, but even your best guesses are just that – guesses. Interviews, surveys and behavioral research can reveal wants, motivations and preferences that would otherwise go unknown.

• Getting input from throughout your organization. Your product team may know exactly what your latest product does and why it matters to your industry – but your marketing team knows the best ways to get the word out and sales knows the right people to reach out to. Truly effective, optimized customer journey management relies on experts, insights and input from stakeholders in nearly every department.

4.   Use the Right Tools for the Journey

All the above is made a lot easier with the right technology. Whether you’re mapping, enacting or optimizing your customer journeys, there are tools that can help you make the most of your customer journey management. These include tools for:

• Customer Journey Mapping: Collaboration and visualization platforms like Figma, Lucidspark, Miro and Microsoft Visio can help your team brainstorm, map, and plan your customer journeys.

• Customer Relationship Management: CRM platforms like Salesforce, Pipedrive and HubSpot can help you gather and analyze customer data and track leads.

• Data Visualization and Analytics: Data tools like Tableau, Microsoft Power BI and Mixpanel can help you organize information and gather insights to inform your journeys and drive better business decisions.

• Marketing Automation: Streamline engagement by automating campaign components like email outreach and social media with tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Intuit Mailchimp or HubSpot Marketing Hub.

• Customer Data Platforms: CDPs pull customer data from across your systems into a single profile, so the journeys you map reflect what customers do across channels.

Some solutions and platforms will have overlapping functionality. Some CRMs, for example, help with analytics or can automate your marketing engagement. Dedicated customer journey management software goes further, combining journey analytics and customer journey orchestration in one place. There are a lot of options available and knowing which ones work well together and what might be redundant can be a challenge. Start small and address your most urgent needs, then upgrade or add tools as you grow.

You can also seek third party help in determining the best tools to buy or build for your needs. Material has a great deal of experience and expertise in customer journey management including marketing technology, journey mapping and marketing and behavioral research. We can help you design and optimize customer journeys to boost engagement, streamline your operations and improve your marketing ROI. Reach out today and let’s start the conversation.