At the heart of every successful email marketing campaign lies the concept of email marketing customer journey.
Imagine taking someone on a delightful journey, where every step is carefully tailored to pique their interests and meet their needs. This is the essence of the email marketing customer journey. A well-planned series of emails that moves your audience from curiosity to loyalty.
Each email is a touchpoint. It guides customers through stages, making them feel important and understood. This article will explain what an email marketing customer journey is, why it’s important, and how you can use it to create engaging email marketing campaigns.
Table of Contents
What is the email marketing customer journey?
The email marketing customer journey is exactly what it sounds like — a journey. It consists of several stages that a customer experiences while interacting with your brand through email. It’s often visualized through a process called customer journey mapping.
This journey starts when a customer becomes aware of your brand. It continues until it leads to a conversion and long-term engagement. Throughout this journey, marketers must send the right message at the right time, to make sure the customer experiences a seamless and positive journey.
It’s important to note that the email customer journey is not a one-size-fits-all process. Each customer is unique, with different needs, preferences, and behaviors. This is why personalization is key.
Why do you need to build an email marketing customer journey?
First, an email marketing customer journey helps you understand your customers beyond the surface and build meaningful relationships with them. Also, it’s a powerful strategy that can scale your business to greater heights if done right.
Let’s get into the why in detail.
Better customer engagement
Engage with your customers more effectively at each point of contact. Understanding their behavior at different stages helps you deliver tailored content that resonates with them at the right moment.
This ensures your email messages aren’t random, but part of a well-thought-out plan that guides your customers through their decision-making.
Benefits
- Raise engagement rates. Keep your audience continuously connected to your brand.
- Align messages with the customer’s journey through targeting.
- Boost customer interaction with relevant content.
Increased conversion rates
Boost conversions with a well-designed customer journey. By addressing your customers’ specific needs at every stage, you can move them closer to purchasing with targeted offers and clear steps.
Benefits
- Drive purchases with timely offers.
- Make it easy for customers to buy from you through clear steps.
- Reduce cart abandonment.
Personalized customer experience
That personal touch makes a big difference. The email customer journey allows you to collect customer information. Use it to make your emails more personal and relevant.
Benefits
- Make customers feel valued and understood.
- Build loyalty and stronger relationships.
- Boost customer satisfaction.
Data-driven insights
Get insights into how your customers behave. This helps you see what works and what doesn’t, so you can improve your strategy.
Benefits
- Make informed decisions based on real-time data.
- Continuously improve by updating strategies to fit customer preferences.
- Improve ROI by focusing on what works.
Seamless customer transition
A well-mapped email customer journey smoothly transitions a customer from one stage to the next. This keeps them interested and engaged with your brand.
Benefits
- Reduce drop-off rates.
- Maintain consistent messaging and brand voice.
- Create a frictionless user experience.
Effective subscriber management
Manage a large number of email subscribers without compromising quality. This is done through automation and segmentation.
Benefits
- Effectively manage a growing subscription base.
- Provide high-quality customer experience, consistently.
- Drive business growth.
5 stages in the email marketing customer journey
The email marketing customer journey has 5 main stages. Each stage requires specific strategies and types of emails to guide your customer effectively. This structured approach is popularly known as an email funnel.
1. Acquisition
Think of the acquisition stage as the first consultation with a prospective client. This is where potential new customers are added to your email list. It’s a crucial stage for any business because it sets the foundation for future interactions.
At this point in the journey, customers might have already discovered your brand through social media, referrals, or other marketing channels. They’ve become aware of your brand and recognize a need for a solution that you might provide. That initial awareness stage motivates them to explore their options further.
Making a positive and memorable first impression is key to drawing them into your brand's story and keeping them engaged. An automated welcome series can be a great start. It makes new subscribers feel acknowledged and valued from the go.
Pro Tips
- Add the subscriber’s name to the welcome email to establish an immediate connection.
- Clearly state the benefits of subscribing to your new subscribers and the kind of content they’ll receive.

2. Consideration
At the consideration stage, potential customers are evaluating your products or services. They’re weighing whether they want to do business with you.
They’re seeking information and comparing your brand to competitors to see which one fits their needs. As a marketer, this is where you highlight the benefits of your products or services. This will help these potential customers make informed decisions.
You might find instances where prospects are close to making a purchase but leave at the last minute. For example, they may add items to their cart but abandon it before completing the purchase.
Don’t worry, all is not lost. You can use strategies like sending an abandoned cart email to bring them back. According to research, the cart abandonment rate stands at 70.19% in 2024, emphasizing the importance of sending such emails.
Pro Tips
- Create a sense of FOMO or urgency by highlighting what your customers will miss out on if they don't act quickly. Use time-sensitive language such as "Limited Time Offer" to encourage immediate action. Prospects at this stage often need an extra push to make a decision.
- Send email content that highlights your unique selling points over your competitors. Answer the question, ‘Why you’?

3. Purchase
Once potential customers reach the purchase stage of the email customer journey, they’re ready to buy.
The emails crafted at this point are the final push to encourage new customers to take out their wallets. Get them enthusiastic with discount codes, free trials, or free consultations—whichever aligns with your product or service.
After the purchase is done, communication still needs to continue flowing. Send them an immediate confirmation email after the purchase is completed. Keep them informed with post-purchase emails. This could be an order confirmation, order status, expected delivery dates, or product recommendations based on their buying behavior.
This ongoing communication paves the way for future interactions.
Pro Tips
- Make the purchase process as seamless and easy as possible. It sets the tone for future purchases.
- Upsell and cross-sell. Research suggests cross-selling can increase sales by 20% and profit by 30%.

4. Retention
When the customer makes a purchase, it’s a great milestone for a marketer, but that’s not the end goal. The end goal is to turn them into loyal customers. This stage involves nurturing the relationship through personalized and relevant content.
You can retain your customers through cross-sell and upsell emails. Do this based on the customer’s shopping history to recommend similar or complementary products. Loyalty programs, discounts and incentives can also encourage repeat purchases.
Another effective email marketing strategy is sending personalized campaigns for special occasions(e.g. birthday emails). This makes your customers feel valued and appreciated. Sometimes it’s the little things that matter.
Pro Tips
- Collect customer feedback through surveys to determine your customers' pain points and satisfaction levels.
- Consistently interact with customers through valuable content and offers to sustain their interest.

5. Re-engagement
Re-engagement involves reconnecting with inactive customers. The goal is to revive their interest and bring them back to the fold.
It’s important to remind them how valuable they are to your business. You can use some email tactics to rekindle their interest. These include win-back emails offering special discounts, personalized product recommendations, exclusive new products, etc.
Also, you can take a direct approach by sending feedback requests to understand why they’re inactive. It shows you value your customer’s opinion. Reminder emails, in case items are left in the cart, can also be sent at this point.
Pro Tips
- Craft engaging email subject lines to catch the attention of inactive customers.
- Inform them of any benefits and new offerings they may have missed since their last interaction.

Reactivation email created with Brevo
Best practices for building an email marketing customer journey
So far, we’ve covered what the customer email marketing customer journey entails. Now let's have a look at the best practices to make sure it’s successful.
Segment your audience
Divide your email list into segments. Use demographics, behavior, and preferences to send more personalized content based on their ecommerce habits.
Additionally, consider the pain points of the audience you’re trying to reach. Are they new customers, existing customers, new subscribers or referrals?
Use data from your CRM to find common touch points. They’re where different segments interact with your business. Then, build a customer journey map from there.
Bonus: Brevo provides ready-made segments to save you time.
Automate your emails
Why automate? The answer is simple: It’s tested and proven. Marketing professionals have reported that marketing automation has improved their targeting by 60%. It also increased ROI by 41% and improved customer experience by 39%. This is according to research.
Use email automation tools to streamline workflows for the different stages of the email customer journey. Automated emails can serve as an extension of customer support in campaigns such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and post-purchase follow-up emails. This ensures efficiency and consistency.
Also, set up triggers based on customer actions to send relevant automated emails when a customer interacts with your brand. For example, when they sign up or make a purchase. This guarantees timely communication, thus improving customer satisfaction.

Personalize content
Personalization has been mentioned multiple times. At this point, it’s not just a buzzword. It’s the cornerstone of every email marketing strategy. Personalization in email goes beyond using the customer’s name. It means knowing their interests, behaviors, and previous interactions to deliver bespoke content.
Think of it like offering everyone the same flavor of ice cream. It works if everyone likes vanilla, but it’s a miss if someone prefers chocolate or is lactose intolerant. This approach might discourage customers with specific tastes and needs, making it harder to build a long-lasting relationship.
So, you need to tailor your emails to the specific stages of the customer journey and address individual customer needs for better results.
Further reading: Personalized Emails: How to Reach Customers and Generate Sales
Use clear call to actions (CTAs)
Guide the customer to the next step with a clearly defined and compelling CTA to increase conversion rates. Be direct, keep it simple, and make sure it’s optimized for mobile devices.
Additionally, use A/B testing to experiment with different wordings, designs and placements for your CTA. This will help you find out what works best. Simplify the process with Brevo’s drag-and-drop templates to add CTA buttons and see what works best.
Further reading: 100+ Email CTA Examples and Best Practices
Analyze and optimize
Data should be your compass. It’s the main ingredient in understanding and optimizing your email marketing customer journey.
Use your all-in-one marketing platform, to review and analyze email performance. Look at metrics like open rates, click-through rates and conversions. Use this data to identify points of interest and areas for improvement, and adjust where necessary.

There you have it. Ready to put it into practice?