How to Map Your Loyalty Program’s Customer Journey and Why You Should

Businesses exist, whether they’re in retail, ecommerce, hospitality, or even supply chain management because there are customers with a need for the product or service. Without customers, there is no business.

As a result, many will create and use a customer journey map to outline what they believe a customer’s experience with them should look like.

If you work for an ecommerce brand or own a Shopify store, you’ve probably heard of customer journey maps and might have even made one for your store.

However, you probably still need to think about making a loyalty program customer journey map.

Why you should create a customer journey map for your loyalty program

There are general benefits to creating customer journey maps (if you haven’t already). A study from Hanover Research in 2022 found that:

• 91% of businesses reported that customer journey mapping (CJM) helped drive sales;
• 89% said they help identify and leverage competitive advantage;
• 89% said they help identify gaps in service;
• 90% said they develop customer loyalty and
• 92% said they help increase customer satisfaction.

While you may have factored your loyalty program into your store’s overall customer journey map, joining and engaging with a loyalty program is a journey in itself and doesn’t necessarily follow the same blueprint or have the same touchpoints.

By creating a dedicated loyalty program customer journey, you can apply the benefits of general CJM to your program and increase customer retention. For the rest of this guide, we’ll show you how to create a customer journey map specific to your loyalty program.

How to map your loyalty program customer journey

Most guides on creating customer journey maps have you start with setting an objective or goal and a reason for the exercise. However, given we’re specifically talking about creating a loyalty program customer journey map, chances are you have one of the following goals/objectives in mind:

• Improve the customer experience of the loyalty program;
• Improve engagement rates within the program; or
• Improve loyalty program adoption/sign-ups.

These goals may help you identify areas for improvement more quickly by having a starting point to look out for. But whatever your goal, you can follow the step-by-step approach below to creating your loyalty program CJM.

Step 1: Create loyalty program personas

The first step is creating at least one customer persona that you will represent on your customer journey map — remember, since we’re explicitly covering a loyalty program, you need your persona to be a fictitious member of it.

However, even though this person will be imaginary, you still want to make them as accurate as possible, and to do that, you’ll need research and data. The type of information you’ll want to gather for creating your persona(s) includes:

• Customer interviews.
• Results from emailed feedback surveys.
• Customer support tickets and complaint logs.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) data.
• Website analytics
• Social listening analysis to see what customers say about your brand on social media.

From these sources, look for information that references:

• When customers decide to sign up (and if/when they choose to delete their account);
• How they found out about the program;
• How easy or difficult it is for them to use and
• Whether or not they’ve referred friends or family.

Creating a persona based on real data will make the remainder of the steps easier to figure out.

Step 2: Identify your journey stages

Here, we start to get more personalized. In many cases, a typical customer journey isn’t linear.

A customer can become aware of a product or service and be in a “consideration” stage for a long time, jumping between multiple touchpoints and doing third-party research before eventually making a decision. Even then, a problem after purchase (or, in this case, loyalty program sign-up) can make them jump out of the journey altogether.

That being said, there is a standard format for mapping stages that can work as a base for your loyalty program CJM; these are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision
• Service
• Advocacy

This is an example, but the stages you identify for your CJM should come from the research you conducted for creating your loyalty program persona.

However, your loyalty program customer journey will likely look a bit different if customers who create accounts with your brand are automatically enrolled in your loyalty program. In this case, your first few stages will reflect your overall ecommerce store CJM before focusing on your loyalty program touchpoints (from “service” onwards).

However, the entire journey likely applies if you allow guest checkouts in your store.

Step 3: Identify touchpoints associated with each stage

Using your loyalty program member persona, consider what touchpoints they might encounter or engage with at each stage of the customer journey mentioned above (or other stages you’ve identified).

Here are some example touchpoints a loyalty program member might encounter across the journey stages:

• Awareness — Invitation to join email, display ads, and brand social media posts about the program.
• Consideration — Landing page, navigation link, checkout process (e.g., “this purchase could earn X points,” FAQs/Helpdesk/Knowledge base page.
• Decision — Dedicated loyalty program page with a sign-up button.
• Service — Rewards redemption page, loyalty emails, customer service contact page.
• Advocacy — Refer a friend page, review page.

These are just a few examples – your store may have more or less touchpoints for your loyalty program.

Step 4: Identify actions members take at each stage

The next step is identifying what your customer does at each stage — again, research from your persona will help significantly here. In particular, any data that you have referencing at what point your customer signed up for your loyalty program would be hugely beneficial.

Here are a few examples of what you might expect to find for actions:

• Awareness — Browsing your website for products, scrolling through Instagram, and reading emails.
• Consideration: Comparing the program’s benefits, reading reviews, checking out the loyalty FAQs/help page, and clicking on the loyalty page.
• Decision — Signs up via landing page, adds personal information, takes product quiz.
• Service — Checks earned rewards, checks progress to next loyalty tier, follows the brand on social media, contacts customer service.
• Advocacy — Leaves product reviews, offers feedback with surveys, and refers a friend.

This is an example of a positive journey. However, there may be sticking points that cause your program member to contact customer service or leave a low review/feedback rating. That’s where mapping potential pain points comes in.

Step 5: Identify potential pain points associated with each stage

Only some customers are going to have a perfect experience through your customer journey map, so you need to plot potential pain points related to each stage.

A great source of information you can use here is existing reviews, feedback surveys, customer interviews, and customer service logs/tickets. A few examples might include:

• The signup form asks for too much information simultaneously, leading to feelings of being overwhelmed or having data privacy concerns.
• Your loyalty page might need to be clearer about how to earn rewards or how the program works.
• Member points balance might need to update faster, or they don’t get notified of balance changes (e.g., Points expiry).

Customer pain points will be unique to your customers’ experiences, but don’t make the mistake of thinking there aren’t any.

Step 6: Propose solutions to potential pain points

The natural next step is adding potential solutions to the pain points you raised in the previous step. Again, these solutions will be unique to the pain points you found in your research, but using the examples above, you could have solutions such as:

• Reducing the number of required fields in your sign-up form.
• Conduct A/B tests on landing pages using various methods of presenting loyalty information.
• Set up points-based email triggers to update members when their balance changes.

When seeking solutions to the pain points, you might want to get advice from multiple stakeholders about the right solutions. A cross-functional team at this stage would be greatly beneficial to help you get diverse perspectives and buy-in on your solution proposals.

Step 7: Map out likely member emotions along the journey and analyze them

The final step is quite simple. At each stage or touchpoint, plot what emotions your loyalty member may be experiencing — you can use your customer actions and pain points here as a guide.

As a side note, you can design your customer journey map in whatever format makes the most sense to you (and your stakeholders). However, a common way to do so is to use a grid-like approach; here’s a design example you can draw from:

You’ll have a fleshed-out loyalty program customer journey map by now, but what then?

The map will help show you where there are areas for improvement in your customer experience, such as insufficient (or too much) information and obstacles for your members. With this information, you can create a copy of your map and add new information based on implemented solutions for an ideal future state of your customer journey, giving you a clear roadmap of how to proceed.

Need a better loyalty solution? Try LoyaltyLion

It may be the case that you either have too many pain points in your journey for your liking or that there are solutions that your current loyalty program provider doesn’t accommodate.

LoyaltyLion is a top-rated loyalty program provider with an extensive suite of features to help you create a well-loved and effective program, such as:

• Email integrations for loyalty program emails.
• A built-in referral program to promote member advocacy.
• Guided insights with a segmented analytics dashboard.
• Customizable VIP loyalty tiers.
• Automated loyalty flows to motivate members to make further purchases.

Interested in learning more? Check out LoyaltyLion’s pricing page to find the right plan to suit your store.