Sectioning your user journey

A user journey is an illustration of a customer's experience with your brand from start to finish.

This usually takes the form of a flowchart and includes everything from your welcome email to ratings and replenishment sales.

Let's look at why you need to split your user journey in sections and how to do it.

Why you need to section your user journey

The user journey is huge. 

For some companies we work with, it's so big that you'd need to print it on a billboard to make sense of it – and even then you may struggle.

An effective user journey covers a wide range of users and devices that intertwine at different stages, and it can easily span a year or two.

So when it comes to optimizing your user journey, it's often helpful to split it up into more manageable sections.

How to section your user journey

The user journey can be split up into five basic parts. We'll look at each of them below and give some ideas of what you can include in those stages:

1. Onboarding – welcome email, in-app messages offering technical support, early feature adoption messages to help users reach your aha moments
2. Ramp up – multiple sequences that help new users discover features in the right order, in-app messages to give users a deeper understanding of the system and settings
3. Cruising – monthly product news, educational tips and tricks, reminders to start using the product again if it's seasonal
4. Loyal – ratings and sales campaigns
5. About to churn – educational email sequences to ramp up usage, new feature roundups, case studies of customer success stories

By zooming in on each part of your user journey, you can dive into the details and make meaningful optimizations without getting lost in the big picture.