CMO’s Guide To Loyalty: Customer Journey Mapping

CMOs face constant pressure to show ROI, defend brand relevance, and justify loyalty investments to the board. However, building the bridge between a first-time buyer and a brand advocate isn’t something that can be summed up in a spreadsheet. To successfully transform loyalty from a tactical program into a board-level growth engine, CMOs must guide customers from first purchase to brand advocacy. This article breaks down the process of customer journey mapping for loyal buyers into actionable stages—second purchase acceleration, personalized retention, gamified program design, and scalable advocacy. 

On a similar note, did you know that in 32.6% of cases, loyalty programs belong under the CMO or VP of loyalty? They are the first on the list (followed by the CEO). If you are looking for similar statistics, like how many members loyalty programs usually have, check out our Global Customer Loyalty Report 2025.

What Is Customer Journey Mapping From a CMO’s Perspective?

At its core, customer journey mapping, or CJM for short, is the blueprint of your customer’s experience. It breaks down how users discover, engage with, purchase from, and remain loyal to your brand. Importantly, it focuses not only on what customers do, but also on how they feel and why they behave a certain way.

For marketing leaders, it offers a strategic view of where communication or experience gaps are costing conversions, loyalty, and brand equity.

What you can achieve with customer journey mapping: 

• Uncover service or communication breakdowns.
• Identify touchpoints where loyalty begins or fades.
• Drive personalization across high-impact moments.
• Align marketing campaigns with customer expectations.
• Increase retention, NPS, and lifetime value.

The 5 Pillars of Building a High-Impact Journey Map

Every effective customer journey map includes five foundational pillars:

1. Customer Persona: Start with real-world data. Who is your customer? What are their biases? Your map should reflect the buyer behaviors and expectations that matter to your commercial goals.
2. Touchpoints: Think holistically—social media, website, loyalty program, customer support, in-store, mobile app. Mapping each channel uncovers friction or inconsistency that might be invisible in isolated channel reviews.
3. Journey Phases: Typically, you’ll chart stages like awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. Each stage should include customer goals, actions, thoughts, and friction points.
4. Emotions and Pain Points: Emotional mapping is where CJM truly becomes a loyalty asset. Documenting high points (“delight”) and low points (“drop-off”) helps you design marketing experiences that resonate.
5. Opportunities: Use your findings to highlight where tech or content can reduce friction or elevate the experience—whether that’s fixing a broken email flow or building a post-purchase journey to increase repeat sales.

The Customer Journey Map for Loyalty Programs

There are many ways to map out the customer journey for your rewards program. Here’s what you need to know about the main stages in general:

1. Reach & Acquire – At this point, customers know little to nothing about your brand, so you have to get their attention. This is where the “marketing” in “lifecycle marketing” shines brightest, as you can use a variety of ad campaigns to raise awareness. However, never underestimate the power of good ol’ word-of-mouth—you’ll soon see why.
2. Act & Convince – Now customers know about you, and are considering a purchase. They usually need a little nudge, though. Reviews and recommendations from their peers, blogs, or even a first-purchase reward from a loyalty program can be convincing enough for these customers to choose your brand over the competition.
3. Convert & Motivate – After sealing the deal for the first time, you have to think of ways to keep customers and push them towards their second or third purchase. Personalized newsletters, free shipping, a tiered loyalty program structure; all of these can be used to maintain interest over a prolonged period of time.
4. Engage & Recognize – Some lifecycle marketing strategies stop around the third stage. However, modern customers tend to lose interest if a business only shows interest in promoting the next purchase. In order to encourage true loyalty (or even turn customers into brand advocates), organizations need to focus on non-transactional engagement. 

Your Takeaway

Customer Journey Mapping gives CMOs a strategic lever to link brand strategy with commercial performance. It helps secure loyalty budgets, build internal alignment, and forecast growth based on real customer insight. When loyalty feels disconnected, CJM reconnects it to every stage of the brand experience. When ROI is questioned, it shows where optimization will pay off.

Ready to see how Antavo’s AI Loyalty Cloud can help you supercharge your customer journeys with your loyalty program? Book a demo with our experts and see our platform’s capabilities in real time!

And don’t forget to download the 2025 edition of our annual loyalty report! It’s chock-full of valuable loyalty statistics that you could use as a CMO.

Tamas Oszi

Tamas is the Head of Content at Antavo and a Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional – CLMP. Tamas is known for having a keen eye for loyalty and customer retention strategies and trends. Tamas is also a true gamer at heart and has an impressive collection of cyberpunk books.