Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / The Educational Email Sequence Your Journey Map Forgets
Transcript
- Lucas: So you build a customer journey map, you've got the awareness phase, consideration, purchase...and then you get to post-purchase, and there's just one box labeled 'onboarding.' That box might contain a whole sequence of educational emails, but most maps treat it as a single touchpoint. Luna: Right, and those emails often have very different goals — the first one might say 'thanks for your order,' the third one might teach them how to use a feature. Lucas: Exactly. I was looking at data from a DTC eyewear brand — they send a five-part educational series after purchase. First email: order confirmation and fit guide. Second: lens care. Third: adjusting your frames. Fourth: styling tips. Fifth: referral request. Luna: And in their journey map, that was all just one box. Lucas: One box. So they couldn't tell which email was actually driving engagement or reducing returns. When they finally broke it out, they found that the third email — the one about adjusting frames — had a 28 percent lower open rate than the others. That's a signal. Luna: A lot of people probably already knew how to adjust their glasses, so they didn't need that one. Lucas: Or the subject line was weak. But because they weren't tracking each email as a distinct touchpoint, they couldn't run an A/B test. They optimized the sequence as a whole — tweaked the timing — and saw no improvement. The moment they split it out, they realized the third email was the bottleneck. Luna: So mapping each email separately lets you see where the drop-off happens and why. Lucas: And more than that — it lets you tie each email to a specific outcome. For that brand, the fourth email — styling tips — had the highest click-through rate to the product page. That told them those customers were in a buying mindset, so they added a personalized recommendation in that email. Luna: If you just see 'onboarding,' you miss that opportunity. That's a direct revenue play. Lucas: Absolutely. And look, I know the temptation to group things — journey maps are supposed to simplify. But when a touchpoint has multiple sub-steps that each affect a different metric, you need to zoom in. The question is: how granular do you get? You don't want a map with fifty boxes. Luna: Yeah, so what's the rule of thumb? Lucas: I'd say: if a sub-step has its own goal and a distinct metric, it deserves its own node. The third email's goal is educating on adjustment, metric is open rate and return rate correlation. The fourth email's goal is cross-sell, metric is click-through and add to cart. Those are different jobs. Luna: That makes sense. Separate them when you need to optimize them differently. Lucas: Exactly. And sometimes you can even merge back — if the data shows two emails perform identically, you might combine them. But you don't know until you map them separately first. Luna: This reminds me of something we talked about a few episodes ago — the micro-moment before search. It's the same principle: what looks like a single moment actually breaks into smaller ones. Lucas: Same idea. And I think the reason journey maps overlook the educational email sequence is that we're conditioned to think in stages: pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase. But post-purchase isn't one stage — it's a series of moments where the customer's relationship with the product deepens or weakens. Luna: If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used — maybe you've gone back and tweaked a touchpoint in your own map — that's exactly the kind of listener support that keeps this show ad-free and independent. We don't run sponsor spots, and we'd like to keep it that way. If you're able and inclined, you can throw a few dollars our way at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It genuinely helps cover hosting and research time. Lucas: Yeah, and we mean it — no pressure ever. Just if the show's added value to your work, it's a nice way to keep it going. Now, back to that email sequence: one thing that surprised me was how much impact the content of the second email had on the third. Luna: How so? Lucas: The second email was about lens care — pretty straightforward. But when they changed it from a listicle format to a short video, the third email's open rate jumped 12 percent. They theorized that people who watched the video were more engaged and more likely to open the next email. Luna: So the sequence has a cascading effect — each email primes the next. Lucas: Exactly. And if you're only tracking the sequence as a whole, you might see a drop-off between email two and three and blame the third email. But the root cause could be in the second email's format. That's the kind of insight you only get when you map each email as its own touchpoint. Luna: I'm wondering about timing. How far apart should these emails be spaced? Did the DTC brand experiment with that? Lucas: They did. Originally it was every two days. They tried three days, and the overall open rate for the series dropped. But they also tried one-day spacing for the first two emails — since order confirmation is time-sensitive — and that actually increased the click-through on the second email by 10 percent. So the map should also capture the cadence, not just the content. Luna: That's a whole other dimension — time. A journey map typically shows the sequence, but not the intervals. Lucas: Right, and I think that's part of the oversight. A good map for an email sequence should include the time delta between nodes. Because if your customer gets an email about frame adjustment three days after purchase, that's different from getting it on day six. Luna: Day three: they've just got the glasses, they're more likely to need adjustment. Day six: they've already adjusted them themselves or lived with it. Lucas: Exactly. So the content and timing are linked. When the brand moved the frame adjustment email to day two instead of day four, returns went down 8 percent. Luna: That's a big number. And all of this comes from treating the sequence as multiple touchpoints rather than one. Lucas: Exactly. So the takeaway is: when you're building or auditing a journey map, look for any box that contains an email sequence — or any repeated interaction — and ask: 'What's the granularity here? Could I split this into sub-touchpoints that have different goals?' Luna: And then test. Because the data will tell you whether the granularity is worth it. Lucas: Yeah. One last thing: after they optimized the sequence, they mapped the whole customer journey again — and they realized the educational emails also fed into the advocacy phase. The styling tips email actually increased referral rates. So mapping the email sequence as multiple touchpoints also helped them connect post-purchase to word of mouth. Luna: It's all connected. You just have to see it. Lucas: Right. And that's why we map — not to have a pretty picture, but to see the connections that drive real business outcomes.