Leverage email data in customer journeys

Email campaigns aren’t just messages you send to achieve marketing goals. They can become stepping stones that guide people on their customer journeys. Every open, click, or unsubscribe is a signal that shows where someone is and what they might need next as they move from curiosity to conversion.

Let’s look at how you can connect the dots between your customer’s email activities and the broader customer journey. You’ll learn how to use email data to track progress and uncover what drives your users forward. That way, you’re not just sending emails but building momentum.

Shape better experiences with Customer journeys

Customer journeys help you map your contact’s real-world path as they interact with your brand, one touchpoint at a time.

Each journey is a sequence of stages that represent a contact’s progress toward a specific goal, such as filling out a form, attending a webinar, or completing a purchase. You define the stages, and the system tracks contacts’ movement through the stages of the journey. The result? A clear, funnel-like view that shows how people move, stall, or drop off on their way to conversion.

Each journey can reflect a different goal or experience.

For example, a lead-nurturing journey might follow contacts from first awareness to sales contact, while a customer onboarding journey could focus on activation and retention. You can then leverage the insights into contacts’ behaviour to optimize your content and tailor your approach to fulfill your users’ current needs, no matter the stage of their journey.

Understanding how customer journeys connect to email statistics gives you more than visibility. It gives you leverage that you can use to update your content or strategy to move your contacts forward. If you can see at which touchpoint the contacts are stalling, you can fix the friction points. If you know what nudges the users forward, you can double down.

That means better campaign results, more conversions, and ultimately, more substantial ROI.

Discover where emails fit in

Let’s be honest – email is still one of your most reliable ways to reach people directly. But its power isn’t just in what you send; it’s in what your contacts do next.

Every email interaction is a touchpoint: a small but revealing moment in a contact’s decision-making process. Did the contact receive the email? Click through? Ignore it? These actions (or inactions) tell you something valuable about the contact’s intent and readiness. And when you plug that behavior into a customer journey, you can stop reacting to behavior and start predicting it instead.

In that way, every moment becomes a meaningful signal in the context of a customer journey:

• A contact confirming they want to stay subscribed might mean that they’re still paying attention to your content, allowing you to engage them further and help them discover their latent need for your services.
• They click through a specific product link – they’re curious, and you can use that to serve them more products as solutions to their needs.
• They register for a webinar – now they’re hooked and open to trying if your solution is the best for them.
• They unsubscribe from specific email channels – something’s not working; perhaps there’s a UX issue, or more likely a content issue you don’t know about.

These are your clues that can turn your email campaigns from isolated broadcasts into connected signals. It’s no longer just “we sent an email”.

It becomes: In the journey, we see that the contact clicked the link in the product teaser. Let’s see if they are ready to follow up with a product whitepaper.

Instead of guessing who’s ready for the next step, you can let the contacts’ email behavior help you decide.

That shift in thinking opens the door to smarter campaigns, tailored timing, and a clearer picture of what’s working.

Use email events as journey conditions

We already established that your email stats aren’t just numbers on a dashboard – they’re signals you can act on. When you use them as conditions to define customer journey stages, they become actionable decision points that help guide contacts from one stage to the next.

Maybe a click on a pricing link shows that someone is ready to talk to sales. An unsubscribe right after a campaign could reveal a misstep in messaging. No clicks across the last three campaigns? It could be time to move the contact to an “At-risk” segment.

These aren’t just actions the contact takes, they’re opportunities to respond more precisely to what might be happening, and nudge the contacts back onto the right path.

With Xperience’s Customer journeys, you can define these rules and let the platform handle the logic.

If someone interacts with your messaging, move them forward and set Xperience to send automated messages. If they stall, consider starting a re-engagement stream, such as sending a targeted message or campaign to contacts who haven’t clicked in a while. While journeys can’t yet shift contacts automatically between groups, you can build a simple segment or automation to reconnect with these contacts manually or on a set schedule.

That way, you’re still creating a responsive journey that adapts to each contact’s behavior, even if every step isn’t fully automated yet.

Here are a few examples of how to set up stage transitions in Customer journeys using email activity:

• Clicks that show curiosity: If a contact clicks a specific product link in an email, move them from “Browsing” stage to “Interested.”
• CTA response shows intent: Clicking a webinar sign-up or pricing link could bump the contact to an “Engaged” stage.
• Unsubscription from all emails suggests disengagement: If the contact unsubscribes from all email interaction, move the contact to “Dormant” or “At-risk” stage.

This approach helps you stay relevant without guessing. A contact who keeps clicking is clearly interested. But if someone hasn’t clicked any of your recent emails, it might be time to rethink your message, or move them to a slower nurture stream.

You’re not working harder. You’re putting the data you already have to work.

Track key email data

Behind every customer journey is a data trail, and your email metrics are some of the clearest footprints. These numbers don’t just tell you how a campaign performed. They tell you how real people behave and what might help them take the next step.

In Xperience, you can view these metrics in the Statistics section of every email created in the Marketing Emails channel app (or in the Email metrics app in the SaaS Portal).

Want to explore the topic further? Use the Contact activities view to see exactly who clicked what and when. While it might be too detailed for high-level customer journey mapping, it’s still a great way to understand individual user behavior when needed.

Here are the core metrics to watch and what they can tell you:

• Sent emails: The total number of emails your system attempted to send, including those that may have bounced.
  • Impact: A high number here doesn’t always mean your message reached people, it’s just the starting point. Always pair this with delivery metrics to understand your real reach.
• Delivered emails: The number of emails that successfully landed in recipients’ inboxes (bounces excluded).
  • Impact: This is your actual delivery footprint. A low delivery rate may signal poor list quality, outdated contacts, or domain issues affecting sender reputation.
• Opened emails: The number of recipients who opened your email.
  • Impact: While it may be taken as a signal of interest, this metric can be very unreliable due to email client privacy features (especially on Apple devices). Don’t rely on it as a success indicator – rather use clicks for a clearer picture.
• Clicked links: The number of recipients who clicked at least one tracked link in the email.
  • Impact: This is your most reliable engagement signal, especially when it comes to customer journeys. It reflects actual interaction and intent. Focus on this metric when building and adjusting your journey, and use it to trigger journey transitions, prioritize follow-ups, or segment contacts based on topic interest.
• Unsubscribed: How many recipients opted out of receiving future emails via your unsubscribe link?
  • Impact: A small number is expected, but spikes may indicate content fatigue, poor targeting, or over-emailing. Watch closely after new nurture sequences or one-off promotional sends.
• Spam reports: How many recipients marked the email as spam in their inbox. (Available when using SendGrid. Developers can also implement custom support for displaying complaints from other email providers, as long as those providers include this information in their reporting.)
  • Impact: Spam reports harm sender reputation and can affect future deliverability. More than a few per campaign should prompt an urgent review of subject lines, content tone, frequency, and list quality.

By tracking these metrics regularly, you gain more than performance insights. You gain early warning signs and improvement opportunities. When used as part of a customer journey, they become practical tools to shape your campaigns’ timing, messaging, and direction.

Gain insights and optimize touchpoints

Once you connect email touchpoints to a journey, you’re no longer just measuring performance but uncovering behavior patterns that help you guide contacts more effectively.

The journey view lets you see these patterns at a glance. You’ll spot which emails are nudging contacts forward, which ones are creating friction, and where people tend to stall or drop off. With standalone email reports, this kind of visibility is hard to achieve, because only customer journeys put every interaction in context.

For example, you might notice that a product promo email generates many clicks, but few contacts move to the next journey stage. That’s a signal to check what happens after the click. Is the landing page unclear? Is the follow-up too slow? With journey data, you don’t just see that something happened. Instead, you know what it led to.

Once you’ve identified patterns like this, you can start optimizing touchpoints:

• If contacts stall after a specific message, try adjusting the content or tone. A hard-sell email might benefit from a more educational or value-focused approach.
• If contacts click but don’t convert, review your post-click experience. Are they landing where they expected to? Is the next step they should be taking obvious?
• If unsubscribes spike during a nurturing series, rethink your targeting, frequency, or messaging relevance.
• If dormant contacts tend to re-engage with newsletters, build that into a reactivation flow. Use what’s working to draw them back in.

The power here lies in the loop: insight leads to change, and change can be measured. Over time, even minor adjustments like tweaking an email subject line or reordering your follow-up messages can lead to more engaged contacts and successful campaigns.

Think of every email in the journey as a signal. When those signals are part of a bigger map, you can respond clearly, not just react. That’s how optimization becomes ongoing and meaningful.

Wrap-up

Customer journeys help you connect the dots between contacts, content, and outcomes. And email? It’s one of your most trackable and actionable touchpoints.

By now, you’ve seen how much more powerful your email data becomes when viewed through the lens of customer journeys. Instead of isolated statistics, your email interactions become strategic signals, helping you lead contacts through meaningful progress, stage by stage.

Here’s what you’ve learned in this section:

• How customer journeys give you a clear, funnel-like view of each contact’s progress toward a goal.
• How email is not just a communication tool, but a sequence of touchpoints that reveal interest, intent, or disengagement.
• How to use email interactions like clicks, opens, or inactivity as conditions that move contacts from one journey stage to another.
• Which key metrics should you track, and how should you interpret them in context.
• How to optimize touchpoints based on insights from journey data by tweaking timing, content, or follow-up actions based on where contacts stall or succeed.

With these tools, you’re equipped to turn every email campaign into something smarter and more strategic. You’ll stop guessing who’s ready for the next step and start responding to what your contacts are actually doing.

Even seemingly small steps, such as a single click, can reveal powerful patterns when seen in the context of a customer journey. So pick one journey, connect your email activity, and see where it leads.

Let your emails guide the way.