Someone subscribes to your company’s newsletter. Another person regularly engages with your business on social media. Someone else reads your blog posts and leaves comments. And then, of course, people visit your website and buy your products directly from there.
All these small—or not-so-small—moments of interaction with both leads and customers are known as “touchpoints.” Each of them may carry a different weight when it comes to converting a passerby into a paying (and loyal) customer, but you should still look after them all in the best possible way.
Do you want to learn more about customer touchpoints and how to map and optimize them? Keep reading this comprehensive guide.
Understanding customer touchpoints
As we’ve just seen, a customer touchpoint is any moment of interaction between your brand and a customer (or potential one). These interactions should be easily identifiable, and each of them goes on to create a broader and more structured customer journey, which in turn determines the quality and effectiveness of the overall customer experience.
Depending on how people react when communicating with your brand, they might or might not continue to do business with you. It goes without saying, then, that looking after each single customer touchpoint is paramount to running a thriving business that attracts its target audience successfully, time and again.
And that’s precisely why having a winning product or service is often not enough. You need to map and optimize the touchpoints that will bring a customer towards a purchase.
Remember, what you sell may be sold by a huge array of other companies, but the experience you offer at each touchpoint is unique to your business. That’s why you need to make it a pillar of your inbound marketing strategy.
Examples of customer touchpoints
By now, you probably already have an idea of the different types of customer touchpoints throughout the customer journey, but it’s worth mentioning something else: these touchpoints vary depending on the specific stage of the journey a customer is in. Typically, there are four stages: pre-purchase, in-purchase, post-purchase, and customer service.
Below is a list of the most common touchpoints, divided by customer journey stage.
Before purchase
This is generally associated with the “awareness stage” of the sales and marketing funnel—a crucial period in which a potential customer is only becoming aware of your brand and what it offers. During this stage, the main ways to interact with leads are:
- Blog posts showcasing your expertise and industry leadership.
- Customer reviews demonstrating the value you brought to real-life customers.
- Paid and organic ads illustrating how your products or services work.
- Events that provide the possibility to network and meet potential customers in person.
During purchase
At this point, a customer is ready to proceed with their purchase. This is the perfect opportunity to show them how simple, secure, and seamless your sales processes are. You can achieve this via:
- Intuitive E-commerce systems to enable them to complete their purchase in a quick and secure way.
- Promotions to upsell or cross-sell your products or services.
- Up-to-date inventory catalogs so that customers can always find what they need (and know what’s currently available and what’s not).
- In-store experience and points of sale for a smooth face-to-face buying experience.
After purchase
Once you have completed a sale, your job is far from done. Now is the ideal time to prove to your customers that you are a brand worth buying from and returning to regularly. How can you do this? By mastering the following touchpoints:
- Purchase confirmation emails that provide a recap of what the customer has just bought, how much it cost, and the expected delivery date.
- Thank you messages that you could even include as handwritten notes when packaging your order.
- Feedback requests and surveys to collect as much information as possible regarding not only your product/service, but also the quality of the overall buying experience.
- Special deals, offers, and discounts on future products to entice customers to come back for more (and soon).
Customer service
Last but by no means least, the way your customers interact with your company’s customer service and support is another crucial moment to optimize. Consider the following:
- Support tools and channels, such as a 24-hour chatbot, a staffed customer service line, and a FAQ section on your website, to address queries, issues, and anything else that might arise after a purchase.
- Onboarding processes that enable customers to have their questions and doubts answered before purchasing from you.
- Loyalty programs that allow customers to enjoy your products or services at great prices while feeling part of an exclusive community that’s always well look-after by you.
The benefits of mapping and optimizing customer touchpoints
What benefits does mapping and optimizing customer touchpoints bring to your company? Let’s find out.
It improves the customer experience
Let’s begin with a fairly obvious—yet still very important!—one: the customer experience. By working to constantly monitor and improve your customer touchpoints, you can keep your finger on the pulse of the customer experience at those touchpoints.
In turn, doing so allows you to maintain your customer experience management platform up-to-date as well as pinpoint any potentially problematic areas and help you come up with ways to fix them.
It drives stellar customer service
Did you know that up to 76% of customers would like someone from within the company to engage with them when they encounter issues or have questions? Optimizing your touchpoints lets you ensure that first-contact resolution rates remain high, which means that customers will have their queries taken care of on the first contact they have with your customer service team.
Fewer steps, less back-and-forth, and zero escalations can all make for much happier customers who are likely to come back in the future, fostering trust, loyalty, and long-term retention.
Image sourced from fastercapital.com
It boosts revenue
Many businesses are looking for ways to do things such as reduce IT costs, optimize in-house resources, and, ultimately, give their revenues a boost. When it comes to the latter, proper mapping and optimization of customer touchpoints can be a tremendous help.
This process, in fact, allows you to remove costly complexities, streamline operations and payment processes, and make it easier for people to complete a purchase at different stages of their journey.
If you implement a spotless checkout process, you can also encourage repeat purchases, as people will be left with a positive impression of your brand and will know that buying from you is not just a guarantee of a great product—it’s also a simple, secure, and speedy way to buy that great product.
It enhances brand image and reputation
When you continually refine and improve your customer touchpoints, you can get a more comprehensive, customer-centric view of how your brand is performing across channels. This, in turn, enables you to build an awesome brand image that reinforces your customers’ positive perceptions and strengthens your reputation.
Basic steps for a customer touchpoint strategy
Before we look at how you can map and optimize your customer touchpoints, it’s essential to consider some basic steps for a solid customer touchpoint strategy, as illustrated below.
#1 Improve your customer onboarding
First of all, you want to build an easy, appealing, and smooth onboarding system that can give your customers the confidence they need to go ahead with a purchase. This can also help them stay with you in the long term, as it shows them that you are a company that looks after its customers right from the start.
#2 Focus on the customer experience
Make everything as user-friendly and intuitive as you can. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer from your target audience, and figure out whether the interface you’re using on your website and other channels is quick to navigate, easy to understand, and enticing to return to. If it isn’t, work on it with priority.
#3 Keep personalization front and center
How you communicate with your customers must be perfectly tailored to the specific customer (or customer group) that you are interacting with. In a word, it must be personalized.
To achieve this, consider implementing a good customer base segmentation strategy, as this will allow you to target specific customers with relevant messaging that hits the mark.
#4 Communicate and engage with your customers
What are customer touchpoints if not your golden opportunity to engage with your customers in the most personable, authentic, and effective way? So, focus on fostering ongoing communication across all your touchpoints, whether it be by leveraging a friendly chatbot, regularly posting on social media, or publishing informative weekly blogs.
Then, by analyzing your interactions, you’ll gain the insights you need to work out what’s working and what isn’t, which helps you turn passing lookers into loyal, long-term customers.
Image sourced from blog.hubspot.com
How to map customer touchpoints
Let’s now delve into some best practices to implement in order to map your customer touchpoints, which will later allow you to put in place some strategies to optimize each of them.
Consider market and competition trends
Start by looking at what your competitors are doing, as well as the current market trends. For example, if you are in the E-commerce space and are noticing a pervasive use of 24/7 chatbots, that’s one tool worth considering, as it will enable you to gather data on how your customers feel about your brands and products.
Conduct audits of your customer interactions
Next, turn to analyzing and auditing your interactions with a typical customer. As we mentioned earlier, each stage of the customer journey features different touchpoints, so you should look at:
- Awareness: How easy is it to find your brand in search result pages? How about your paid ads? Are customer reviews helping draw in new potential leads?
- Consideration: How many new followers do you have on social media? What’s your readership like for your blog posts? How many newsletter subscribers do you have, and is this figure increasing over time?
- Purchase: Are people checking out pricing information or starting a transaction? Have they downloaded your mobile app (if you have one)?
- Retention and advocacy: How easy is it to contact your customer service team and get a query resolved straight away? Are your customers purchasing more than one item from you and leaving positive reviews and feedback? Have they joined one of your community groups on social media? Do they take to social media to create UGC and shout out how amazing your products are? Have they joined your exclusive loyalty program? Are they considering becoming ambassadors for your brand?
Harness easy-to-understand visuals
Now that you have an overview of all the different touchpoints that your brand is leveraging to interact with its customers, it’s worth mapping them out visually.
Consider using an easy-to-understand, user-friendly, and enticing way to lay out all the stages chronologically so it’s simpler for your team to pinpoint the specific touchpoint they might need to work on.
Review, improve, and optimize
With your visual chart, try to identify any weak spots or anything else that you think might be creating issues, such as conversion rates, customer loyalty, customer engagement, or customer retention.
Let’s use an example.
Your newsletter unsubscribe rates have spiked in the past three months. This would point to the fact that the content you share in your emails is probably no longer hitting the mark, and that is one touchpoint you should focus on.
Collect customer feedback
As with anything else in business, what customers think of you is paramount to help you do better every time. So, keep asking customers for feedback on the service they received as well as reviews on the products they bought, as this can illuminate your strongest as well as your weakest areas, giving you plenty of opportunities for improvement.
How to optimize customer touchpoints
Finally, let’s consider how you can ensure that each touchpoint delivers exactly what it’s supposed to through comprehensive optimization.
Product pages
Regardless of whether you sell tangible products or offer services or solutions, you must optimize your product pages.
Firstly, never assume that your potential customer already knows all about what you’re selling. Provide a clear, simple, and captivating description of your product or service, and remember to include all the relevant details and specs, as well as any visuals that might help your offering come to life.
All this is crucial for effective sales development, because a product page is often one of the most popular touchpoints when it comes to driving conversions.
Pricing pages
If you run a SaaS business, looking after your pricing pages is another essential way to optimize this all-important customer touchpoint. Be sure that your pricing is as transparent as possible and clearly list all the different features included in each pricing plan.
Onboarding process
As we have already mentioned a couple of times, offering a smooth customer onboarding process is vital. You can achieve this by offering tips, support, and guidance across all the different touchpoints, with a view of helping a passing visitor become a paying customer faster.
Image sourced from saasaspire.com
Social media accounts
Whether your brand is active on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social media, that’s another vital touchpoint to optimize for success. Keep collecting data on customer interactions on these channels, and review your performance by analyzing things such as reach, engagement, and impressions.
Importantly, always remember to communicate with your followers on social media: after all, that’s what the “social” part of it is all about! Be genuine, personable, and informative, and diversify your content to ensure your different customer segments are catered for.
Email campaigns
If you’re still managing your email marketing manually, then you need to move to automation as soon as possible, as it will help you greatly optimize this touchpoint. With email marketing automation, you’ll be able to deliver the right type of email content to the right recipient at the right time.
Consider a mix of automated drip email campaigns, automated email newsletters, and automated broadcast emails, and remember to keep checking on vital factors such as open and click-through rates as well as subscription rates.
Image sourced from blog.hubspot.com
Customer support
Stellar customer service is paramount for any company that is serious about customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Therefore, focus on optimizing this touchpoint by leveraging a combination of well-trained human agents with AI-powered tools such as chatbots to provide a well-rounded, outstanding support experience every time.
Offboarding process
Just as you did with your onboarding process—when a new potential customer came across your brand and started interacting with you for the first time—you’ll want to apply similar optimization to the offboarding process, too.
Stay in touch with your customers after they have purchased something from you. Show them you care and value their custom by requesting feedback and offering enticing incentives aimed at driving future purchases, such as referral and loyalty programs or special deals and discounts.
Key takeaways
We all want loyal customers, high revenues, and continuous success. One thing is central to achieving all three (and then some): providing an exceptional customer experience by mapping and optimizing all your customer touchpoints.
In this guide, we explored what customer touchpoints are, their benefits, and how you can go ahead and create a customer journey map that lets your marketing and sales reps pinpoint any area that needs to be optimized.
By following the tips and best practices outlined in this article, you can deliver a stellar overall experience that exceeds your customers’ expectations, thus building a loyal community of members who keep coming back to you for more.
