A customer touchpoint is an interaction or contact between a customer and a specific business that occurs directly or indirectly. It refers to the interactions that emerge before, during, or after a client completes a purchase with a brand.
In this article, we’ll explain why customer touchpoints are important for marketers and how they work. We’ll also show you how to identify customer touchpoints and provide examples at every stage of the customer journey.
Why are customer touchpoints important for marketers?
Customer touchpoints are crucial for marketers because they shape how people perceive your brand, influence their journey to purchase, and ultimately convert them into customers. Furthermore, there are many reasons for businesses to pay attention to every interaction prospects have with their website, social media, advertising, and more. By analyzing customer touchpoints, you can achieve the following goals.
- Improve relationships with your target audience. Potential customers’ actions, whether they visit your pricing page, open your emails, contact you on social media, or ask questions through chatbots, influence their perception of your business. By providing customers with a positive experience across multiple marketing channels, you can establish trust and strengthen your relationships with clients. Sending personalized messages after prospects interact with your company demonstrates your care and encourages customer loyalty.
- Enhance customer experience. When customers receive all the necessary information at each touchpoint, they are more satisfied with your brand. Reducing friction allows clients to make fast purchasing decisions and ensures a consistent customer experience. When you incorporate an omnichannel strategy, your customers can check out using different channels simultaneously.
- Optimize the customer journey. Analyzing touchpoints allows you to understand user behavior, identify patterns, and track where customers drop off. This information helps you address weaknesses and enhance interactions with your brand. For instance, if many prospects add items to their shopping carts but abandon them without checking out, it may indicate a need to review the checkout process. Potential customers might leave due to a lack of specific payment methods or a lengthy checkout process with too many steps. With this knowledge, you can effectively improve these areas and increase conversions.
- Increase sales. Every touchpoint contributes to people's decisions. Personalization and effective marketing channels help establish a positive impression and reduce hesitations. For instance, after customers abandon their shopping carts, consider sending them an email, SMS, or chatbot message offering discounts on the chosen products.
- Boost engagement. By constantly optimizing customer touchpoints, you can ensure that prospects are happy with your brand. You can also enhance the experience across different channels and provide customers with all the information they need to determine whether your product will solve their problems.
Now that you know the most crucial reasons for tracking your customer touchpoints, it’s time to understand how they work and how they can benefit your business.
How do customer touchpoints work?
First, you should understand how customer touchpoints work to use them to your advantage effectively. This section will discuss this in more detail.
Since customer touchpoints encompass all interactions that potential customers experience at various stages of their journey, they can differ. Advertisements, blog posts, and social media are the initial touchpoints that leads encounter when they first discover a brand. At this stage, companies strive to present their businesses in the best light to foster a positive perception of their brands and influence the future purchasing decisions of customers.
After prospects move down the sales funnel to the consideration stage, businesses typically offer them reviews, comparisons, and customer feedback. These touchpoints help customers decide whether they need this product. At this point, when clients are positive about buying from particular brands, it’s essential to ensure that the checkout, live chat, and payment methods are seamless. Any negative experience at this stage can drive them away and make these prospects leave your website.
Ultimately, engaging with touchpoints enables businesses to connect with their customers even after a purchase. This is a vital step for every company, as it impacts the number of loyal returning clients.
In addition to understanding how customer touchpoints function, you should also learn to identify them for your business.
How to identify customer touchpoints?
Tracking and analyzing all customer interactions is essential for the success of your business. Constantly doing so can help you understand the buyer journey, improve customer experience, and make clients happy with your brand.
- Outline the customer journey. Consider mapping out the stages of your buyer journey and the content you should provide at each of them. When prospects are in the awareness stage, ads, blog posts, SEO, and social media are the main touchpoints for discovering your brand. During the consideration stage, you should offer all the necessary information to help leads decide why they need your product. The website, reviews, product demos, and email campaigns are the channels they can engage with to make an informed decision. Once they are sure that your product fits perfectly, you should ensure a seamless checkout process, provide access to live chat and send payment confirmation. Don’t forget to contact your customers after they complete a purchase to collect their feedback.
- Pay attention to all customer interactions. Identify all the possible channels where people can interact with your brand. These include online and offline interactions such as site visits, social media communication, webinars, email marketing, podcasts, reviews, retail stores, events, customer service phone calls, etc. Your task is to understand how each of these leads engages with your business, analyze their decisions, and find space for optimization. This will help you add value to prospects and increase your company’s conversions.
- Collect customer feedback. After customers complete their purchases, consider contacting them via email campaigns, chatbot messages, or social media to request reviews. Distribute customer surveys and feedback forms to gain insights into your strengths and weaknesses. You can inquire about the channels that helped customers discover your company. This will help you identify the key touchpoints that need your close attention and improvement. Additionally, monitor reviews and social media mentions to gauge public perception of your brand and engagement with it.
- Evaluate your website using analytics. Numerous analytics tools allow you to understand users’ interactions with your site better. With Google Analytics, you can monitor website visits, bounce rates, and user paths. After identifying the drop-off points, you can effectively work on improving those pages. For example, if your prospects leave without completing their purchase, you may need to reassess them. The checkout process should be as simple and quick as possible, with popular payment methods easily accessible to customers.
Now that you know how to identify customer touchpoints, it’s time to move on to the examples. The following section will help you visualize all possible interactions during various stages of the customer journey and give you insight into what customers expect to receive at each point.
10 Examples of Customer Touchpoints
Since customer touchpoints differ depending on the stage of the customer journey they occur in, we’ve provided examples typical of each stage to inspire you. This section will show you how to effectively reach your leads and convert them into customers using effective channels.
Awareness Stage
When prospects have not interacted with your brand, you can initiate first contact through various channels and touchpoints. These include ads on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, PPC ads, blog posts, word-of-mouth referrals, and influencer marketing. Let’s review the most common touchpoints that you can use to your advantage during the awareness phase.
Blog posts
Content is the most crucial asset for every business in building awareness, recognition, and attracting attention. By creating relevant blog posts, you can effectively draw potential customers to your product and educate them about it. This does not require running ad campaigns or paying influencers for promotions that do not guarantee 100% success. However, when adding content to your blog, you should ensure it is valuable, high-quality, and relevant. By creating listings, how-to guides, and informational articles, you can showcase your product’s benefits in a non-intrusive and friendly manner.
Let’s take a look at one of SendPulse’s blog posts. The company provides useful information and recommends the best online course builders, including the platform itself. This is the best way for users to discover this new service.
Pay-per-click ads
PPCs are ideal for reaching prospects who are looking for the best solution to their problems. When users enter the keyword, they can quickly see your company, typically positioned at the top and marked with “Sponsored.” This helps you enhance visibility and raise awareness about your business.
For instance, when leads look for a platform to create a website, they insert the keyword in Google and get the results. People often pay attention to the ads placed at the top. They can open the website and explore Wix’s offer instantly.
Sponsored content on Instagram
Recently, Instagram has been used more to explore new products and services. Sponsored content has become one of the main ways of reaching new customers and introducing them to brands. Many companies use sponsored content to educate their potential customers about the available products. Sponsored content is the best way to build brand awareness and inform about enticing offers.
Below, you will find how a clothing brand announces its 50% sale using sponsored content that appears between Instagram Stories. This is an effective way to drive the attention and interest of prospects who might have looked for similar products.
Influencer’s recommendations
Influencer marketing is a powerful marketing tool, enabling brands to drive attention to their products. Collaboration with opinion leaders is a great way to generate more prospects and encourage people to discuss your product and consider purchasing it. The main task here is to choose an influencer with the audience's trust and who can genuinely recommend your product.
For example, below, you can see how a travel blogger recommends a coffee spot. An appealing Reel will certainly catch followers’ attention and motivate them to visit this place soon.
Consideration Stage
When prospects move into consideration, you can come across different interactions that influence customer decisions. That’s why all processes related to whether leads buy your products should be seamlessly integrated. You decide the preferred channels to connect with these individuals, yet the checkout process, email campaigns, and reviews must be present to encourage a positive decision.
Email campaigns with enticing discounts
Email marketing is consistently effective in informing customers about appealing offers and end-of-season discounts during the consideration stage. By sending emails, you can engage with your audience and update them on all the sales, launches, and events. Reaching prospects’ inboxes directly enhances their chances of being noticed.
Additionally, a countdown timer or limited-time offers evoke the fear of missing out, leading to quicker purchasing decisions. A specialized service like SendPulse allows you to create professional emails quickly. It offers all the essential templates and tools for executing outstanding email campaigns.
Let’s consider The North Face’s email campaign for the end-of-season sale. By limiting the duration of the sale, the brand effectively drives leads toward conversion.
Reviews
When prospects evaluate whether a product is worth purchasing, they visit various review websites to find the answer. They check the ratings and what others say about a specific product. This helps them determine the product's quality and take the desired action. That’s why it’s always beneficial to allow space for customer reviews beneath your product cards.
For example, Zenni Optical allows its customers to share their reviews and rate products based on how likely they are to recommend them to friends. This offers great convenience for potential buyers, enabling them to effortlessly scroll through the web page and read customer reviews at any time.
Virtual try-on
Augmented reality is an excellent way to provide customers with simulated experiences online. They can try on clothes, glasses, furniture arrangements, etc., and make decisions and buy without visiting a physical store.
For example, Sephora offers its customers the brand’s app. The app allows customers to try various makeup products virtually to find the perfect one for them. Clients can also save time and money by shopping online.
Purchase Stage
The purchase stage is about making everything simple and seamless to ensure a conversion. This refers to the checkout process, customer support interactions, order confirmations, etc.
Simple checkout process
When customers want to checkout, it’s essential to let them do it fast. It should cover all the most popular payment methods so clients don’t churn out.
For example, when customers shop for items from Alo Yoga, they can even choose an express checkout to skip some steps of this process and order in seconds.
Order confirmation
When customers place an order, you should confirm it through email marketing. By emailing clients, you provide proof of the order and include its shipping information. This allows consumers to double-check their shipping address and make changes while they still have the opportunity.
Below is an example of an order confirmation customers receive after shopping with Temu. They can check the date, items, and delivery address.
Post-Purchase Stage
After customers complete a purchase or begin using your service, it’s essential to ask for their feedback and a genuine review. This way, you not only demonstrate your care for customers but also gain valuable insights about your brand and products. Customer feedback enables you to improve for an even better customer experience, encouraging satisfied customers to return.
Feedback request email
It is a good idea to send an email asking clients to evaluate their satisfaction with your brand, share their thoughts on the product, and provide their input. Depending on your goals, you can include fast answers or leave space for open-ended answers.
Let’s take Codeacademy’s email inviting subscribers to give their feedback after using this educational platform. This way, students from all over the world can share their voices and make the learning process even more pleasant.
To sum up, customer touchpoints are crucial for your business because they help you determine what works best with your customers and where you can optimize for higher conversion rates. By focusing on prospects' interactions at each stage of their customer journey, you can effectively lead them down the sales funnel without spending additional resources and effort.
Last Updated: 26.02.2025
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