The marketing rule of seven states that it takes customers an average of seven interactions with your brand before deciding to make their purchase.
Identifying these interactions (also known as customer touchpoints) can help you ensure that you are providing customer experiences that lead to sales. Taking these touchpoints and mapping them using your ideal customer backstory can take this up to the next level and ensure that you are making the most of each connection with your customers and ideally speed up the sales cycle. So how do we go about building such a map?
What Are Customer Touchpoints?
Customer (or consumer) touchpoints are direct or indirect interactions between your business and your prospects or existing customers that affect how they think and feel about your brand, products, or services. Identifying these touchpoints is an important step to mapping customer journeys and ensuring your teams are doing what they can to keep your customers satisfied.
TL;DR
- The “rule of seven” in marketing highlights seven interactions with your brand before a purchase decision. Identifying these interactions, or touchpoints, is crucial for crafting experiences that drive sales.
- To identify relevant customer touchpoints:
- Review your marketing platforms to understand where customers engage with your brand.
- Observe customer interactions to gauge preferences and behaviors.
- Categorize touchpoints based on stages (pre, during, post-purchase) and interaction types.
- Visualize touchpoints through a customer journey map, simplifying complex interactions.
- A customer journey map visually narrates how customers engage with your brand across touchpoints, aiding in maximizing interactions and meeting expectations. You can develop an omnichannel strategy for a seamless experience by understanding customer journeys.
- Creating a customer journey with touchpoint mapping involves:
- Developing a customer persona to tailor the map to your target audience.
- Crafting a customer backstory illustrating how your product or service addresses customer needs.
- Mapping customer emotions, thoughts, and pain points across touchpoints.
- Establishing relevant metrics to measure effectiveness throughout the journey.
- Organizing touchpoints and stages to gain a holistic view of the customer experience.
- Using digital touchpoints to enhance the customer journey aligns interactions with the end goal of conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. Ensuring positive experiences across touchpoints is vital, and robust support systems play a crucial role.
- Optimizing customer journey mapping enhances customer experiences, streamlines the sales cycle, and fosters brand loyalty. If you’re considering improving your help desk system, we can simplify the data migration for your company. Schedule a call to explore how we can assist you further.
What Are the Examples of Customer Touchpoints?
Consumer touchpoints involve more than direct communication between customers and your sales and support teams. They also include indirect interactions, such as when prospects happen to see an online review of your services or when a friend tells them about an experience they had with your product.
Here are more examples that will help you come up with a full picture of your customer touchpoints:
| Before purchase | During purchase | After purchase |
| Social media | Conversations with customer support and sales representatives | After-sales service |
| Online advertisements | Product catalogs | Customer onboarding |
| Company blog | Brick-and-mortar store or office | Customer service channels |
| Company events | Promotional booths | Billing |
| Customer reviews/ratings | Landing pages | Thank you cards |
| Testimonials | Company website | Loyalty programs |
| Word of mouth/referral from friends, family, and coworkers | Website checkout flow | Follow ups / transactional emails |
| Community involvement | eCommerce site or app | Email newsletter |
| Phone system | Online help center/self-service tools/company knowledge base | |
| Direct mailers | Community forum | |
| Point of sale | Customer satisfaction surveys/product feedback | |
| Upselling/cross-selling emails | ||
| Subscription renewals |
So, how do you figure out which touchpoints are relevant to your business? Let’s take a closer look.
How to Identify Your Customer Touchpoints?
Follow these steps to identify your existing consumer touchpoints. And get ready to leverage your strong points and improve the weaker ones.
Review your marketing platforms
Start by reviewing the platforms your brand is using to reach customers. Do you have your own website or app? Have you built a strong fan base on your social media channels? How about reviews and ratings that prospects can easily find online?
Observe how customers are interacting with your brand
You should also take note of how your customers are connecting with your brand. Do they contact you on your social media channels? Or would they rather use the self-help tools available on your website? Maybe they discover your brands through word-of-mouth referrals. Conducting surveys and analyzing customer data will help you answer these questions.
Categorize your customer touchpoints
Categorize the touchpoints you’ve identified as before, during, and after purchase. You may also classify them under marketing reach, sales interactions, customer-initiated conversations, and service or product feedback. Feel free to come up with categories that are unique to your organization.
Visualize the customer touchpoints
One of the best ways to make sense of the many customer touchpoints relevant to your organization is to create a customer journey map. This means visualizing how your customers, directly and indirectly, engage with your business.
We’ll talk more about what customer journey mapping is and how it can help you in the next section.
What Is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map visually tells a story of how your customers interact with your business across all touchpoints. It simplifies complex customer journeys and helps you make the most out of every interaction and meet customer expectations.
Customer journeys are rarely linear. Because they involve several channels and interactions that could go back and forth, they’re not always easy to visualize. And there’s no cookie-cutter way to do it. Different organizations have their own creative ways of creating the map, from using post-its and pens to crafting infographics and 3D illustrations. What’s important is that the visual representation makes sense to the teams that will be using it.
How Does Customer Journey Mapping Enable Omnichannel Customer Service?
With the customer journey map taking account of all the touchpoints, it becomes easier to craft an omnichannel strategy that offers a seamless customer experience throughout the buyer journey.
This means enabling a cohesive experience between channels. For instance, customers who see your TV advertisements should be able to go online and reach you via your website. They should also be able to follow you on social media channels where they can get more brand updates.
How to Create a Customer Journey with Touchpoint Mapping?
Studying touchpoints is about putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. These steps will help you do just that.
Create a customer persona
Your customer journey map will be much more effective if it’s geared toward a specific audience. So before mapping out your touchpoints, take the time to create a customer persona.
This means putting together a profile that represents your ideal customer. It may include a fictional name, educational background, job title, income level, personal or career challenges, and motivations.
Build a customer backstory
Based on the persona you put together, create a compelling story that illustrates just how customers can benefit from your product or service. The narrative should demonstrate the common challenges clients encounter and how they can use your solution to get past them.
This customer backstory will equip you with the messaging you need to come up with strong ads and campaigns.
Map what the customer thinks and feels
Map the different thoughts and emotions your customers are likely to have as they jump from one touchpoint to another. And use the information to magnify positive responses and mitigate negative ones.
Map the pain points
Pain points either push your customers to take action or prevent them from doing so. Mapping these motivators will help your teams come up with strategies and tactics that can shorten the customer journey and speed up the sales cycle.
Decide what to measure
You can’t effectively manage what you can’t measure. So, make sure you set up metrics that will gauge whether you’re converting and retaining customers. This quantifiable assessment will also help you ensure you’re providing positive customer experiences across the touchpoints.
And, of course, you need to measure metrics that are relevant to your business. Here are some KPIs you can consider across various stages of the customer journey.
- Awareness stage: impressions, cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM), reach, SEO ranking, bounce rate, time on page, number of pages per visit
- Consideration stage: clicks, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), engagement rate
- Decision stage: conversion rate, sales, cost per conversion (CPC)
- Customer retention: customer loyalty, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), customer lifetime value (CLV), feedback
- Customer advocacy: referrals, NPS
Instead of trying to track everything, focus on those most relevant to your business and concentrate your efforts there.
Organize with touchpoints and stages
This is the part where everything comes together. Map all the touchpoints under the relevant stages of the customer journey. Make sure you also integrate the customer persona, backstory, thoughts, emotions, pain points, and metrics you identified. As mentioned above, you and your teams can figure out the type of visual representation that works best for you.
Completing the above steps will give you a complete view of the customer experience.
Why Should You Use Digital Touchpoints to Improve the Customer Journey?
Identifying touchpoints allows you to see and experience your brand the way customers do. But this approach is only powerful if you take into account the bigger picture—that is, if you put them in the context of the end-to-end customer journey.
Instead of improving individual transactions on separate touchpoints, you can implement strategies that shorten the sales cycle and take your customers closer to the ultimate goal of conversion, loyalty, and advocacy.
Ensure a positive customer experience at every touchpoint with a well-oiled support system. If you think your help desk system is not up to the task, it may be time to make a switch. Fortunately, we can make the process easier and cheaper for your company. Schedule a call to learn more about how we can help you.