What is a customer touchpoint? A customer touchpoint is the first interaction that the customer makes with your product or service. It can be either online or offline, a personal interaction, through the mail, or even a phone call.
Consider this: You visit a website to buy a product. Your first touchpoint is organic search or to be more precise, the Google search bar that you used to type the information you wanted.
Similarly, if you come across a paid advertisement on a blog or website, your first touchpoint will be display advertising. Or, if you visited the website through a social media post, then the touchpoint will be the social post itself.
In the figure above, you can see that customer touchpoints are ever-increasing. They grow based on the number of new devices and ways of interaction being added to the system. Your list of touchpoints will also increase when you start omnichannel marketing.
Why is Recording Touchpoints Important?
The straightforward reason for recording touchpoints is so that you can improve them for maximum profits. When you are aware of what touchpoints are bringing in the most traffic to your product/service or generating the most leads, you can improve them further through split tests, experimentation, and adding new workflows.
Types of Customer Touchpoints
Although touchpoints can be categorized based on many facets, we will be using the purchase cycle category. In this category, customer checkpoints are segmented into pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase segments. Let’s discuss each one in detail.
Pre-purchase Touchpoint
Pre-purchase touchpoints are the initial interactions between the customer and the brand. Search, social, paid advertisements, all are pre-purchase touchpoints because they are the first interactions that people make with a product or service.
Purchase Touchpoint
Once visitors have passed the pre-purchase touchpoint stage, they are now potential customers. For them, the touchpoints will be a demo, a discovery call, talking to a sales representative, or completing the checkout form (in case of an eCommerce website).
Post-purchase Touchpoints
Once the purchase has been made, it isn’t the end of the touchpoint cycle. The brand must retain this customer and for this purpose, the touchpoints will change to customer care, follow-ups and outreach, loyalty programs, word of mouth, and positive reviews.
Source: Pinterest
Customer Journey Mapping with Data Mapping Software
What do most businesses want? To improve their profits, right? The best way to get that done is to improve the flow of traffic through various touchpoints. This is only possible when the C-level executives have the bigger picture available. That’s where customer journey mapping comes in.
Source: Astera.com
Data mapping software is the best way to map customer touchpoints to purchase cycles. It helps collect and consolidate insights at each stage of the purchase cycle. It also provides a deeper understanding about how the touchpoints are either helping or becoming a hurdle during the whole data mapping process.
Source: Astera Centerprise
As you can see in the image above, we have used Salesforce visitor interaction data and combined it with customer data to find out the trend of conversion, loss of visitors, cart abandonment, lags in the smooth data flow, and many other similar parameters. Without data integration software, this information stays in your CRM software as consolidation with other applications and data marts is not possible.
A decent data mapping software will allow you to map customer journeys through multiple data analytics software. For instance, for an ecommerce store, a data mapping software can help map data from Hotjar, visitor data from Google Analytics, paid advertising data from Google Adwords, position tracking data from Google Search console, email marketing data from Hubspot, and much more.
Now that you have the required data integrated on a single platform, you can use it to create reports for further forecasts. Data integration software like Astera can help clean cluttered data and create reports that C-level executives can use to make relevant decisions. Since they are interested only in the bigger picture, all the excess data is none of their concern.
Business Intelligence teams or even marketing teams in our case can map out customer journeys on data mapping and integration software and then clean relevant data to present to the top layer.
Reasons for Customer Touchpoint Mapping
A few reasons customer touchpoint mapping is helpful is because it can help…
Discover Areas of Improvement
Mapping touchpoints can help identifyareas that need improvements. If traffic is getting bounced from the search pages, perhaps they need to be reproduced. Similarly, if people are signing up for newsletters but unsubscribing when they get them, maybe your newsletters are just too bland. These are just some areas of improvement that you can easily figure out when your customer data is integrated.
Create Relevant Workflows
Another reason is that touchpoints can be a great way to improve workflows available on your website/store/interaction point.
For instance, if visitors are landing on a page that is just a blog post, maybe you can add a lead generation form, or even a subscription form on that page to increase leads. This will not only help decrease dropouts but also increase the chances of converting more leads.
Experiment with New Ideas
One thing to know about customer checkpoints is that they can always be improved and the best way to do this is by introducing new experiments. Marketing is all about experiments. The more you experiment, the more ideas you can test and then optimize them to convert leads. When you are aware about the customer touchpoints, you can add new experiments on the first and the last touchpoints to see how the potential customers behave when interacting with those experiments.
Get Started with Customer Journey Mapping
Now that you are familiar with the concept of customer touchpoints, customer journey mapping, and customer touchpoints integration, it is time to learn more about how customer journey mapping can fulfill your business needs.
As one of the leading data integration software on the market. Astera centerprise can help you easily integrate customer journey data from multiple tools and applications. Learn how Astera Centerprise makes Customer Data Integration possible.
