Examples of Digital Touchpoints in the Customer Journey
Written by Support EXP
Digital touchpoints are an integral part of marketing and customer experience management. These buyer touchpoints create a strategic step-up in customer service and occur intentionally throughout the customer’s journey. Build brand awareness with digital touchpoints by implementing purposeful sales strategies that align with each step throughout the customer journey.
Key Takeaways:
- An optimized customer journey involves creating thoughtful and purposeful digital touchpoints that collectively promote your brand and the customer experience that backs it up.
- Your online content drives or inhibits each stage in the customer journey: Awareness, Interest/Consideration, Desire/Decision, Action/Purchase.
- Providing educational, solutions-driven digital touchpoints will ultimately yield the best results in conversions and sustained customer loyalty.
What Are Digital Customer Touchpoints?
It would be ideal if customers found your eCommerce website organically, made a sizable purchase, and then became a customer for life. Likewise, in a perfect world, your brick-and-mortar establishment would consistently generate massive revenue from walk-in customers who blindly trust you and your product line based on first impressions alone. However, these scenarios are the rare exception, not the norm.
In reality, most revenue is supported by solid customer experience, which includes a strategic customer journey. Providing an optimized customer journey includes creating thoughtful and purposeful digital touchpoints that collectively back your brand and the customer experience. Providing service to match that experience is crucial and non-negotiable.
Digital customer touchpoints may include things such as email marketing, search engine-optimized web pages and articles, social media channels, an eCommerce store, videos, pay-per-click ad campaigns, online testimonials, and live chat. Let’s discuss how you can improve conversion rates by implementing a plan for digital touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
Improve Your Customer Journey with Digital Touchpoints
Your marketing plan should give priority to improving CX by integrating customer journey touchpoints throughout the sales process. If you’re new to the customer journey process, don’t worry! Strategic concepts that allow you to know how to meet your customer where they are and build influence at different parts of the sales funnel are part of this process. This step is vital for any business owner to understand. Each of these stages in the customer journey will be affected by the information you share in your online content. Commit to understanding how this strategy works and affects buyer outcomes.
Awareness
Awareness is the initial stage of a customer’s journey. At this point, your customer needs to learn that they have a need for your service. Your customer will be introduced to your brand by absorbing content relayed in touchpoints and digital marketing pieces that you’ve designed. These customer touchpoints will influence their decision-making in later parts of the customer journey. You might assume that customers will see your touchpoints, fall in love with your brand, and make a purchase. However, that’s a little too optimistic. There’s a widely-accepted “rule of seven” in marketing, which suggests that your customer will need to see or hear your marketing message approximately seven times before making a purchase. Don’t let this discourage you. Just commit to trusting the process and getting your brand in front of the customer on a consistent basis.
Interest or Consideration
This stage is an excellent time to really hone your digital customer experience. During the consideration stage, your customers are contemplating whether they should purchase from you, from a competitor, or not at all. You may consider ramping up additional customer touchpoints to drive home your brand. Include things like digital guides (downloadable PDFs or optimized video content). You can release other items like teaching tools such as presentations, testimonials, white papers, data comparisons, and more. It’s essential to really show proof that your brand is an excellent reputable choice and the only choice your customers need to consider.
Desire or Decision
When your customer makes it to this stage in the sales process, you’re moving in the right direction. However, the deal is still open so keep up the momentum! Your prospective customer still needs some solid reasons to commit, so consider building increased awareness through social media, additional brand messaging, and product testimonials. You can ramp up your marketing efforts here to let your customer know you are all-in! Make sure your service and pricing pages have high visibility so your potential customers can find them with ease. Put customer reviews and testimonials front and center. Make sure to position yourself as an authority with any videos or other digital touchpoints you still need to reveal. Consider saving the most effective deal-sealers for this stage of the sales process.
Action or Purchase
This phase of the customer journey is when all your hard work comes into play. All of the digital marketing content and other digital takeaways that affect your customer journey mapping plan will ultimately get your customer to this stage, opening the door to new business. Your customer has already evaluated the competition. They are well-informed about your brand, prior experience, and products. They have done their homework! If your customer journey strategy is working, your business will experience growth during this stage of the purchase experience.
Digital Touchpoints in the Awareness Stage
Think of the awareness stage of the customer journey as the “getting to know you” stage before a first date with someone new. During this stage, your customer is still deciding about investing in your brand, but they are interested in learning more. The customer is putting out feelers and wants to know if you’ll respond in a way that makes them feel warm and welcome or cold and dismissive. This stage of the customer journey is a perfect time to introduce yourself using customer digital touchpoints with some information about your background, experience, and future business plans. Really highlight your customer service expertise here to elevate what your business has to offer from step one. You may consider promoting testimonials, referrals, and online content that highlights your experience and commitment to customer satisfaction. Your digital touchpoints should be accessible for the customer to find and understand. They should be clear and to the point. You can’t risk releasing a confusing message at this stage in the customer journey. Lack of clarity could deter your customer from progressing to the next stage.
Targeted Ads
Use a simple ordinal response for this question. This is an excellent broad question to start your survey. It gives you a feel for the customer’s general feelings without creating friction and hampering answers to future questions.
Targeted Social Media Posts
You can use a Likert scale or ordinal rating for this question. This question is handy if you’re testing website usability and general attractiveness.
You can include a more specific follow-up question to understand what aspects of your website are working and which aren’t.
Cross-sharing Posts
Give customers a binary option. Ask this question when you’re following up on an interaction between the customer and an employee—via the help desk, on social media, or through another channel.
Digital Touchpoints during the Interest and Consideration Phase
The interest and consideration phase of your customer’s journey allows you to highlight your brand and business further. During this stage, your business is being considered as an option by the consumer. They have given some thought to your brand and will now move forward to learn more about your business and product experience. Now is an excellent time to ramp up your customer touchpoints for optimum exposure. Consider using the following.
Social Posts
Use these posts to position your brand or business as an authority in your field. You can do this with consumer-focused information that shifts the focus away from what you do and more on what you can do for the customer. Call out pain points your ideal client may be experiencing. This call-out will spark curiosity and transition them into the next phase of the customer journey.
Targeted Videos
Videos are significant digital touchpoints because they bring human factors into marketing. Instead of presenting your prospects with a pile of case studies or statistics, putting a face with a name (or in this case, brand) garners familiarity and comfort. The videos don’t have to be long, but they do have to provide value and enough information to help your prospect move to the next part of the sales journey.
Testimonials
When your customers are interested and considering doing business with your brand, they will look forward to hearing more about the experiences of others. You can easily qualify your brand by presenting authentic reviews from a variety of customers. Make sure your testimonials speak to customer experience and product satisfaction. These testimonials can be repurposed from online review platforms or even short video shout-outs from customers. You’ll be positioning yourself well if the reviews are accurate and thoughtful.
Digital Touchpoints That Drive Your Customer’s Desire
Feature your brand and business even further during the desire phase of your customer’s journey. This is the time to ramp up social posts and reinforce the information shared in the earlier stages.
Offers
Consider increasing value to your customer. Businesses will often provide a promo code to first-time shoppers. This type of promotion tells your consumer, “I believe in this product so much that I’m willing to sacrifice a little profit to prove it to you.” These offers can be incorporated into your social media marketing, email marketing, or even via print marketing.
Chat Features
Sometimes, customers want very specific clarity before committing to spending with your brand. This is normal, and business owners should be willing to sacrifice a little time to answer questions. Hosting a chat service within your website or providing access to another form of open support will allow your customers to feel confident about getting the answers they need before committing to spending money with your brand. Additionally, add an FAQ section to your website to answer common questions that prospective customers bring to the table on a regular basis.
Product Placement
At this stage in the customer journey, your customers have almost reached the final phase of the sales funnel. Now is certainly not the time to lose steam on your social media and email advertisements. Make sure your products and services are being targeted correctly and showing up in your prospect’s social feeds. The more they see your brand and products or services, the more they will be prompted to make a decision about your brand.
Action Touchpoints in the Digital Journey
When customers reach this stage in the purchasing journey, they are ready to make a decision about your business. You’ve given them all they need to know about you – building your reputation, providing them with good customer reviews, showing your products and services, and positioning yourself as an approachable authority in the marketplace.
Point of Sale
Use your point-of-sale tools to improve the deal for your customers. Many customers will “add to cart” before they are truly ready to hit “complete purchase” just to see final price tags and to compare deals. You may consider offering a promo code for first-time shoppers or a bundled deal that will incentivize your customers to try even more items from your inventory.
Plentiful Shopper Reviews
Continue using reviews for your customers’ benefit. At this stage in the journey, customers know they want or need your product, but chances are that many other companies offer comparable products (and possibly for less money). Seal the deal by driving home reviews. Savvy shoppers will do their homework and act on brands with the best reviews. Reviews build buyer confidence. Make sure you are collecting them often! If you’re worried about bad reviews, don’t sweat it. Every organization will experience poor reviews from time to time. Rational customers will understand this. As long as your good reviews far outweigh the bad, online reviews will continue to be of great value to you.
Create a Seamless Checkout Experience
Consumers often go with what they know. At this stage, customers are very well versed in checkout experiences provided by online marketplaces like Amazon, Google, Shopify, major retailers, and Etsy, to name a few. These sites are straightforward to navigate, and purchases can be made in just a few clicks. Make sure your checkout process isn’t overcomplicated, or you may lose a willing customer due to technical frustrations. Streamline the process early so you don’t have to worry about it later.
Complete the Customer Journey with Digital Touchpoints
As we’ve outlined in the sections above, digital touchpoints are critical to building a customer relationship based on trust, transparency, and reputation. It’s tempting to want to spend the most time on the action/decision phase; however, doing your research and providing digital touchpoints that are educational and solutions-driven will ultimately yield the most results for your brand and provide the most comfort to prospective consumers. If you implement each step very well, allowing digital touchpoints to speak for you, this will free up a lot of time and sidestep repeated conversations. If you continue using and perfecting this approach, as time passes you will likely continue to see good results. At that point, you will undoubtedly generate customer loyalty that goes beyond the initial sale simply by reminding customers why they purchased from you in the first place.
If you’re a credit union or bank with questions about optimizing the customer experience of your digital touchpoints, we can get you the answers you need. Start the conversation with our CX experts today!