In a nutshell, customer touchpoints are the precise points where customers finally make contact with your business. Customer touchpoints exist from the beginning of a customer’s interaction with a business up to the end. The simplest example of a customer touchpoint would be an online ad that your customer sees on any of the platforms where your ads are distributed during a campaign.
Physically shopping in brick-and-mortar locations also provides several customer touchpoints. Knowing what your customer touchpoints are is essential for making important decisions about your Web design business. The number one gain from focusing on customer touchpoints makes your customers happier in the long term.
Below are some examples of various touchpoints at different points in a customer journey:
Before making a purchase:
- Marketing campaigns
- PR campaigns
- Community work/integration
- Advertising
- WOM or word of mouth
- Customer testimonials
- Ratings
- Reviews
- Social media posts
During a purchase:
- Physical store
- Online store
- Website
- Blog
- Online promotions
- Sales team communications
- Staff communication
- Phone call
- Points of sale
After a purchase:
- Thank you mail or emails
- Follow-up communication
- Help center
- Technical support
- Service
- Marketing emails
- Promotional emails
- Billing emails or documents
One of the things that you need to realize about customer touchpoints is they’re not one size fits all, and just one of these touchpoints can have multiple subcategories that you need to work on. A good example would be advertising, which is already a complex category. What kind of advertising is best for your audience? How do you target your customers properly? What platforms are most suitable?
How to Find Customer Touchpoints?
There is no need to figure out and set up all your customer touchpoints all at once. This can be exceedingly daunting. Frankly, you won’t be able to handle all of the touchpoints all at once unless you have a dedicated team for marketing and Web development operating full time.
Chances are if you are a Web design company, you probably have one or two small teams working steadily because you are in the market to scale up your operations. Generating Web design leads is challenging, we know. That’s why we need to work on your customer touchpoints.
Getting down to it, several questions will help you determine these touchpoints:
- Where can your customers encounter your business again after making any purchase?
- Where do they go so they can make a good decision about something that you offer?
- Where can they go when they need to get more information about your business’s solutions?
- Where do they go when they have a problem, and they’d like to know more about how they can solve it?
Having a higher awareness of your customer’s journey is key to mapping your customer touchpoints and the general order to serve your customers before, during, and after a purchase. If you’d like a shortcut to knowing how customers eventually find your business, you can send out a survey and ask them. Of course, you’d need more data to see the bigger picture in the long term as more and more people are involved.
Let’s talk about expectations. A customer touchpoint serves its purpose if it is functional and if it performs according to customer expectations. There are four types of interactions that make a touchpoint more relevant to customers:
- Endearing – The customer touchpoint creates a meaningful, relevant, and memorable bond with the customer. Yes, customers get attached to digital interactions.
- Meaningful – The customer touchpoint provides a sense of value or importance to the customer.
- Relevant – In terms of utility, the touchpoint is perceived as very useful by the customers.
- Appropriate – The message provided by the interaction is rational, appropriate in a cultural sense, and the message is acceptable.
These are the general markers for a well-built customer touchpoint. If you think of touchpoints along these lines, your branding’s message becomes stronger and more powerfully perceived by customers. In short, your Web design business stands out from the crowd, and you get better leverage and traction, too.
What about touchpoints that are beyond your site’s reach? This is where reputation management comes into the picture. Reputation management ensures that your brand will survive in the wilderness of the Web, and you’re still in control, to an extent, as to how your brand is perceived outside your online channels. You can have many channels under your control, but if someone posts badly about your business on social media, you need to respond to that.
The Customer Touchpoints
Whenever a customer gains awareness of your brand and what your business is about, even fleetingly, that’s already considered a touchpoint. Let’s explore the various ways that you can make contact with your customers.
Social Media
Social media should be present at every stage of the customer journey. Social media, however, is most useful for acquiring customers. Social media is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach a massive audience. Of course, targeting is a process, and you may not immediately reach your goals with your first few attempts. However, there’s a reason why many brands have reached massive success on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook. It’s a challenging process, but it’s certainly something you should keep exploring if you have the budget for it.
Online Promotions and Advertising
Advertising only evolves – it will not go away. Even with adblocking on websites, advertising is still a billion-dollar industry because it still works. Sure, the strategies may have changed, but that doesn’t mean the system’s core has gone away. Like social media, online promotions and advertising should also be part of every portion of the customer’s journey. The main purpose of advertising is to draw more attention and traffic to your main site.
Content Marketing
Content is king. It always has been. People may now be reading more content on their mobile phones, but without new content, the Web will be one large, dusty desert. Focus on publishing online content that people will find useful and relevant to their queries and problems. If every brand could focus on producing content that answers questions and provides genuine solutions or at least a general direction to solving customer problems, every brand would have a fighting chance no matter how young the brand is. People always have problems to solve. Relevant content shines and light on the solution and builds brand trust and confidence in the process.
Events
Physical events notwithstanding, consider creating online events like webinars or even podcasting to reach more people with your branding and vision. Before COVID-19, we all knew how powerful branding works with much-awaited conferences and meet-ups. Even brainstorming sessions can create a stir. Now that we are warier of physical events, it makes so much sense to host online events more often. Online events are cost-effective, and word of mouth and organic traffic will serve your cause quickly, too.
Referrals
Never underestimate the power of referrals. Referrals are incredibly powerful, with 83% of customers saying that they found new brands and businesses through referrals. People will trust what they know are trusted by their colleagues, office maters, organization people, and the like. There’s power in the wisdom of people that we trust, and you can offer incentives for referrals in the form of discounts and the like when a client works with you again.
Communication with Decision-Makers
This may not be so apparent to digital marketers who are more oriented towards advertising, but there’s a reason why LinkedIn has reached the pinnacle of business success. It’s the best place to reach out to different organization members, from regular staff to CEOs. Where else can you find a very specific segment of the population with all the relevant information attached? The communications or conversations you have with people linked to purchasing decisions will affect the interaction’s outcome. Take this customer touchpoint seriously and see more positive outcomes.
Catalogs
Printed catalogs may seem like a thing of the past, but the concept of placing in one volume or bundle all the great things that your business can provide customers will never be a thing of the past. In Web design companies, you can provide customers a downloadable portfolio of all your notable projects. Take this opportunity to add all the information that customers need to make a decision. Leave nothing out, if possible. This process is called “removing friction,” and it’s one of the most awesome ways to lead the customer to a final purchasing decision. Don’t forget to add those CTAs at the end, too.
Ecommerce Sites
This works for Web design companies engaged in selling templates and other digital bundles for their customers. If you can sell something at a low price to break the ice, then there is a good chance that customers will come back to make a purchase again.
Customer Reviews
This is another relic of Web 2.0 that remains a powerful foundation for marketing. Customer reviews are not just a touchpoint – they’re a double-edged sword for businesses. Anyone can leave a good – or bad – review online, so you must constantly monitor the Web for these bad reviews and act swiftly to ensure that your brand’s reputation is secured. We also recommend that you provide incentives to your past customers so they can leave reviews on your site. Customer reviews are testimonials, and sometimes, this is the last customer touchpoint needed to push other customers to make a purchase decision.
Thank You Communications
Whether you send physical mail or email, thank your communications are vital for continuing the conversation after making a purchase. Whenever a customer clinches a deal with your business, be sure to send a nice thank you letter. A hand-written letter isn’t excessive either. Do this if you want to create long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Surveys
Feedback is pure gold to marketing. Normally people won’t share their thoughts about a brand because they don’t think about it that much. In Web design companies, offering a simple reward or incentive, such as a free download or discount, is often enough to convince people to answer surveys. Service feedback surveys are important, too. If there is more negative feedback than positive feedback, you can direct the customer to reach out to you to resolve their problems.
Cross-selling and Upselling
The needs of your customers don’t change after you’ve completed a Web design project for them. There will still be additional needs along the line and additional opportunities to make more sales. Upselling and cross-selling become vital at one point to magnify your marketing efforts and squeeze every drop of profit from each project.
Billing Communications
If you’d like to avoid churn as soon as possible, make sure that billing communications are not overlooked. If there are any billing issues, make sure that these are addressed properly at the soonest possible time.
Customer Support
Customer support has several possible channels, from the AI-drive chatbot on your website to the more run-the-mill email support we’re all familiar with. Customer support is defined as any platform that various service agents use to help customers before and after a purchase. These channels include peer review platforms, social media sites, phone, chat, etc. You need to invest in more customer support channels to keep your customers happy because customers have their comfort zones to reach out to support agents—some people like being straightforward with email, while others are less anxious when they respond quickly.
