Touchpoints: Optimizing Each Lead Interaction

Every touchpoint with your potential customers matters, as each makes up part of their journey. These interactions with the company — whether in person, through direct messaging, on social media, or other ways — are essential for leads learning more about your brand, and moving further through the marketing funnel. But, touchpoints don’t happen on their own — they’re part of an intentional marketing strategy.

What Are Marketing Touchpoints?

Marketing touchpoints are interactions with potential customers, from the first time they visit the website and download a free resource, through calling them to answer questions before a final sale.

“The most important touchpoint is their first, wherever that comes in,” says Justin Barlow, marketing director at Nigel Wright Group. “This is because how we treat that lead will influence the potential customer’s positive, indifferent, or negative perception of us.” He adds that other key touchpoints are especially noteworthy when the customer takes action to engage with them. “That may be by providing their contact details when they download our content, or sending us an email, or completing a survey, or anything that wasn’t in response to someone calling them to begin a conversation.” He adds that these can be digital or offline touchpoints, including:

Digital Marketing Touchpoints

• How a customer interacts with your product online.
• Can occur at any point during the purchase process.

Offline Marketing Touchpoints

• Occur outside of the digital space.
• Includes in-person events, trade shows, radio or television advertising, newspaper advertising.

Different Types of Marketing Touchpoints

Just as each of your leads have specific and unique needs, they will interact with your company in their own individual way, too. This means that diversifying your marketing touchpoints to include multiple of the following types is important:

Website

If someone needs something, often they still just “Google it.” That’s where your website comes in as a first essential touchpoint.

“Website interactions tell you what people are interested in and how ready they are,” says Colleen Barry, head of marketing at Ketch. “If someone is looking at product features or pricing, that’s a big buying signal. If they’re just reading blogs, they might be early-stage. We track what pages are viewed, time on site, and what CTAs are clicked to score their interest level.”

Email

“Emails are like quiet reminders that you exist and are ready to help,” Barry says. “They can guide leads through the journey without being too pushy. We use emails to educate first, which includes sending useful guides or industry news, and then offer demos or trials once people are warmed up.”

Dan Salganik, managing partner and CEO of VisualFizz, calls email “an incredibly powerful touchpoint.” He says it allows for direct and personalized communication at all stages of the journey. Those touchpoints through email might be to introduce the company, nurture leads with valuable content, share relevant updates, offer target promotions, or provide ongoing support, he shares. “For many of our B2B clients, email remains a fundamental tool for building relationships and driving conversions.”

Online Advertising

Barry calls ads a “first handshake.” “They introduce people to your brand, but they have to feel connected to the next step. If someone clicks an ad about ‘how to prepare for new privacy laws,’ and then lands on a random homepage, you lose trust,” she says. “The ad and the landing experience must fit together like puzzle pieces.”

Your ads should also be seriously attention grabbing, and should guide leads to their next step in the journey, whether that’s a landing page, website, or other spot, Salganik says. “The effectiveness really hinges on relevant targeting and a clear message.”

Additional Examples of Marketing Touchpoints

If you want to go a bit beyond the basics with touchpoints, diversify your marketing strategy by integrating multiple of these options:

• Blog posts: Highly researched blog posts, including subject matter experts and up to date resources, can earn trust and help position you as a thought leader and reputable provider in your industry.
• Social media: People are scrolling through their feeds — are you there? Chip away at building a following by posting helpful content on Instagram, X, Meta, and other places your audience hangs out.
• Referrals: Sometimes happy fans of your business will just provide these, and sometimes you have to ask — don’t be shy! Some of the best business comes from referrals.
• Events: Not everything can be virtual. Plan an in-person event to get people out and experiencing your brand, then talking about it.
• Email campaigns: These are ideal for increasing the number of touchpoints a future customer experiences, and solving problems where there are gaps in the journey.

Marketing Touchpoints and the Customer Journey

Key Touchpoints in a Customer Journey

“Key touchpoints are all the moments a customer interacts with your brand, ads they see, emails they get, your website, webinars, live chat, even reviews they read online,” says Barry. “Every small interaction either builds trust or pushes them away. For us, the first download (like a checklist) is huge, and so is the first time they attend a webinar or open a pricing page.”

Some touchpoints matter more than others, and therefore should have more time, money, and resources dedicated to them. Salganik says that for a smaller business, a “compelling social media presence might be a critical early touchpoint.” On the other hand, for a larger enterprise client, he suggests that a crucial touch point would be a “well-received presentation from our team.”

How to Explore the Practical Application of Mapping

Mapping the customer journey involves visualizing, ideating, and formalizing the touchpoints involved in how the lead moves from initial touchpoints through conversion, and ultimately to brand loyalty, referrals, and long-term engagement. This is often done through research on how your audience currently moves through your funnel, then ideating with your team to turn that data into next steps.

“We start by sketching out a simple flow, from first contact, like an ad or a blog, to becoming a paying customer,” says Barry. “We map what they see, where they click, what emails they get, and when sales should step in. We also use journey analytics tools in HubSpot to see the actual paths people take. Sometimes they’re very different from what we expect.”

Salganik adds that this is where you get into the nitty-gritty of the customer journey. “We often facilitate workshops with our clients where we literally map out every conceivable step a customer might take,” he says. “For a mid-sized growth company, this could mean diving deep into their website analytics to see where users are engaging and where they’re dropping off. We might also survey their existing customers to understand their initial discovery process.” He shares that the “real application” comes when they then overlay their current marketing efforts onto this map. “It helps us identify gaps, areas of strength, and opportunities to better align our messaging and activities with the customer’s needs at each specific stage.”

Identify the Measurable Touchpoints

Measurable touchpoints are those that a tech tool or your team can evaluate and analyze through data and analytics reports, audits, and other processes. Barlow says to first identify the touchpoints you want to measure. “These are ones that we believe we should be influencing and focusing on to generate more responses. There’s no point analysing touchpoints if they’re not important enough — from an actionable, client-winning perspective — for us to drive activity toward,” he says.

From there, Barlow says to ensure all contacts and leads from those touchpoints are actually making it to the marketing team’s tools. “They cannot be left with our salesforce because we won’t be made aware of them all, so our measurement will be wrong. So, we record the lead and its source to enable us to accurately track and understand the volume, fees generated, and ROI,” he says. “Our best converting leads are from SEO, where under one in 10 become a new client within three months. Our slowest converting touchpoints, such as downloaded web content, can take many months and require hundreds of different companies downloading them before any are converted.”

How to Measure the Impact of Your Marketing Touchpoints

Get Specific About Your Goals

Are you trying to increase your leads within a specific segment of your audience? Are you trying to identify areas of drop-offs in the conversion process before and after your final touchpoint? Your specific goals will help you identify which measurements you need to gather data around.

Once you have your goals in place, you can start to ensure that your marketing team is able to answer data questions around those goals. “By doing this, we can analyse their progress every month and calculate resulting fees from new clients won. This enables us to understand the different values at each stage in the leads funnel,” Barlow says.

Determine Which Metrics Best Reflect Those Goals

Once you know what you want to measure, you need to implement tools and experts to gather that data. Metrics might include bounce rates, impressions, clicks, time on your web page or landing page, scroll depth, email open rates, click to conversion rates, form opens/completions/abandonment rates, rate sheet downloads, and signups for newsletters, offers, and other items.

Other touchpoint metrics further down the funnel include cart abandonment rates and checkout abandonment rates. Finally, after they’ve converted, there are additional metrics to consider if your goal is to improve customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and referral rates from satisfied customers.

Consider Single-Touch Versus Multi-Touch Attribution Models

Should every touch get credit for the final conversion? That’s the question at the heart of the single versus multi-touch attribution model discussion. “A crucial best practice is really understanding attribution — which touchpoints are truly driving those conversions. It’s not always straightforward, and we often explore different attribution models to get a clearer picture,” Salganik says.

Multi-touch attribution models divide “credit” for a conversion amongst each of the touchpoints in the funnel, which is something to note as you consider metrics and make decisions from them. There are pros and cons to using those models, depending on your goals. “We always look at multi-touch attribution, not just ‘last touch,’ because the first helpful guide someone downloaded is just as important as the last demo they booked,” Barry says.

How to Optimize Touchpoints to Improve User Experience

Personalize Your Touchpoints

“Make every touchpoint feel personal and valuable. We constantly ask: ‘Is this helpful, or is it just noise?’” Barry says. You can personalize through adding names, segmenting your audience to have various touchpoints speak to specific industries or roles, and other strategies.

Don’t Make Them Wait — They’ll Go Elsewhere

“We also optimize speed, fast-loading pages, quick replies to chats, and clear emails. And we always test,” Salganik adds. “For example, just by shortening our webinar registration form, we doubled signups,” Barry says. “For a smaller client, ensure their website is lightning-fast and easy to navigate on any device.”

Use A/B Testing

You aren’t supposed to just guess which touchpoint will work better — instead, try them both. “The key is to remove friction points and make every interaction as valuable and seamless as possible. We often encourage A/B testing and actively seeking customer feedback to continually refine these experiences,” Salganik says.

This is why it’s important to choose an ad platform that offers A/B testing powered by AI, which can test constantly and help you optimize on the go.

Add Actual Value

Are you just blasting out ads without any real purpose or greater value for the customer? Flip the script by putting yourself in their place and thinking through what you would want to see. “To me, optimizing touchpoints for a better user experience is about empathy. It’s about putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes at each interaction,” Salganik says.

Prioritize the Big Picture

Sometimes you need to zoom out from specific touchpoint data to look at the larger picture. “You can over-email your database to generate increased responses in the short term, but this could be harming the user experience, resulting in increased requests to unsubscribe from your database,” Barlow says. “So, marketing teams should keep an eye on wider unintended consequences resulting from their activities.”

Ask It Again — What Do Your Customers Want?

“In general, look at ways people want to engage with businesses and consider how you can provide these touchpoints and make the experience seamless,” Barlow says. “So, for example, do all your “contact us” pages on a website provide a range of ways you can be contacted — by phone, email, form, LiveChat, etc.? And is this within working hours, or have you tested demand outside working hours that may or may not justify investment to extend your service?”

Best Practices to Manage Marketing Touchpoints

Lead to Action

“You have to tie each touchpoint to a real action. Did they book a demo after the webinar? Did they open five emails, but never click anything? We track micro-conversions like guide downloads or event registrations,” Barry says.

Keep Tabs on Your Data

Your marketing team should know how each of your touchpoints is performing at any given time, but that shouldn’t be the only thing they consider. Instead, balance group brainstorming, expert advice, and metrics to achieve your goals. If you aren’t sure how to find specific types of data, bring in an expert marketing consultant, a service, or a technology tool that can dig out that data and get it in front of your team.

Don’t Be Afraid to Try New Things

A/B testing, catchy advertisements, and other out-of-the-box strategies have their place. You don’t know what types of touchpoints will work with your audience unless you try, so consider playing it safe in some respects with predictability and reliability, while branching out to explore one new idea at a time for specific touchpoints you want to improve.

Key Takeaways

Touchpoints are interactions between your company and your leads across all platforms and outreach on either side. Together, touchpoints represent a customer’s journey through the marketing funnel. Through goal setting, data gathering, concept testing, and expert input, you can improve the efficacy of your touchpoints for more conversions and more loyal lifetime customers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What role do emails play as marketing touchpoints?

Emails are essential to understanding and gauging interest through open rates, subscribe rates, unsubscribe rates, and other metrics. Targeted email campaigns can be an essential part of personalizing touchpoints for leads, and ultimately better understanding the customer journey through the funnel.

How do online advertisements act as marketing touchpoints?

Online ads build awareness, help leads through the consideration and decision/action phases, and can ultimately be the reason a lead converts. Examples include display ads, Instagram ads, video commercials, native content advertisements, and others.

How do website interactions serve as marketing touchpoints?

Website interactions might seem small or insignificant, but they are far from it. In fact, website interactions — including chatbot discussions, contact form messages, downloads, and email list subscriptions — matter. Each serves as a marketing touchpoint showing that an interested lead is ready for the next steps.