How to Optimize Vital Brand Touchpoints to Boost User Experience
How your business introduces itself to your customers matters. Every time they come across your brand – an ad, your social media profile, and, of course, your website – it’s a chance to court them. A great introduction and, more importantly, excellent follow-ups can turn a no-name internet user into a valued and loyal customer.
The secret to building that relationship is in your brand touchpoints. Optimize them, and you enhance the user experience, build a winning reputation, and cultivate a community of loyal fans.
Ready to get started? Here’s everything you need to know:
What Are the Vital Brand Touchpoints?
Brand touchpoints are every instance where a potential or existing customer comes across your brand online or in person. With a clear brand identity and winning message, those recurring introductions can increase customer loyalty, sales, and reputation.
A brand touchpoint is your website, social media profile, and customer service team. Implementing first call resolution best practices, for example, can help enhance every customer’s experience with your brand just as much, if not more, than a well-designed website.
Brand Touchpoints in Your Control
Some brand touchpoints will be in your control. These are the ones you will want to focus on the most. If you clean up the house with the touchpoints you can control, the ones you aren’t in charge of will follow suit.
Digital Touchpoints
Digital touchpoints include everything from your email marketing funnel to your social media content posts. These digital touchpoints are critical to getting right since you can remarket to users who come across your profile and hopefully snatch up a newsletter signup or even a sale.
Physical Touchpoints
Some brands (those with brick-and-mortar stores or booths, for example) will also have physical touchpoints:
- Staff uniforms
- Store design
- Trade shows booths
- Merchandising
Communication Touchpoints
Communication touchpoints are used to inform. They are a vital part of your content marketing strategy and include:
- PR marketing
- Content marketing
- Professional talks
- Blog posts
- Guest posts
- Publications
Human Touchpoints
Every person who works face-to-face with customers is a human touchpoint. This means your retail staff are human touchpoints, as are your customer service representatives, sales representatives, and so on.
Brand Touchpoints Out of Your Control
There are a few touchpoints that are entirely out of your control. You cannot influence third-party ratings, customer feedback, or word-of-mouth directly. What you can do, however, is work to improve your customer experience.
Why Care About Brand Touchpoints?
Brand touchpoints are your opportunity to engage with established customers and newcomers alike. They are how you reach out from your office, to the wider world.
Improving your brand touchpoints, unifying them, and clarifying them helps in so many ways, including:
- Bringing in new customers
- Creating a unique and memorable identity
- Improving customer experience
- Increasing brand loyalty
- Enhancing brand identity and unity
There are so many reasons to clean up and improve every brand touchpoint as well. 40% of customers won’t do business with a brand if they can’t use their preferred touchpoint (a website or social media profile). More importantly, 84% of customers claim that their experience with a brand matters more than the product itself.
The 7 Touchpoint Rule
The 7 touchpoint rule is simple. It means that, on average, a customer needs to interact with a new brand seven times before they’re ready to buy. This means you must put your brand front and center in the first two stages of the buyer’s cycle.
You don’t need to wait passively for them to interact with your brand. You can use the best sales intelligence tools to find and follow up on leads with a custom approach. Similarly, you can leverage remarketing tactics and even add influencers to your touchpoint strategy.
How to Optimize Brand Touchpoints to Boost User Experience
Optimizing your brand touchpoints is an easy way to drive up sales. In a C survey, 46% of respondents said they’d pay more for a brand they trust. Providing positive experiences and working on enhancing customer satisfaction is just how you build that trust.
If your business is live, then you already have touchpoints. That’s why the first step will always be to use these auditing and optimizing tips to clean up your current efforts:
- Identify all your touchpoints: Identify and sort all touchpoints into digital, physical, communication, and human.
- Start measuring effectiveness: Create KPIs to measure if you have effective brand touchpoints and which ones are lacking or underperforming.
- Audit your touchpoints: Find issues with each touchpoint and how they can improve. Consider if your touchpoints properly reflect your brand identity and message.
- Run competitor analysis: In a competitive market, you need to stand out. Research the market dynamic, your competitors, and what’s trending to ensure your efforts rise above the rest.
Now, let’s explore some strategies to implement if you’re serious about optimizing your brand touchpoints.
1. Provide a Seamless Customer Journey
Providing touchpoints across each stage of the customer journey is how you can deliver a seamless experience. If you’ve started customer journey mapping, then you know these five stages:
- Awareness stage: This is when you introduce your brand to your target audience and highlight what problems you solve.
- Consideration stage: This is when customers compare your brand to competitors. They’ll read guides and reviews and consider their options.
- Purchase stage: When a customer is ready to purchase.
- Retention stage: This is your chance to further your customer relationships and achieve post-purchase loyalty with creative content and highly optimized touchpoints.
- Advocacy stage: If you’ve exceeded customer expectations, then your customer is ready to recommend your brand to others.
When it comes to advertising successfully using your brand touchpoints, aim to create campaigns specific to each stage of the buyer journey.
This can include user-generated content campaigns to help with the consideration stage, for example, and engaging blog content to help with the retention stage.
2. Identify Which Touchpoints to Focus On
It’s not realistic to put equal emphasis on every single touchpoint you offer. That’s why it’s important to do your research and pick out the key ones you want to focus on first. Your website is a must, of course, but which social media platform is best for your brand depends on your target audience, for example.
3. Be Consistent Across Touchpoints
Every single one of your touchpoints needs to feel like it’s coming from the same source. This means you need to use the same brand assets, the same message, and showcase the same values. In a study conducted by Digital Silk, 68% of polled brands state that brand consistency increases revenue by 10% or more.
4. Provide Personalization
It’s so easy to provide personalization, especially with your post-purchase touchpoints. This is done almost exclusively through email newsletters. You can start email campaigns that provide user-specific updates, deals, discounts, and exclusive product bundles.
These emails are designed to keep customers thinking about you in a positive light since they’re curated with that specific customer in mind.
5. Update Your Website with Fresh Content
Creative content is a great way to provide essential value during the consideration stage. For best results, consider creating interactive content. Other great ideas include product demonstrations or even a how-to blog article that helps customers learn how to use, care for, or repair your products.
6. Draw Customers to Your Store
If you have a physical store, then you need to make a strong impression. These physical touchpoints matter most since they act as a constant billboard advertising your business and are also a source of sales.
To get positive impressions from passersby, you need to start with a great store design. This design needs to look good, feel good, and even smell good. Put a big emphasis on your products, and consider going the extra mile by offering free samples.
7. Provide Award-Winning Customer Experiences
Invest in training for all of your sales staff and service staff. This is true not only for in-person, customer-facing assistants but for your office staff as well. The good news is you can support your customers and sales representatives with a UCaaS.
What is UCaaS? It’s a cloud-based solution that puts all the communication tools into a single platform so that your teams can bring up past conversations and even get extra support for every call, email, or DM.
The goal is to give every customer or potential customer a winning experience so they feel safe in your brand’s hands.
8. Start a Brand Ambassador or Influencer Program
Influencer partnership is a big part of any touchpoint strategy. Those influencers can provide their audience with a live unboxing experience, product showcase, and even advertise your loyalty program rewards if you have one.
Collaborations with influencers can have a huge impact on your sales or referral programs, but you do need to choose your partnerships carefully. Each one is a touchpoint, so each one must match your brand values.
Key Takeaways
You need to give every customer an outstanding brand experience. To do that, you need to be specific about the touchpoints you use, make sure they remain consistent and cohesive, and that they add value. Think about providing a seamless experience online and offline, and you’ll see a rise in loyal customers – and sales.
