Marketing Touchpoints: What They Are & How to Optimize Them

Marketing touchpoints are any interaction a potential customer has with your (or your client’s) business. It could be landing on your website, clicking on your ad, reading a blog post, talking to a sales rep, etc. All of a user’s touchpoints as they move from “stranger” to “customer” is called their customer journey. 

The more you understand your customer journey, the easier it is to see which marketing drives results and optimize your campaigns accordingly.

For some businesses, the customer journey is just two steps—1) someone finds your product and then 2) makes a purchase.

For other businesses though, it can be much more complex:

1. Someone sees an ad for your business
2. Goes to your website to learn more
3. Submits a request for a quote
4. Signs up for a $500 purchase

Each interaction is a marketing touchpoint, and each pushes a potential customer closer to a purchase decision.

But what if you could shorten that customer journey? Or optimize it so a $500 purchase turns into a $10,000 purchase? This is the value of analyzing and understanding your marketing touchpoints and customer journey. And it’s what we’re talking about today.

We’ll discuss what marketing touchpoints are, the role they play in the customer journey, benefits of tracking touchpoints, and much more.

What Are Touchpoints in Marketing?

Again, touchpoints are any interaction potential customers have with your marketing. These can be online (clicking an ad, reading a blog post, submitting a form) or offline (having a call with a sales rep, visiting a physical store).

Each touchpoint plays a role in persuading someone to become a customer.

The thing is, not all touchpoints are equally effective in driving that action.

Some have a big impact on turning a visitor into a customer. And others only move the needle a tiny bit.

Think of it like trying to overflow a glass of water by dropping in different sized rocks—it could take 20 small stones to do the same job of just two or three large ones.

One goal of marketers should be to identify which touchpoints have the most significant impact (the big rocks) and guide users to those touchpoints to speed up the customer journey.

Pro Tip

Remember, the number of touchpoints is just one factor to consider when optimizing your customer journey. You should also think about customer value.

 

For example, a 5-touchpoint customer journey may lead to a $500 customer lifetime value. But a 15-touchpoint one may lead to a $10,000 lifetime value.

 

As such, be sure to equip yourself with tools like WhatConverts that let you track both customer journey… 

and customer value…

Marketing Touchpoints Examples

The list of possible marketing touchpoints is practically endless. Why? Because there are an infinite number of ways customers can—and do—interact with your business.

You know the major players here:

• Online ads
• Referrals
• Newsletters
• Video content
• Blog posts and other content marketing materials
• Talks with company representatives
• In-person trade shows
• Offline advertising
• Product reviews

However, there are less obvious touchpoints, too, like mentions by influencers, community sponsorship, one-on-one social messages, and even overheard conversations. These are all marketing touchpoints.

Each interaction, no matter how big or small, influences your audience’s decision to make a purchase.

What’s essential for marketers, though, is:

1. Knowing which touchpoints they can track
2. Understanding how users navigate those touchpoints (the full customer journey)
3. Using that data to optimize their marketing

Marketing Touchpoints on the Customer Journey

As people unfamiliar with your business (“strangers”) engage with more touchpoints, they move through the various stages of the customer journey.

1. Stranger → Visitor
2. Visitor → Lead
3. Lead → Customer
4. Customer → Repeat Customer

For some businesses, customer journeys are short:

For others, that journey can be much much longer:

But no matter what kind of customer journey your audience follows, certain touchpoints facilitate that transition from step to step.

The chart below shows which type of touchpoint works best at which stage of the customer journey.

Pro Tip

Use the chart above to plan out your calls to action for each touchpoint.

 

For example, CTAs for conversion actions like trial signups or quote forms should be readily available on blog posts. Email correspondences should have CTAs to set up sales meetings. And current customers should receive upgrade offers to keep them coming back for more.

How Many Marketing Touchpoints Before a Sale?

It’s widely cited that, on average, it takes eight touchpoints to generate a sale or other conversion.

However, take that stat with a grain of salt.

Industries vary in a million ways—in pain points, in customer lifetime value, in use cases. And just because eight is the average, that doesn’t mean one business might need two while another needs 50.

Put simply:

The number of touchpoints needed for a sale depends on your business.

Pro Tip

Don’t get too hung up on how many touchpoints you should have for a sale. Instead, focus on 1) having the tools needed to track your touchpoints and 2) making continuous improvements to your customer journey using that data.

Why Track Touchpoints?

So, why should a marketer like you track touchpoints and customer journeys in the first place? What’s the point?

Because it helps you be a more effective marketer.

Here’s how.

1. Better Understand What Marketing Is Working

One of the biggest challenges agencies face is being able to show clients the value of their marketing.

Sure, business might be good. But how can you prove it’s doing well because of your efforts?

Collecting and tracking your audience’s touchpoints gives you the marketing attribution data you need to do just that.

With the right tools, you can trace conversions, purchases, and even hard revenue numbers back to a single piece of marketing (an ad, blog post, newsletter, etc.).

And that means you can prove to clients your marketing has real value.

How to Prove Your Value

Let’s say you’re running PPC campaigns for a home services client. Things are going well and business is good. But they’re skeptical of whether that success is actually due to your efforts.

 

With WhatConverts, you can look at the Lead Manager to see the exact attribution data (campaign, ad, keyword) for individual leads…

Or you can zoom out for a birds eye view of the same data across multiple leads…

It’s indisputable proof your client’s investment is producing real results.

 

Try WhatConverts for free for 14 days.

2. Spot Optimization Opportunities

Tracking your marketing touchpoints also opens up the door to insights you can use to optimize your customer journey.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to find blog posts with the highest rate of generating quote form submissions. That way, you can point other post CTAs to that article and boost your overall conversion rate.

To do that, you need to analyze your customer journey and identify post conversion rates using last click attribution.

This is pretty easy in WhatConverts:

1. Go to the Lead by Source report.
   
2. Adjust your filters and dimensions to target blog pages.
   
3. Switch to Last Click Attribution.
   
4. Find your top converting pages.
   

Now, with that info, you can swap out CTAs for ones that point to the post with the highest conversion.

You could even switch the view to show pages by Sales Value earned.

Then, you could use that data to point to pages that generate the most revenue per lead.

The main takeaway is this:

The more marketing touchpoint data you have, the more you can fine-tune your customer journey for better results.

3. Gives a Full-Picture View of the Customer Journey

Lastly, tracking marketing touchpoints lets you understand how customers interact with your business across all your channels before purchasing.

For instance, you may have campaigns for:

• Google Ads
• Bing Ads
• LinkedIn
• Google My Business (GMB)
• Email
• SEO

And customers may engage with multiple channels before converting.

They might:

1. Click on a Google Ad to learn about your business
2. Browse through your features pages after finding them organically
3. Subscribe to your newsletter
4. Set up an appointment for an estimate through GMB

Each of these touchpoints comes from a different source. However, each is important in driving a lead to becoming a customer.

With the right tools, you can see how users interact with your business on a linear timeline—no matter what channels they’re coming from.

For instance, in WhatConverts, you can see a full customer journey that includes the pages your leads are seeing and the marketing that drove them there (Google Ads, organic, social, etc.).

As you can see, the lead below started with Google Ads, converted, but then browsed our content by finding it organically on Google.

They then signed up for a trial.

This full-picture view shows how several blog posts contributed to a signup—something that may not have happened without them.

We might not have caught this insight if we hadn’t seen how these channels (Google Ads and organic) overlapped in the customer journey.

Wrapping Up

Tracking and analyzing marketing touchpoints is integral to being an effective marketer.

Doing so lets you:

1. Prove your marketing value to clients
2. Catch optimization insights
3. Better understand the customer journey

And with WhatConverts, you get the data and interface you need for all three benefits.

For more on customer journeys and marketing touchpoints, check out the guides below:

• How Does Customer Journey Marketing Work
• What Is Marketing Attribution & Which Models Are Best?
• How to Solve 3 Attribution Problems Stealing Your Results

Ready to get the data you need to understand marketing touchpoints ? Try WhatConverts for free for 14 days!