Identify customer touchpoints during purchase
Identify customer touchpoints during purchase
1. Review the flow reports in your website analytics platform to see internal online touchpoints that drive customers to your site.
Identify the pages involved in the customer’s conversion, such as product pages, contact pages, case study pages, and pricing pages. In Google Analytics, for example, use the following flow reports: Behavior Flow outlines how users navigate from one page to another, helping you find pages that they want to visit on your site. Goal Flow helps you learn if your prospects are completing set goals and shows you if users are leaving your site in the middle of the journey.
2. Review your customer journey and list the steps involved with evaluating your products.
Key steps include problem, solution, and product awareness. You may also want to include steps connected to evaluating products on your website.
3. List the marketing emails you send between signup and purchase.
These messages often include: signup confirmation lead nurturing sequences product demo reminders abandoned browse abandoned cart emails general marketing emails that your full list receives.
4. Interview your sales and customer support teams and review the interactions that occur when customers are purchasing.
Touchpoints often include: product demonstrations webinars emails sent to customer support live chat If you have many in-purchase touchpoints, use a spreadsheet to track the data you collect in these team interviews. Use the following columns in your spreadsheet: Channel Campaign Where customers are told to go after hearing more about the product they’re buying.
5. Visit review sites where your products are listed. See what people are saying about your products, as well as your purchase process.
As you read over these reviews, ask: What features are people discussing? What are your products compared to? How accurate is the information they are sharing? What are common complaints about your product or purchase process?
6. Review your point-of-sale process or online buy flow.
Add a product to the cart, choose a payment method, confirm the order and shipping details, and complete the checkout.
7. Conduct customer interviews and ask previous customers what they read, researched, or looked up while making a purchase.
Not every lead or sale can be attributed to a concrete touchpoint. Asking something as simple as Where did you do last-minute research when you were making a purchase? on customer feedback surveys can net you a lot of qualitative data and identify trends that can’t be captured through pure analytics, including: Customer referrals. Overheard conversations. Ads in offline channels, such as radio or printed ads. Affiliate referrals that weren’t properly tracked through a link.
8. Use a competitive analysis tool, such as Ahrefs or SEMRush, to identify your competitors’ marketing and promo channels and the specific touchpoints these promotions point to.
Reviewing your competitor’s touchpoints should give you an idea of any possible touchpoints you’re not currently using, and also help you refine your strategies. Example touchpoints your competitors may use include: Case studies. Abandoned cart emails. Retargeting campaigns for their online store.
9. Map the touchpoints you identified back to your customer journey.
Review where these current touchpoints fit in terms of buyer stages, such as identifying a problem or researching a solution.