What are brand touchpoints and how do you analyse them?

6 min read

Marketers often use the term ‘touchpoint’ when they’re talking about interactions with customers. But what exactly are brand touchpoints? They're actually vital for driving customer loyalty, with one study finding that a range of touchpoints are needed to encourage customers to keep spending their money with your brand. 

In this guide, we’ll take a detailed look at what brand touchpoints are and why they matter. We’ll also discuss how they should be measured, categorised and analysed so you can improve the customer journey and boost customer loyalty.

What are brand touchpoints?

When we talk about the customer experience, we’re actually talking about the result generated by a series of interactions between a company and a customer. Each of these individual interactions are what we call ‘brand touchpoints’.

A brand touchpoint is defined as any interaction between your brand and a customer. Each business has hundreds of touchpoints, but popular examples include

• Websites
• Face-to-face interactions with the customer service team
• Transactions (both on a checkout page and in a store at a till)
• Reviews or ratings of a company
• Blog content
• Social media output
• Signage
• The uniforms of staff members
• Advertising campaigns

Some company brand touchpoint examples are entirely within your control, such as your website, sales reps, and advertising strategy. However, there are some brand touchpoints you only have influence over (such as third-party ratings and word of mouth) and some that are totally outside of your control (such as competitors discussing your brand)

Why are brand touchpoints important?

Every brand touchpoint matters. This is because each individual interaction a customer has with a company can influence both their opinion of the brand and their purchase decision. Consistent brand touchpoints emphasise the importance of delivering a seamless and memorable experience.

Whenever a customer interacts with your brand, a positive or negative impression will be made. If your brand touchpoints aren’t up to scratch, then your brand’s reputation and integrity will be damaged, and your customers won’t return. For example, if a customer can’t get in touch with a member of your customer service team to ask a question about your product, they’ll likely take their business elsewhere and not return.

So, with this in mind, let’s look at how you can create effective brand touchpoints and deliver the best possible brand experience for your new and existing customers.

How should you measure brand touchpoints?

As each interaction matters, it’s vitally important that brands determine how effective each individual brand touchpoint is. This way, the brand can then optimise each touchpoint and ensure any inefficiencies are addressed.

If you want to improve the interactions you have with your customers, then you need to understand where you’re having those interactions and what each interaction looks like. Without this level of understanding, it’s impossible to measure how effective each brand touchpoint is and whether these interactions are fostering customer loyalty consistent with your brand values.

Identify all touchpoints

Before you can start to measure the effectiveness of your brand touchpoints, you first need to identify all possible customer touchpoints. When carrying out this process, you should make a list of all the possible ways that a customer interacts with your brand. In doing so, you should split these touchpoints into the following categories:

• Pre-purchase experience: Such as your website, online advertising communication touchpoints, and social media platforms
• Purchase experience: Such as your packaging, in-store experience, and the performance of sales reps
• Post-purchase experience: Such as your product experience, ongoing employee interactions customer support, and the performance of loyalty programs

At the end of this process, you should have a comprehensive list that includes every possible way a customer can interact with your business. So, think deeply about the customer journey and every touchpoint the customer can encounter.

As part of this, you must consider both the offline and online experience. While some customers will come to you via your website, others will be persuaded by your in-store experience. Due to this, you must measure the effectiveness of both digital and non-digital touchpoints.

Assign impact ratings

Once you’ve identified every touchpoint, you must assign an impact rating to each. This will then act as a measure of the importance of each touchpoint.

Impact ratings are non-scientific, and there’s no exact formula for assessing exactly how important each touchpoint is. When assigning impact scores, you should put yourself in the shoes of your customers and consider the positive and negative interactions you’ve previously had with brands. This way, you can begin to understand the importance of each touchpoint.

On top of this, you should also collect customer feedback when devising scores. When doing this, you should send out surveys. This way, you can be confident that you have accurately measured the impact of each touchpoint.

How to measure non-digital touchpoints

Measuring digital touchpoints is far simpler than measuring non-digital touchpoints. However, you should still ensure that all of this data is placed in a CDP. This way, you can prevent silos and generate a powerful understanding of how customers interact with your brand.

With non-digital touchpoints, it’s much harder to judge effectiveness and inefficiencies. However, there are still techniques you can use. For example, you can use secret shoppers to measure the effectiveness of various in-store customer touchpoints.

If you need further support when measuring non-digital touchpoints, then you can also enlist the help of focus groups. If this is too expensive, instead spend time gathering feedback from customer reviews or looking for brand mentions and interactions on social media platforms.

How should you analyse brand touchpoints?

Analysing brand touchpoints is difficult. While some touchpoints simply need to be ‘good enough’ or delivered at a level of competitive parity, others need to differentiate your company in the minds of your customers.

That said, all of your brand touchpoints must:

• Clearly represent your brand and your business
• Help you stand out as a class leader
• Motivate your customers to take a desired action (such as making a purchase)

Once you’ve audited your touchpoints, you should identify which touchpoints require improvements and then create a priority list that shows which will be improved and when. This will ensure a seamless customer journey that meets customer expectations while reinforcing a strong brand identity.

Improve your understanding of customer touchpoints with Apteco

By continually tracking and measuring all touchpoint-level data, you can ensure that you know how to improve the individual interactions and resulting experiences that drive customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Once you’ve unified all of your customer data, you can turn it into a source of competitive advantage. By gathering data from multiple sources, you can generate a powerful understanding of each customer and how they interact with your business.

For this reason, you should use our software to perform a journey analysis. This can teach you more about the goals of your customers, where they encounter friction, and which touchpoints are causing churn. It can also show you:

• Which interactions have led to a purchase
• Which interactions and journeys provide the highest value for your business
• How customer journeys have changed over time

Once you’ve developed a keener understanding of your customers and how they interact with your brand, you can also deploy an omnichannel marketing approach. By harmonising your messaging in this way, you can ensure that each customer touchpoint is consistent and performing as intended.

With the help of our solutions, not only can you determine which touchpoints you should focus on, but you can also discover more about how customers interact and engage with your brand. Ultimately, this means that you can create an omnichannel approach that is tailor-made to them. From here, you can add Apteco Intelligence (AI) to your marketing campaigns and harness the full force your data provides.

To discover more about how our solutions can help you realise the value of your data and improve your brand touchpoints, book a personalised demo today.