Create an Unforgettable Experience with Customer Journey Touch points

Great client and customer experiences start way before a person arrives at your website or begin working with you. Long before people get exposed to your brand on a personal level, they’ve followed a series of customer journey touch points that empowered them to get to know your brand more. In this article, I’ll show you how customer journey touch points help shape an unforgettable customer experience that makes it easy for folks to say Yes to getting involved in what your business offers. We’ll also take a look at the different types of customer journey touch points, from those focused on the pre-purchase period to those focused on the post-purchase period.

What is a customer journey touch point

The first thing that we want to clearly understand is what a customer journey touch point is. When you think of a touch point, you can relate it to any exposure someone has to your brand or any interaction someone has with your business. There are countless touch points that we can establish as we work to establish a strong online presence. What matters most is that we are deliberately establishing our touch points in a way that makes the most sense for what our brand stands for and the culture we wish for our business to develop.

Any time you are looking to improve your brand presence or establish a deeper connection with the audience you wish to serve via your business, chances are you will want to focus on customer journey touch points. Your touch points, when put together like a channel people ride on, form your customer journey. We can provide people with a super fun and memorable journey to go on… or we can fall short and create a journey that makes folks want to get off at the first gate. Our customer journey, which is made up of our touch points, is what establishes the experience people have with our brands. This experience shapes the way people associate with and think about your business. As you can see, your touch points are incredibly important!

Why customer journey touch points matter

Quite simply, your touch points are what shape the journey people go on that influences the experience people have with your brand. Why does this matter? Well, it is how people develop opinions, feelings, and beliefs about your brand. Those things they develop directly impact the actions one takes in relation to your business. If someone has a great experience with your brand because your touch points were well thought out and incredibly memorable, they may easily go on to get involved in your business offerings or even begin referring your business out to other people. The better your customer journey, the easier it becomes to attract aligned people to your business. Since your touch points form the journey individuals take as they learn more about your brand, when we focus on developing fantastic touch points we can directly impact the success we have in attracting and working with great folks.

Your touch points help you create a personalized experience for your target audience. As we know from our previous article on personalized marketing, creating this customized experience can support us in tailoring our marketing efforts to our target audience in a way that helps them feel important, seen, understood and deeply prioritized. This ultimately supports brands in cultivating superb relationships with the community that is built around their brand. Relationships drive so much of business and the relationships you form via consciously developed journey touch points will help your business continue to grow.

Identifying your touch points

Familiarizing yourself with your customer journey touch points isn’t rocket science. It’s actually quite an easy concept to understand because you can break your touch points down into three primary phases.

Pre-Purchase: The pre-purchase can consist of many touch points in and of itself. What you want to know about this phase is that it consists of all the interactions someone has with your brand that helps them get to find out about you, know you, and begin trusting you. The relationship building process starts at this phase and should be nurtured so that individuals move to phase 2.

Purchase: If the pre-purchase phase was thoughtfully built out with several touch points, you will have individuals move to the purchase phase as a byproduct. This phase is when folks begin interacting with your offerings in a way that encourages them to get involved with your services and/or products. There are many touch points you can cultivate within this phase to support folks in getting involved in your business offerings.

Post-Purchase: Once someone goes into your purchase phase, they then should be encouraged to keep moving down your customer experience channel into this post-purchase phase. In this phase, you consider all the things that happen after someone purchases something from you. There are many touch points you can establish within this phase that can help you retain clients and provide impeccable experience that helps you easily form referrals.

Now that we understand the main phases that help you begin to develop your customer journey touch points, let’s now take things a step further and get more specific with how we can develop our touch points within each phase.

Developing your exposure stages

When beginning to map out your customer journey touch points, you want to think deeply about each and every aspect of the experience you want to create for folks. This requires considering how people will feel at each phase of your customer journey and how you want to establish your touch points in a way that makes people feel considered, thought of, and prioritized. Let’s look at each of the three phases that we discussed above in more depth, breaking down the touch points that could be a part of each phase.

First exposure: Within the pre-purchase phase, the first touch point you want to think about developing is the first exposure touch point. The first exposure touch point is when someone first gets introduced to your brand or discovers your business. Therefore, you want to ask yourself “How do people discover me?” and begin mapping out the ways in which you want to help people easily get introduced to your brand.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Social media presence

• Created user generated content

• Advertising

• Events

• Digital content marketing such as blogging

• Podcasting

• SEO optimization

• Collaborations and partnerships

When establishing the first exposure touch point, the most important thing to note is that the content you create and ways in which you market your brand in this stage should be simple, basic, and entry level. Think of this phase as the first date! You are just starting with introductions and there is no need to rush the relationship! This stage is all about simply meeting one another by clarifying how you will meet your target audience! During this phase, you want to make sure you know who your target market is, what their habits are, where they spend their time, and how you can connect with them. This phase is all about creating awareness of your brand, so the strategy you want to adopt to develop first exposure contact comes down to focusing on building your brand presence and helping people to discover you!

Second exposure: During this second touch phase, people already know that your brand exists. Therefore, your approach should be a bit different than the first exposure. In this touch point, your content can get a bit more niche-specific, where you are answering common questions you know your target audience is asking and create content that is user generated. This touch point is all about building interest in your brand after a person becomes aware that you exist. During this phase, you can focus on a handful of content types as well as activities to help take the relationship to the next level. This touch point can be considered the second date, so you want to help folks get to know you more! On a second date, we are going deeper with the relationship and starting to get more vulnerable as well as intimate with people.

Here are some second exposure ideas to get you started:

• Blog writing that is more niche topic specific

• User generated content that answers common questions of your target audience

• Informational social media content that informs folks about your business offerings

• Strong marketing campaigns that provide people with value and support that builds trust and loyalty

• Networking and relationship building habits that form deep connections and personalized experiences

• Email newsletters

• Word of mouth and referrals

• FAQ pages

• Freebies and lead magnets

The main difference you want to understand between first exposure and second exposure touch points is that your first exposure touch point focuses on helping people discover, find and become aware of your brand. Therefore, your content and marketing approach should be simple, direct, straightforward, and deeply relevant to your target audience habits, activities and behaviors. Your second exposure touch point is about taking the relationship to the next level, where you begin to nurture the connections with those who became aware of your brand. Let’s look at the example of having a new individual join your email list. Say this person discovered your brand via a quick Google search, landed on your website, and was prompted to join your email list. This first exposure journey depends on SEO optimization to help your website attract people, a strong website presence that encourages people to take action, and an email marketing strategy to help build the relationship once they opt in. Your second exposure contact starts the moment someone opts in to your email list. What you do once they opt in will form the experience someone has in that second touch point. Strong email marketing automations that are personalized and memorable can help you take that relationship to the next level.

Third exposure: Once someone goes through first and second exposure, if done well they will then move into third exposure which is all about kicking off the purchase phase. The first two exposure points we discussed above are all within the pre-purchase phase, where as the third exposure drops into the purchase journey. In this touch point you want to take the relationship even further to a degree that builds loyalty and trust. Think about this phase as the third date, where you are beginning to decide whether or not you want to make the relationship official! There are many touch points we can put into place in this phase, but what you want to lean into the most is providing an ethical, compassionate, and transparent purchasing experience that helps folks feel empowered to take things to the next level with you.

Here are some third exposure ideas to get you started:

• Website optimization

• Sales page and landing page design

• Providing reviews and testimonials

• Providing case studies

• Optimal product / service descriptions

• Sharing your processes an operations

• Providing fantastic customer service and support

• Establishing a strong and sustainable onboarding process

• Cart experience

• Delivery and receivables process

The third exposure touch point is often done in a way that upholds manipulative marketing methods and unethical sales practices. In order to create a customer experience that leaves people feeling empowered and safe to trust your brand, you want to take time to consider how you can form this touch point in a way that is completely honest and transparent. During the purchase phase, we want to move into focusing on the experience we are providing people that directly relates to our products of services. Up until this point, the main areas we were focusing on consisted of creating awareness about our brand and building interest in our business. Now, we must uphold a sense of responsibility toward how we are delivering on what we promised in the previous phases by developing an unforgettable experience with our products and/or services!

Forth exposure: The journey does not stop the moment someone purchases something from you! Once someone goes through the purchase phase of your customer journey, they will then be encouraged to keep moving into the post-purchase phase. During this forth exposure, you want to instill certain things to help support the person in their journey with your brand.

Here are some things to support the fourth exposure:

• Feedback forms

• Ability to leave reviews

• Loyalty programs

• Intentional off-boarding process

• Referral programs

• Maintenance programs

In this final exposure, we are all about developing a culture of brand loyalty. If this phase is done well, you will likely begin cultivating an incredible referral system that supports your business in gaining sustainability for the future. The experience we provide folks at every stage of our customer journey is not just important but helps you ensure you are doing everything you can to create sustainability for your business now and into the future.

Let’s recap!

You now understand that you can look at your customer touch points by breaking them down into three main phases: The pre-purchase phase, the purchase phase, and the post purchase phase. Within each of these phases we can create many touch points, all of which help us further establish our customer journey and provide an impeccable customer experience. Within your main customer touch point phases, we now know there are four main exposure points we can focus on developing to build out our touch point road map. The first two exposure points are pre-purchase points that are all about building brand presence and helping people to not just discover our businesses but also begin forming a relationship and connection with them. The second two exposure points switch gears to start then focusing on deepening the relationship with those who decide to take the relationship with our brand to the next level by purchasing a product / service. In these last two touch points our focus is on delivering an unforgettable experience with our business that forms loyalty and retainment.

If you are new to developing customer journey points, start with the first two phases that we discussed in this article and begin building out your touch points for first and second exposure stages. Once you build these stages out, you then can move to focusing on the remaining two phases and exposure points, which will ultimately form your customer journey map! The key with customer touch points is to not try to add in a million touch points or do all the things that wind up spreading you too thin. Rather, you want to identify what ideas listed above make the most sense for your brand to lean into and begin developing your skills in regards to those realms. If you are not into blogging, then focusing on building a blog as one of your touch points doesn’t make sense. Consider what types of content you are passionate about creating and what types of touch points feel the most exciting for you to prioritize!

I hope this article helps you clearly understand customer journey touch points and shows how doable it is to develop a remarkable experience for your target audience.

Until next time…

Natalie Brite