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Touchpoints: How to Optimize Conversion to help your sales

When it comes to focusing on touchpoints that are important to conversions for an online business, there are several strategies that can be implemented in assessing what is most important to your clients. But most importantly, we should discuss the first burning question…

What is a touchpoint?

A touchpoint in a customer journey refers to any point of interaction between a customer and a business. It can include different stages of the customer journey such as awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase. In the context of online business, touchpoints can include website design and navigation, content, user experience, shopping cart and checkout process, email and marketing campaigns, and customer service and support which can span beyond the scope of the website, their e-commerce or their social media.

In terms of conversion, a touchpoint is important in the customer journey where a customer can make a decision about whether or not to complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service. For example, a touchpoint in the customer journey could be the shopping cart and checkout process, where a customer decides whether or not to proceed with a purchase.

How do you find important touchpoints relevant to your website?

To find out which of the touchpoints are most important to your business, you should take a multi-faceted approach to identify, optimize and measure for key steps in the customer journey. All aspects happen in tandem and require multiple implementation steps to be sure you capture where problems or opportunities exist.

A. Identifying key touchpoints

The first step is to identify which touchpoints in the customer journey are most important for conversions. This can be done by analyzing customer data, such as website analytics and customer feedback, to determine where customers are dropping off or experiencing difficulties. Specifically, you can use a few of the following strategies:

  1. Analyze website analytics: One of the most effective ways to identify key touchpoints is to analyze website analytics and events that are taking place on your website today. Looking at events and actions happening on your pages can provide you insights into customer behavior, such as where customers are dropping off or experiencing difficulties. By identifying patterns in customer behavior, businesses can pinpoint specific touchpoints in the customer journey that need improvement.

  2. Conduct customer surveys: Although it’s a more intrusive effort, another way to identify key touchpoints is to conduct customer surveys to collect feedback. Surveys can provide valuable insights into customer pain points and areas where they are experiencing difficulties, if the survey is designed well.

  3. Observe customer interactions: Observing customer interactions can also provide valuable insights into key touchpoints. This can be done by watching customer interactions with a website or app, or by conducting user testing to see how customers interact with a product or service.

  4. Analyze customer feedback: Analyzing customer feedback can also help identify key touchpoints. Businesses can use social media, customer support tickets, and other feedback channels to gather information about challenges visitors experience with a business’ products.

  5. Heatmap analysis: By using heatmap analysis, you can see how customers interact with different elements of the website, such as buttons, links, images, and forms. If you suspect that your UI or UX is causing issues for clients, see about implementing a software like Hotjar to understand where clients are facing issues with your page and where they spend most of their time when they visit your site.

  6. Session recording: By session recording, you can see how customers interact with the website, and how they navigate through different pages. Similar to the heatmap analysis, but thorough session records can show how a customer might interact with a page instead of only showing where they spend most of their time.

Below are a list of areas worth investigating first to determine where issues or opportunities may exist in the customer journey:

The above is not an exhaustive list, but it is a list of areas worthy of exploring to get an idea of exactly what issues or opportunities might exist.

B. Optimizing Key Touchpoints

Once key touchpoints have been identified, the next step is to optimize them to improve conversions by determining if the touchpoint creates a problem driving a negative feedback loop or it creates an opportunity with a positive feedback loop that exists driving more conversions.

Sample Problem

For example, throughout the analysis of finding key touchpoints, you may find that there are a group of clients that get stuck on a certain page that includes an animation or banner element that sees these clients drop off. This could be a good area to check if a visitor is being deterred from your website and bouncing as a result.

Sample Opportunity

An example of an opportunity that may exist without realizing it is determining a pattern of conversions when visitors join from a social media channel such as Twitter. If Twitter visitors are more likely to convert than visitors from other platforms, this creates an opportunity by establishing a marketing experiment where you can push advertising that prompts key touchpoints and validate the hypothesis.

C. Measuring and Analyzing Results

After making changes to key touchpoints, it’s important to measure and analyze the results to determine their effectiveness. This can be done by using website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to track changes in metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, and average time on site. Additionally, there are some proven practices used to validate a hypothesis such as:

The practice of measuring is a timely process that will require consistent evaluating of the results and determining if a signifcant result is noticeable.

D. Continuously testing and iterating

Optimizing key touchpoints is an ongoing process, and it’s important to continuously test and iterate to ensure that the changes are having the desired effect. In the previous section, we noted the tests that can be used to determine if a perceived issue or opportunity exists in the customer journey. When validating a hypothesis, it’s important to ask the following questions:

Provided you can find out some of the answers or test for them, you’ll be ahead of the curve in terms of gathering data-driven insights about the important elements of touchpoints in the journey with visitors to your pages and clients who are successfully converting online.

By focusing on key touchpoints, optimizing them, measuring and analyzing results, and continuously testing and iterating, businesses can improve conversions and enhance the overall customer journey. In the event you have burning questions about areas where you could improve your conversions and where customers are converting that remain unanswered, reach out to one of our advisors at EV Advisory to determine if your approach is sound. We help small- and medium-sized businesses improve their results online with a data-driven approach.