Understanding your customer touchpoints can be the difference between an average conversion rate and a great conversion rate – let’s show you how.
Within every service-based business, there is a customer journey.
This customer journey is made up of several components that play a key role in your brand’s perception, customer experience, and ultimately, whether or not a prospect will choose to become a customer of your brand.
In our last post, we discussed the two types of leads that can be found along the customer journey: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).
To summarise, an MQL is a lead that has moved through the funnel purely through interactions with your marketing channels. For instance, they’ve read a blog, looked at your landing page, downloaded an eBook and so on. However, once the transaction moves offline or to sales, such as booking an appointment or a free demo, as is the case with most service-based businesses, the lead becomes an SQL.
Today, we want to discuss another critical element of your customer journey that is closely related to MQLs and SQLs: customer touchpoints.
What is a customer touchpoint and why are they important?
HubSpot defines a customer touchpoint as any interaction between a business and a customer that occurs during the customer journey. They note that each customer touchpoint significantly influences the customer experience, as well as brand perception.
So, all of those interactions, above, such as a blog or a phone call, count as touchpoints.
When building the ideal customer journey for your service business, it’s important to consider each customer touchpoint along the way, as once you understand each, you can optimise these interactions to increase your conversion rates and make more sales.
To assist in the optimisation of your customer journey, you can utilise several touchpoints such as digital marketing techniques and MarTech (Marketing Technology) that will help you to convert strangers and prospects more effectively into paying clients.
For more information, check out our 9-Step Digital Marketing Strategy Guide.
Ultimately, with the right customer touchpoints, your business will begin to see:
- More highly qualified leads
- More sales calls
- More proposals
- More signed clients
For this reason, it’s important to regularly revisit and consider your typical customer journey to understand where you can utilise further tools and support.
10 customer touchpoints that will lead to more conversions for your business.
When it comes to crafting your customer journey, it’s important to understand that leading a prospect to the point of becoming an MQL requires different touchpoints to those used for nurturing an SQL through the funnel.
This requires a strong and integrated partnership between your Marketing and Sales teams to ensure you’ve built an effective customer journey.
In the beginning, digital marketing is a great tool to help move your prospects through the marketing funnel. You can utilise touchpoints such as:
- Always-on thought leadership content
This is the type of content that you can use to educate your audience about your brand, show them you are experts in your field and how you solve their problems. Content such as blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos are great tools as they will work for you 24/7. - A well-optimised website
Simply having a website is no longer enough. You now need to ensure that your website is optimised to provide a great user experience and successfully convert a certain percentage of your audience into MQLs. This means making sure the right information is quick and easy to find and simple to understand. - Contact and Subscribe forms
Website forms are a great way to gather a prospect’s details by offering them something in return, such as a free consultation or an educational eBook. Once a lead completes the form, that’s when they become an MQL.
Once you have an MQL, there are several following touchpoints that your Sales team can use to continue to move the lead through the customer journey towards conversion. - Prequalify the lead with Calendly
Not only is Calendly a great tool to help your prospects book a consultation with your Sales team, but it also has great prequalification tools that you can use to help determine the viability of the lead before going any further. - Add the prospect on LinkedIn
This shows your prospect that you know who they are and that you want to get to know them better. You can even send them a nice message to thank them for their interest in your brand. - Send a personalised voice memo
More than just a personalised message, a personalised voice memo through WhatsApp or LinkedIn shows your lead that you value them and that you’re willing to go the extra mile to connect with them. It also demonstrates that you respect your prospect’s time, as they can listen to your memo on the go, rather than stopping to read what you have to say. - Send an intro pack
A digital introductory pack is a great way to promote your brand’s value and explain exactly what you can do to solve your prospect’s problem. Including a video in your intro pack can also help to make your pack more appealing for the lead, as video is often preferable to text. - Send a personalised video proposal
Create and send a personalised video service proposal to your lead using Loom or Canva Pro to show them exactly how what you’re offering is going to help them. Again, this shows that you are willing to go the extra mile for your clients. - Send video introductions of your team
Sending video introductions in tandem with your proposal will help to humanise your brand and show your prospect exactly who they will be working with, which will deepen the connection that you have with your lead from the start. - Follow up all communication
A lead will rarely say “yes” the first time. It’s important to follow up on all communications, including voice memos, LinkedIn messages and videos to show your prospect that you are genuinely interested in gaining their business.
Using these multiple touchpoints, you can streamline the customer journey which will improve the conversion rate and have a significant, positive impact on the ongoing success of your brand.
Do you need help with strategic digital marketing for your business?
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At Ask Digital Marketing, we combine decisive digital strategy and managed marketing execution to help B2B service-based businesses build demand, establish thought leadership and own their industry through digital business marketing.
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Just get in touch with us and we can discuss your business to help you navigate the digital marketing landscape towards success.
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