Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / Why Unengaged Touchpoints Are Costing You Customers
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about something that makes most marketers uncomfortable — the touchpoints they've created that nobody actually uses. Luna: Ouch. That's the marketing equivalent of leaving your voicemail inbox full, isn't it? Lucas: Exactly. And it's more pervasive than people think. I was looking at a study from last quarter — a mid-market B2B software company did a six-month audit of their customer journey map. They identified over a hundred discrete touchpoints. Luna: A hundred? That seems high for a B2B company. Lucas: It does, until you realize they counted every email, every LinkedIn ad variant, every webinar replay link, every customer support ticket follow-up. And when they scored each touchpoint for engagement — defined as meaningful interaction that moved a lead closer to purchase — forty percent of those touchpoints scored near zero. Luna: So nearly half their marketing apparatus was basically decoration. Lucas: Worse than decoration — it was costing them money and confusing their messaging. The head of marketing told me their cost per engaged touchpoint was roughly four times higher than they'd assumed, because they were allocating budget across all hundred touchpoints equally. Once they pruned the low-engagement ones, their conversion rate actually went up fifteen percent within two quarters. Luna: I love that. But I think a lot of teams resist that kind of pruning because they're afraid of losing reach or brand presence. Lucas: That's the exact fear. And it's rooted in a misunderstanding of what a touchpoint is supposed to do. A touchpoint isn't just 'a place where a customer encounters your brand' — it's 'a place where a customer takes an action that signals intent.' If nobody clicks, watches, downloads, or replies, that's not a touchpoint. It's a noise point. Luna: Noise point — I'm stealing that. So what's the practical framework for identifying these noise points without spending six months on an audit? Lucas: Three steps. First, list every single touchpoint in your current journey map — every email, every social post, every landing page variant, every event booth. Then assign two scores to each: engagement rate — how many people actually interact — and influence rate — how often that interaction appears in your CRM as a first or last touch before conversion. Luna: And then the third step is the hard cut, right? Lucas: Yeah. Any touchpoint that's below the twentieth percentile on both scores gets flagged for removal or radical redesign. The company I mentioned found that twenty percent of their touchpoints drove eighty percent of their conversions — classic Pareto principle. The rest were either redundant or inert. Luna: I want to push back a little, though. What about touchpoints that build brand awareness or trust over time without a direct conversion event? Like a podcast episode or a thought-leadership article — those might not show up in last-touch attribution. Lucas: Fair point. That's why the influence score matters. You look at first-touch attribution, assisted conversions, and time to conversion lag. A podcast episode might not be the last click, but if it's consistently the first touch for high-value accounts, it's earned its place. The issue is when a touchpoint has neither direct engagement nor any attribution weight — it's just sitting there because someone built it three years ago and nobody thought to check. Luna: So the real enemy is inertia, not brand building. Lucas: Exactly. And inertia is expensive. The average B2B company spends about sixty percent of its marketing budget on activities that generate less than twenty percent of its pipeline. That's from a 2025 benchmark study by a major consultancy. Pruning those silent touchpoints isn't just about efficiency — it's about freeing up budget for the touchpoints that actually work. Luna: Speaking of freeing up budget — and I want to be sincere here — if this kind of practical analysis is useful to you as a listener, that's exactly why we keep this show ad-free. A handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — that's literally what funds these conversations. We don't run ads, and that's a deliberate choice. Lucas: Yeah, and it means we can dig into specifics like this without a sponsor telling us to keep it light. So if you've gotten value from today's episode, that link is the way to keep it going. Luna: Alright, back to the touchpoint audit. Lucas, you mentioned the Pareto principle — what's the single most common type of underperforming touchpoint you see? Lucas: Automated email sequences that were set up for a campaign and never turned off. I see companies running the same six-email nurture flow from a 2022 product launch, sending it to everyone who ever downloaded a white paper. The open rates are below ten percent, the click rates are below one percent, but nobody kills it because 'it's automated, so it's not costing us anything.' Luna: Except it is costing — in list fatigue, unsubscribes, and brand dilution. Lucas: Exactly. One company we worked with found that their top of funnel email sequence had a twenty-three percent unsubscribe rate over six months. That's almost a quarter of their list leaving because of one inert touchpoint they forgot to audit. Luna: So what's the timeline for a reasonable touchpoint audit? For a team that doesn't have a data scientist on staff. Lucas: You can do a meaningful first pass in two weeks. Week one: export all your touchpoints from your marketing automation platform, your CRM, your ad platforms, and your website analytics. Week two: score them using simple engagement metrics — open rate, click rate, conversion rate, cost per interaction. Flag anything that's below your median on at least three of those metrics. Then decide: kill it, redesign it, or test a variant. You don't need a data scientist — you need a spreadsheet and the willingness to kill your darlings. Luna: And that fifteen percent conversion lift from pruning — is that typical? Lucas: It varies. But in my experience, most companies see at least a five percent lift just from removing touchpoints that are competing with themselves. The bigger gains come from reallocating the freed-up budget into the twenty percent of touchpoints that are already performing. One B2B SaaS company I advised took the budget from seven underperforming trade show appearances — which were costing them three hundred thousand dollars a year — and put it into direct mail for their top fifty accounts. Their pipeline from those accounts went up forty percent. Luna: Direct mail in 2026 — that feels counterintuitive, but I've seen data that it works for high-ticket B2B. Lucas: It works because it's rare. When everyone else is sending emails, a physical package stands out. But that's a different episode. The point is: the budget was trapped in touchpoints that were silent, and moving it to a high-engagement channel created real impact. Luna: Let's talk about the emotional side of this. Marketers often have personal attachment to the touchpoints they created — the webinar series they launched, the newsletter they wrote, the campaign they designed. Lucas: Oh, absolutely. The hardest part of a touchpoint audit is not the data — it's the conversation with the person who built it. You have to separate the creator's effort from the touchpoint's performance. One tactic I've seen work is to frame it as a test: 'Let's pause this for ninety days and see if anything breaks.' Usually nothing breaks, and that becomes the evidence. Luna: So it's a scientific approach to what's often an emotional decision. Lucas: Exactly. And it protects the team culture. Nobody feels like their work is being trashed — it's just being tested. If the touchpoint is truly valuable, the data will prove it when you reactivate it. Luna: I want to close with a forward-looking thought. As more companies use AI to generate content at scale, the risk of touchpoint bloat is going to explode. A single marketer can now create a hundred variants of an ad, fifty email sequences, and twenty blog posts in a day. Lucas: That's the next frontier. We're going to need a new discipline — call it 'touchpoint hygiene' — where auditing and pruning become as routine as creation. Otherwise, the customer journey becomes a maze of identical paths that all lead to the same dead end. Luna: And that's the opposite of a good experience. A good journey is clear, intentional, and respectful of the customer's time. Lucas: Right. The goal isn't to have more touchpoints — it's to have the right ones. And sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do is take one away.