When people describe a brand they love, they’re not just talking about products and services. They’re thinking of many intangibles that make up their experience and interactions. It’s how they feel when they interact with your brand touchpoints.
Brand touchpoints are all the surface areas—off-site online advertising, social media posts, product packaging, retail product displays—that make up a consumer’s experience of a company. Read on to learn about common types of brand touchpoints across the customer journey and best practices for creating memorable and frictionless ones.
What are brand touchpoints?
A brand touchpoint is any point of interaction between a customer and your business. In ecommerce, that list is long. It spans digital interactions on your homepage, product pages, and social media, and physical touchpoints like packaging, retail displays, and the delivery driver at the door. In an omnichannel world where shoppers move between your online store, a marketplace, and a pop-up shop, every platform—and the transitions between them—is a touchpoint.
When touchpoints are disjointed, customers notice. A brand touchpoint exists whether you’re intentional about it or not. If your password reset email doesn’t include your logo or isn’t in your brand voice, it’s still a touchpoint; if your 404 page is generic and feels spammy, that’s a touchpoint.
Brand touchpoints vs. brand assets
Brand touchpoints are the moments where customers come into contact with your business. These can be carefully curated, like an Instagram post, or ones outside your control, like a dented shipping box.
Brand assets are the building blocks you create to communicate your brand personality. These include your logo and taglines, typography, color palettes, and brand voice.
Using your brand assets effectively across your brand touchpoints can help create a cohesive experience for your customers, giving them a clear idea about what your brand is all about. This means, for example, that your product pages and marketing emails will have the same brand voice, and your logo will be used consistently across your in-store experience, website, and product packaging.
Common types of ecommerce brand touchpoints
Think about someone shopping for a couch online. Pre-purchase, they might see a targeted ad, click through to your site, sign up for a discount code, and start getting emails. During purchase, they’re reading reviews, chatting with support, and going through checkout. Post-purchase, they get an order confirmation, shipping updates, a white-glove delivery, and retention emails suggesting pillows and throws that pair with their new sofa.
Being aware of potential and likely points of interaction can help you create a smooth customer journey. Here are some key brand touchpoints.
Pre-purchase
Before a customer spends a dollar, they’ve already formed an impression. Pre-purchase touchpoints shape customer expectations and influence whether someone keeps browsing or bounces:
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Social media content. Your Instagram posts, TikTok videos, and Pinterest boards are often early brand touchpoints.
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Paid digital advertising.Sponsored content and display ads that appear off-site put your brand in front of new audiences.
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Email sign-up and welcome series. That pop-up offering 10% off is a touchpoint, too. A strong welcome email sequence educates prospective customers on your brand story.
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Product reviews and word of mouth. Product reviews on third-party sites like Trustpilot and Judge.me are touchpoints you don’t control, but you can shape them by how you ask for reviews and respond to the ones you get.
Purchase
Every touchpoint in the purchase stage has the opportunity to help drive a customer to checkout or away from your site altogether:
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Pricing and promotions. How you price and discount your products is a brand touchpoint in itself. A luxury skin care line running constant flash sales sends a different signal than one offering curated gifts with purchase.
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Product pages.Product photography, sizing charts, and copywriting all influence the purchasing decision.
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Live chat and customer support. A shopper mid-browse with a question will remember the tone and speed of your response. Whether that’s a real person or an AI chatbot, the interaction should feel helpful and on-brand.
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Checkout flow. Your checkout flow should feel consistent with the rest of your website, even if it redirects shoppers to a third-party processor. Trust badges, brand colors, and a smooth flow all affect how confident a customer feels handing over their credit card information.
Post-purchase
The sale is not the finish line. Post-purchase touchpoints help build brand loyalty:
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Order confirmation and shipping notifications. Order confirmation emails can see a 54% open rate. Branding them turns a routine update into a reinforcement of your brand identity.
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Packaging and unboxing. For online stores, the box, packaging, and thank you card are some of your few physical touchpoints.
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Follow-up and retention emails. Messages nudging customers toward complementary products keep the relationship going. Collecting customer feedback through these emails also gives you data to improve.
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Returns and exchanges. A friction-free return process can help turn a disappointed buyer into a repeat buyer.
Best practices for creating effective brand touchpoints
- Use Shopify Brand Assets to store your brand kit
- Assign every touchpoint a job in your customer journey
- Scale your touchpoints to match your price point
- Carry your brand voice into every touchpoint
- Close the gap between your digital and physical brand
- Train your team on your brand, not just your products
- Brand your checkout and post-purchase notifications
- Treat returns and complaints as brand touchpoints
Building a cohesive brand experience takes real effort, whether a shopper is browsing product pages at midnight on mobile or unboxing a delivery at their front door.
Use Shopify Brand Assets to store your brand kit
A centralized brand kit and brand guidelines help everyone pull from the same assets, whether they’re on your marketing or operations team. You can use Shopify’s Brand Assets to upload your default and square logos, set primary and secondary color palettes with contrasting colors, and add your slogan, short description, and social links. Any sales channel or app connected to your store can pull those assets through the Brand API, so your square logo shows up correctly in social profile pictures and your colors stay consistent in checkout without having to copy and paste HEX codes.
Assign every touchpoint a job in your customer journey
Not every touchpoint should do the same thing. Some should educate, others build brand loyalty, and others drive conversion and customer satisfaction. Give each a clear purpose so every interaction pulls its weight. For example:
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A welcome email can educate subscribers on the raw materials and products you use.
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Endcap displays at retail stores can drive brand awareness of a new collection.
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Post-purchase SMS texts can reduce support tickets by sharing delivery timelines.
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A dashboard for customers signed up for a rewards program can be designed to boost repeat purchases.
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Product samples at a brick-and-mortar store can aim to convert foot traffic into first-time buyers.
Scale your touchpoints to match your price point
A $15 candle and a $3,000 sofa require different levels of lead nurturing. Higher price points typically demand more touchpoints because the decision carries more weight. If you’re selling a product that costs more than a few hundred dollars, think about what happens between the first ad someone sees and the moment they enter their credit card number. That gap should be filled with education, reassurance, and social proof that the purchase is worth it.
A lookbook, a sizing consultation over chat, or a follow-up email with customer testimonials can each close a small piece of that trust gap before checkout. And if you’re wholesaling to stockists or in business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce, expect some of those key touchpoints to be genuinely high-touch. That may look like a Zoom walkthrough of your product catalog, a sample box shipped to their office, or a face-to-face meeting.
For example, Original Duckhead sells its signature umbrellas online as well as via retail stockists. The latter requires a longer, more deliberate path to conversion. “We talk about eight to 10 touchpoints to convert a retailer,” says founder Morgan Cros on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. She notes the work continues after closing: “Once they become a customer, it doesn’t just end there. We support them with in-store displays [and] beautiful imagery.”
Carry your brand voice into every touchpoint
Just like your brand kit holds HEX codes and fonts for your brand visuals, have voice and tone guidelines dictating how your brand speaks. That includes everything from your captions on Instagram to your chat widget messages. Build those with intention: Do you use contractions or spell things out? Is your brand playful or buttoned-up? Do you use slang? Or do you use formal words like “complimentary” instead of “free”?
Giovanna Alfieri, the vice president of marketing for feminine care brand The Honey Pot, shares her approach on an episode of Shopify Masters. “I think the brand has done just such an incredible job in the touchpoints where it makes sense to leverage humor to create that connection,” she says. That’s been especially impactful for a product category people may not talk about casually. A playful, direct voice helps normalize the conversation and makes the brand feel approachable rather than clinical.
Shopify’s Messaging tools support consistent branding. You can save custom email and SMS templates so every campaign starts from the same tone. Shopify Sidekick generates content that matches your brand’s voice. It also supports seven languages beyond English, including Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Portuguese, if your brand speaks to an international audience.
Close the gap between your digital and physical brand
A customer who finds you online and visits your store should feel like they’re dealing with the same brand. Here are a few ways to unify your digital and physical brand:
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Print your Instagram handle on packaging inserts, encouraging customers to share their unboxing.
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Place QR codes at your retail location linking to online tutorials or a digital lookbook.
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Send email campaigns promoting in-person events and follow up with photo recaps.
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Match in-store signage typography and colors to your online storefront.
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Feature physical locations on your website so online shoppers know the space exists.
Train your team on your brand, not just your products
Your team can know every product spec and still deliver an off-brand experience. A support agent who answers a question accurately but in a tone that sounds nothing like your website copy has technically done their job, but the customer feels the disconnect. Brand training means teaching people the values, tone, and standards your company runs on.
A one-page brand cheat sheet goes a long way, but a proper brand handbook is even better. Include your voice and tone guidelines, a few do-and-don’t examples of how your brand speaks, your visual identity basics, and a short primer on your origin story and values so everyone can tell it consistently.
Some of your most visible team members may be external partners you can’t formally onboard. Be selective about who represents you, including external customer service and support teams, retail staff, freelancers, delivery partners, and any social media influencers you partner with.
Brand your checkout and post-purchase notifications
If your store feels curated but checkout looks like a default template, that disconnect lands when the customer is deciding whether to trust you. Leaving the checkout experience unbranded is a missed opportunity. The same goes for what happens after they buy. Order confirmation emails and shipping updates get checked repeatedly. If those messages show up with no logo and generic formatting, you’ve wasted a touchpoint that had a captive audience.
Shopify’s Checkout Branding lets you add your logo, set your brand colors for buttons, accents, and error messages, and choose fonts for headings and body text, so the page on which a customer enters their credit card feels like the same store they just browsed.
Use Shopify Messaging to customize every automated email your store sends, including order confirmations, shipping reminders, delivery, and return notifications. For stores that want to go further, templates built with liquid variables let you pull in dynamic order details while keeping the look and tone fully on-brand.
Treat returns and complaints as brand touchpoints
A return may be the last intentional interaction a customer has with your store, giving it outsized influence in shaping their final impression. Making the process painless goes a long way: Prepaid labels, clear timelines, and proactive refund updates help here.
For complaints, speed and empathy are what people remember. If someone reaches out frustrated and your team responds quickly with a real fix, you’ve given them a reason to try your brand again.
Brand touchpoints FAQ
What is an example of a touchpoint?
A brand touchpoint is any interaction between a customer and your brand. For an ecommerce business, this could be seeing a product ad on social media, browsing your website, going through checkout, or receiving a shipping notification after an order.
What are the five customer touchpoints?
These five customer touchpoints map to the entire customer journey: awareness, consideration, purchase, post-purchase, and loyalty. They can be further simplified to pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.
What is the rule of seven touchpoints?
The rule of seven is the idea that a customer needs to encounter your brand at least seven times before taking action, though this number will vary by industry and product price point. The trust that converts a browser into a buyer is built across repeated touchpoints, not in any single one.
