THE RELEVANCY OF DIGITAL TOUCHPOINTS IN OMNICHANNEL MARKETING ON THE CHOICE OF RELEVANT SALES CHANNELS – BASED ON GERMAN FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS

Abstract

All German financial service providers work with omnichannel marketing and try to support the classic, traditional sales channel with digital touchpoints. They are also trying to transform traditional direct sales into a hybrid model so that they can later handle sales directly online. The target is a fully digitized sales channel. The thing, which makes a digitalization difficult is that the Germans are very traditional regarding their investments. This leeds during the time to a very conservative finance industrie in Germany. There is a lot of ambiguity within the topic of digital touchpoints. Especially because there are a lot of interactions and touchpoints with the customer and a high complexity within the topic, and they are not yet explored. Many companies implement digital touchpoints to the customer with no clear approach or strategy at all. They have no idea what the results of their investments in touchpoints will be. This paper will help to understand and assess the relevance of digital touchpoints on the way to digital sales. Influencing factors will be shown and typologies of determinants will be highlighted that have an impact on the choice of sales channel. The results of the work can be used to design sales and marketing strategies for managing customers. Further research will be done. Expert interviews and a survey will be used in the further work. Mixed methods will find their place during the further research. With his research, the further work will find an answer to the question if and how digital touchpoints influence the choice of sales channels based of German financial service providers. Findings of this Paper are, that the the influence of digital touchpoints on the choice of sales channels has not yet been investigated within the conservative German financial sector. This can be concluded from the fact that no results can be found in common databases within the question and the focus of this work. Another indication of a research gap is provided by a study conducted by the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in 2020 (www.hs-fresenius.de, 2021), which states that influencer marketing can be useful for German financial institutions if the brand matches the person advertising. It becomes clear that the research is still at the beginning, because within the study, it is clarified whether influencer marketing can be useful at all and not how efficient or relevant such a digital touchpoint can be. Another indication of ambiguity within this question is a study by a neurologist who suspects that branches will still be the most important touchpoint for banks and insurance companies and thus goes against the prevailing opinion of digital marketing (www.horizont.net, 2021). In further research (Auge-Dickhut, 2014), the business model and the customer are considered, and a multi-channel marketing strategy is derived out of the research, but digitality and the impact of the touchpoints are left out and not considered further here. Similarly, another research (Brock, 2015) describes how the financial institution can transform away from mono-channel marketing, towards multi-channel marketing, but again does not further consider the impact of analog and digital touchpoints. It becomes interesting if one does not refer to the German area and looks at the search for research in this direction worldwide. There has been some work done around the subject area, but no one has yet answered exactly the question of this thesis or even explored it. Therefore, I will work on this and will try to close the open research gap in my further research.