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Customer engagement is the basis for consumers to be loyal to your brand. For your customers to connect with your company —that’s what engagement is all about—the digital customer relationship channels that digitization puts at your fingertips are decisive.
Digitization focused on engagement has the following benefits:
- Improved user experience (maximum customization) and customer service.
- Strengthening of the links with the client.
- Increased conversion rates.
This post analyzes the digital tools and channels that increase engagement.
Customer engagement
Engagement with the client, or customer engagement, is the promotion of a relationship with the client that goes beyond the transactions with it and seeks to create long-term links.
Engagement is the emotional connection between the customer and the brand. It is about the customer buying from you but also about genuinely caring about how that purchase has gone and your product or solution’s value to the consumer.
Digitization, at the service of customer relations
The cultivation of this relationship is done through all the interactions that take place between the brand and the consumer. With the boost of e-commerce and the digitization of sales, a greater percentage of these interactions occur 24/7 —24 hours a day— in the digital sphere.
Thanks to digitalization, the positive part of that close contact with the customer is that you have many opportunities to increase consumer engagement with the brand and generate new conversions. Also, if you do things right, there is no word of mouth more powerful than the one provided by digital engagement.
The other side of the coin is that the digitalization of the activity can amplify any error through social networks.
For the customer to be happy and vibrate with your brand and also for them to give you a second chance if something has not gone well, it is essential to make optimal use of the different digital customer relationship channels.
The digitization of the relationship with the consumer allows us to take advantage of all the opportunities to serve them and to sell them more things based on an engagement strategy. Not only the product or service you sell must be good, but also the consumer’s digital experience and the standard of the digital relationship established with him.
Digital engagement
Digital customer engagement uses digital channels to communicate with customers you want to win back, current customers, and potential customers.
This is a key type of engagement because customers are increasingly digital and expect digitization to contribute to an agile and personalized service.
The customer wants your brand to know their preferences and purchase history. Increasingly, expectations are for personalized attention and experience.
Companies with good digital engagement keep the data of all the interactions on the different platforms and use all that knowledge to design new and better customer engagement strategies.
Digital engagement strategies are as dynamic and changing as customers are. The constant flow of consumer knowledge obtained through digital engagement facilitates the personalization of the relationship with the client and the improvement of strategies directed toward the brand’s target.
Also Read: Five Digital Marketing Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make
Digital channels for customer relations
We highlight the main digital channels to improve customer engagement:
- Website and app
- Social networks
- Live chat
- Email marketing
- Self-help tools
- Webinars
- Testimonials
- Push notifications
- Videos
- SMS
- Voice assistants
Website and app
The websites and applications of a brand are fundamental parts of the digitalization of a company and digital engagement.
The content, the service, the interface, and the user experience that you offer through the web and app have a decisive influence on the customer’s perception of your brand.
To increase customer engagement, the websites and applications through which you sell and build your brand must be based on these three concepts: relevance, personalization, and incentives.
- Relevance: Share content relevant to your brand’s audience. And when we say relevant, we mean that they are as useful as they are exciting, inspiring, and capable of igniting that emotional spark that makes customer engagement possible.
- Personalization: All interactions ( touchpoints ) in the consumer’s journey through the brand’s web/app are an opportunity to cultivate engagement and to advance on the path to conversion. The more personalized these interactions are, the more results you will get.
- Incentives and rewards: Many interactions offer the consumer incentives and rewards (discounts, trial periods, etc.) for using your website and app.
Social networks
Social networks are no longer just platforms for relationships with friends and family; they are also a space to connect with customers.
An active presence —with campaigns and responses to consumer requests— and an attentive presence —analysis of everything said— on social networks helps you get to know your brand’s audience better.
Even negative feedback has a high value since it allows you to react humbly to criticism and to improve the aspect that has been questioned.
Live chat
A live chat on your digital platforms (web, app) is one of the digital engagement tools that most help connect with the customer. A human assistant virtually assists the consumer through instant messaging, translating into a better user experience and conversion rates. The feedback and knowledge that you get from your client through this channel is very valuable.
Email marketing
Email is one of the digital channels that allow higher levels of personalization. From personalized email marketing according to customer searches and preferences to fully personalized communications via email.
Email correspondence is an opportunity to increase customer engagement:
- Launch of a new product or service
- Welcome or signup emails
- Emails with a survey or to obtain feedback
- Transactional emails (related to online sales)
- Thank you emails
- Newsletter
Self-help tools
Consumers increasingly value the opportunity to help themselves through self-help tools such as chatbots, FAQs (frequently asked questions), help videos, and explanatory posts on the corporate blog.
Self-help content and assistants reinforce trust in the brand and, therefore, increase engagement.
Webinars
In B2B, webinars are a great way to increase engagement. Clients or potential clients share concerns, express doubts, and express preferences. Also, during a successful webinar session, the host brand reinforces the emotional connection with the customer.
Like other channels that digitization makes available for engagement, webinars offer feedback fueling continuous improvement.
Webinars can also provide relevant and engaging content for new blog posts. If a webinar participant, or a group of them, raises an interesting topic or angle, we can transfer that interesting discussion to other brand digital platforms.
Testimonials
Testimonials from satisfied customers are one of the most trust-building engagement techniques.
Push notifications
Push notifications are short messages that are activated (pop-ups) on the user’s screen to communicate offers and other messages that should always be relevant.
This digital engagement tool is enormously effective as long as the notifications are personalized and have a clear user value proposition.
What you never have to do is send irrelevant or repetitive messages because the engagement will suffer.
Videos
Videos have become digital content with a great impact on customer engagement.
A good video content strategy helps to strengthen links with consumers for several reasons:
- They can contribute to the emotional connection with the client.
- They can facilitate digital word of mouth. On social networks, users share more videos than other types of content.
Beyond video tutorials and product videos, there is a wide spectrum of approaches—FAQs, best practices, and consumer-generated videos—that a brand can address to strengthen customer relationships.
SMS
SMS is a digital channel with the client widely used by companies. The open rate is usually above 90%.
Voice assistants
In a context increasingly influenced by Artificial Intelligence (AI), voice assistants are a stronger digital channel for customer engagement. Dialogue with these tools takes digital engagement to a new level.
Also Read: 13 Trends That Will Mark Digital Marketing During 2023
