Every business has realized the need for a digital presence to connect with its audience. But a mere presence just does not suffice.
While businesses put their best foot forward to stay omnipresent digitally, customer engagement is one aspect they overlook.
Despite social media platforms emphasizing engagement and continuously updating how their algorithms work to support the trend, businesses, unfortunately, have been slow to understand the importance of digital customer engagement.
This article will highlight the importance of customer engagement in digital marketing and how to make them work together.
Why is customer engagement in digital marketing important?
Engaging customers on digital platforms means getting them involved with your brand right from the first point of contact throughout the journey.
Therefore, the right mix of customer experience and marketing efforts is essential to grasp customers’ interest at every stage of the funnel. And the first step is understanding their interests, needs, purchase histories, etc., and tailoring a personalized experience at each level.
Missing out on engaging customers through digital channels at each and every stage, for instance, from urging sign-up to purchasing, puts you at risk of losing high-intent customers.
Continuously losing customers results in running endless digital marketing campaigns to no avail. No wonder the lack of engagement in digital marketing has increased customer acquisition costs by 60%. And that’s proof of how customer engagement in digital marketing plays a key role in boosting profits.
How to drive better engagement through digital marketing?
Customer expectations have evolved with time, and so have digital platforms. Thankfully, digital marketing has transformed steadily and has plenty of engagement opportunities waiting for businesses to tap in.
Here are the top approaches you can take to drive healthy engagement through digital marketing:
- Deliver a good customer experience Customer experience makes or breaks a customer’s relationship with your business. Good customer experience shows effect right from their first contact with your business. Meanwhile, poor experience is the major reason customers lose interest in a brand and never return. 21st-century customers expect every brand interaction on digital platforms, such as social media, emails, customer support, etc., to be seamless and enjoyable. For instance, a quick order checkout process, as opposed to a time-out request during an interaction. Delivering great customer experience can also lead to an increase in word-of-mouth marketing where your satisfied customers are your spokespersons. So to do this, start by mapping all digital channels your customers use to interact with your brand. Perform an in-depth analysis, get customer feedback, pinpoint roadblocks, and try to improve the experience.
- Make the experience personalized
Customization is the driving force behind better conversions and retention. It means you’ve understood the consumers’ expectations and are ready to tweak your digital marketing campaigns to fit their mindset. By making their experiences more personal, you build customer trust and loyalty for the long term, which in turn boosts active customer engagement. Hyper-personalize customer experiences across digital channels that are a part of your funnel to invite engagement and guide them through their unique journeys. Popular examples include personalizing emails with users’ first names, web notifications with tailored product-specific details, showing high-intent ads, text messaging, etc. - Create and offer helpful and relevant content Putting out valuable content in the form of FAQs, videos, blogs, social media posts, and newsletters lets you educate customers about your products or services. Collectively, relevant content acts as a knowledge base for your customers, allowing them to refer to resources whenever needed and use them as self-service. And as far as customers consume your digital content, they are actively engaging with your brand. So tailor your content by understanding the information your consumers find valuable. Providing useful content is also a great re-engagement strategy. Ensure to distribute content across all relevant digital channels as it reminds customers of your brand and offering.
- Tie in all digital channels meaningfully
The truth about digital channels is they work optimally when interconnected. But most businesses use each digital channel, such as emails, messaging, etc., in silos rather than combined. Omnichannel engagement is the best way to engage your customers, from onboarding to reactivating silent customers effectively. WebEngage helps you use multiple digital channels like web-push notifications, emails, social media, etc., in tandem. For example, whenever a customer abandons their cart, you could use push notifications as the primary channel to remind them of their incomplete purchase, followed by a personalized email and a WhatsApp text message. WebEngage’s Journey Designer lets you quickly create engaging custom journeys, optimize them using real-time metrics and customer interactions, and enhance automated campaigns across channels. And now for some inspiring digital customer engagement examples of successful brands.
Examples of companies that have tied engagement to marketing
1. Happilo: Experimenting with web personalization
Websites are often the first point of contact customers have with your business. Web personalization is one tactic that ensures you offer visitors a great first impression and elevate engagement.
Modern users of various segments expect brands to offer relevant content across every interaction. That’s what Happilo executed with its in-line personalization strategy.
The health food brand looked to improve its retention rates and order frequency but dealt with a weak personalization strategy. Happilo used WebEngage’s in-line campaigns to create hyper-personalized and unique experiences for each user based on their custom events and attributes.
The result of web personalization? A 15% increase in repeat purchases and a massive 286% uplift in abandoned cart conversions.
The takeaway: Weak personalization can lead to high customer turnover. Target customers accurately by tailoring and optimizing your campaigns based on numerous user attributes.
2. Scripbox: 3x customer engagement through valuable content
Businesses often misinterpret leveraging user communications by spamming customers with unnecessary messages. Nowadays, where users are constantly dealing with digital noise, it’s high time brands deliver contextual information to their customers.
Scripbox cracked this code by partnering with WebEngage, leveraged automated workflows to drive engagement, and used contextual communications for better retention.
WebEngage helped the brand automate its omnichannel services using the Journey Designer. Further, Scriptbox bifurcated users based on their traits and actions and conducted A/B testing of engagement strategies to deliver the right content to the right target audience seamlessly.
The result? Scriptbox noticed a 3x increase in engagement and a 30% rise in email open rates.
The takeaway: Customer segmentation and A/B testing marketing efforts are key to enriching campaigns and ensuring the right users receive the intended content to increase engagement.
3. Perfora: Customized communication across multiple digital channels
As mentioned, businesses must prioritize personalizing user experiences across all digital channel touchpoints to ensure customers move smoothly down the sales funnel. That’s what Perfora aimed at.
The healthcare brand looked to improve user engagement and experience by personalizing its communications across channels like email, WhatsApp, SMS, and Web Push.
Perfora worked with WebEngage and used an omnichannel approach to engage its customers across these channels and various stages of the funnel, from cart abandoners to first-time buyers.
The result? Perfora saw a 13% improvement in cart recovery.
The takeaway: Omnichannel approach is the best tactic to tackle the difficulty of retaining and engaging users effectively due to its capability of building well-connected experiences.
4. Vikatan: Leverage customer feedback to increase engagement
Customers love feeling heard and understood. Capturing customer feedback lets you understand their perspective and is the best way to enhance user experience.
Vikatan, a leading media house, looked to boost its mobile and web engagement while delivering exceptional reader experiences. But the brand noticed a rise in app uninstalls and, as a result, a massive drop in user engagement.
To understand the reason behind the drastic drop, Vikatan sent feedback surveys to users who’ve uninstalled the app. As a result, the brand discovered that the app crashed on their devices, leading them to uninstall it. These surveys led to an 18% rise in app reinstallation post-rectification.
Further, Vikatan used Relays with the help of WebEngage to engage readers through hyper-personalized communications followed by a multi-channel engagement strategy using the Journey Designer.
The takeaway: Ask for customer feedback using short surveys to understand the customer’s stance and get contextual data to rectify concerns.
Conclusion
There is no either-or scenario when choosing between digital marketing and customer engagement. The right customer engagement strategy should rely heavily on digital marketing to build customer loyalty and foster business growth.
Together, digital customer engagement shows:
- How customers choose to interact with your business.
- What digital channels they are most inclined to use and prefer interacting with.
- How you could explore the pros of each digital channel for maximum impact.
- How to engage and re-engage customers through each channel and keep their interests in your offerings intact.
Creating omnichannel, connected experiences is key to driving cross-channel user engagement and increasing the customer lifetime value.
With WebEngage’s omnichannel engagement solutions, tailor well-customized experiences and targeted messaging to increase your revenue across all channels. Understand your customers better with the Journey Designer and automate campaigns at multiple stages of the customer’s journey.
Take a demo with WebEngage today to implement these use cases, boost sales, and skyrocket your revenue.
Sharath Byloli
Dev Iyer
