Digital Engagement: The Best Way to Attract and Retain Customers
Today’s consumers are plugged in and connected. Our technological world means the customer journey often takes place entirely online, so digital engagement is more important than ever.
Just how important is digital engagement? E-commerce sales are projected to account for 22% of all retail sales by 2023, up from 18% in 2021. This rapid growth is creating opportunities and putting competitive heat on web-based sales.
One way to stay ahead of the competition is by implementing a robust digital customer engagement strategy. In this post, we’ll help you jump-start your digital engagement by answering these questions:
- What is digital engagement?
- Why is digital engagement important?
- How do you increase digital engagement?
- How do you manage digital engagement?
Let’s begin!
What Is Digital Engagement?
In the simplest terms, digital engagement is the process of connecting with a customer. The process of digital customer engagement not only includes how your customer connects with your brand but also how your brand connects with the customer.
Digital engagement is more than an interaction. It can include almost any "touchpoint" your business has with a consumer. There are many channels for digital engagement. Your customer might engage with your brand by visiting a website and clicking a CTA, reading a blog post, conversing with a chatbot, "liking" a social media ad, or even participating in a webinar.
Overall, digital engagement serves to build relationships with customers. Positive digital customer engagement can spark brand loyalty and increase net promoters. Negative digital customer engagement can hurt your brand’s reputation. These aren’t the only reasons why digital engagement is important, though.
Why Is Digital Engagement Important?
Digital engagement is important because it can help manage customer expectations, improve the customer journey, and lead to more conversions. When your customers are engaged throughout their journey down the sales funnel, they are more likely to align with your brand and share additional information.
You’ll find that digital customer engagement can:
- Create a favorable brand experience
- Grow trust and consumer loyalty
- Improve the customer journey and user experience
- Help you collect valuable data
Data collected by digital engagement is extremely valuable to businesses and brands because it shows great insight into your customers. Look at engagement data like blog views, CTA clicks, and chatbot interactions. In doing so, you’ll find information that can help you come up with new content ideas, streamline strategies, revamp messaging, and take advantage of other marketing methods.
Customer interaction is important, and increasing digital engagement comes with many benefits.
How Do You Increase Digital Engagement?
You know digital engagement is important and that increasing customer touchpoints can come with a host of benefits. But how do you increase digital engagement? Following are some best practices for doing that.
Add a live chat feature to your website
Numbers from Forrester indicate that 41% of customers expect websites to have a chat feature.
This is a huge group of consumers, and it could mean that failing to take advantage of live chat software on your site is ignoring the needs of a significant segment.
A live chat feature on your site can help poster a personal connection. Live chat also saves time and creates an opportunity to provide great support. It is no surprise that data from Zendesk indicates that customers are 3 times more likely to make a purchase when they reach out over chat. You can even use your live chat tool to see what web page customers are looking at, and engage them when the time is right.
Use offline messages
Live chat is ideal, but human agents can’t be available 24/7. Consider using offline messages to engage with customers even when you’re not available.
You can use offline messages to encourage customers to send a message a human will see later, send an email, or even request a callback. An offline message will provide an acceptable method of interaction for customers even when you’re not around.
Automate responses to common questions
You can go above the use of offline messages by automating responses to common questions. Your brand can take advantage of the benefits of digital engagement by using a chatbot to fulfill basic customer service requests.
You can automate responses on your website chatbox and even via social media platforms with a robust chatbot tool like JivoChat. Businesses have found that chatbots can upsell and cross-sell, qualify leads, conduct surveys, and provide basic customer service.
Create a knowledge base
A knowledge base is an extensive collection of information that covers almost everything your customer needs to know. Creating a knowledge base is a great way to provide digital engagement to those who prefer self-service. In fact, 70% of customers actually prefer self-service.
A knowledge base will provide answers and helpful information for customers in every section of the sales funnel. Provide information about your product specs, walk buyers through the purchase process, give after-purchase support, and more. A knowledge base is especially important for SaaS companies, as you can help your customers understand how to use your product and reduce the volume of incoming support calls.
Give customers more options
Customers come from all walks of life with all kinds of preferences. While 40% of internet users say they prefer to interact with chatbots, the other 60 percent might prefer phone calls, live agent chats, email, or other methods of support.
Give customers more options to meet their varying communication preferences. Consider offering immediate callback or sharing a digital business card that will help them contact your customer success representatives at their convenience:
Or scheduled callback so customers feel like they are in control:
Offer multilingual support
The online marketplace has no boundaries. This means digital engagement should be accessible to all, regardless of location or language. Multilingual support shows your customers you speak their language — literally.
It is hard to engage with customers when you don’t speak the same language. A translation feature on your website and especially in your chat window can promote digital customer engagement with speakers of other languages.
Offer an omnichannel experience
An omnichannel experience lets you make the most of digital engagement across platforms and engage customers in an ongoing way. In fact, 73% of customers use more than one channel or platform on their journey to conversion.
What makes an omnichannel experience great? It will provide a fluid experience, save your customers from repeating themselves, let you sell new products based on past purchases, improve satisfaction, and align all departments.
How Do You Manage Digital Engagement?
Digital customer engagement is essential to the success of your business. The best way to manage digital engagement is to rely on a single platform to streamline interactions and create a seamless omnichannel experience for consumers.
An omnichannel digital engagement strategy is convenient for consumers, creates a consistent journey, is relevant to expectations, and fosters quality connection. Build relationships, encourage brand loyalty, and see conversions increase by creating online touchpoints that increase digital engagement.
JivoChat is perfectly designed to be the center of your omnichannel digital engagement strategy. The widget is easy to install and use on a website, the software works on any device, and conversations can be translated into multiple languages. JivoChat can track flow across platforms and let your customer communicate where they are, whether that’s on your website, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or on the phone.
Are you ready to level up your brand’s digital engagement? Learn more about JivoChat features and sign up for free today.
Sign up and try JivoChat for yourself!