What is digital
customer
engagement?

With the right digital engagement strategy, you can create, nurture and accelerate customer relationships at scale. Here's everything you need to know to build and deliver the exceptional experience customers expect.

Digital customer engagement refers to every online interaction your customer has with your brand, with each interaction either accelerating or obstructing the buyer's journey.

Think about the customer's journey like a funnel:

• The top of the funnel could include online marketing promotions, your social media posts and interactions through direct messaging on social media;
• In the middle of the funnel, a customer might interact with your video or blog content to learn more about your products; and
• At the bottom of the funnel, when the customer has made a purchase, they may stay engaged by messaging a chatbot for support, sharing product reviews with others, completing customer satisfaction surveys and engaging in upsell opportunities.

Digital customer engagement is all about creating an experience, which is more important than ever. According to PwC research, 73% of customers point to the brand experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, prioritizing it not far behind the price and product quality. Not only that, but 42% say they would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience, while 65% say a positive experience with a brand is more influential than great advertising.

But watch out: That same research shows that 32% of customers will stop doing business with a brand they love after one bad experience.

By keeping customers engaged and happy throughout the buyer's journey, you're far more likely to increase your close rates, helping you drive revenue and profit. According to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report 2022, 73% of business leaders report a direct link between their customer service and business performance.

Not only will you make the sale today, but you'll also be able to endear and nurture customer loyalty. The more a customer comes back, engages and buys on their own, the more you can focus your limited marketing dollars elsewhere.

Remember that your current customers are also one of your most important marketing channels, especially in a digital world. The more engaged a customer is, the more likely they'll leave a positive public review on an e-commerce site or gush about your products and service to their friends and followers on social media. According to Qualtrics, people are 90% more likely to trust and buy from a brand recommended by a friend.

Finally, your digital engagement strategy can help you learn more about your customers. Using your data to analyze how customers interact and where they fall off at each stage, you can optimize both your online and offline digital experience to better serve your other customers.

Often, no one person or even department is responsible for digital customer engagement. The average customer could digitally engage with a business's social marketing team, email ops staff, content marketers, salespeople and customer support organization.

To ensure a holistic engagement, one critical element for any digital strategy is to ensure that someone has visibility into and is responsible for the overall digital customer experience. While this title varies by company, a chief digital officer works with leaders across marketing, sales and customer experience to ensure all their initiatives are delivering a cohesive experience.

The chief digital officer can also work with IT and data teams to ensure all the company's business systems are integrated and working from a single source of customer data. This omnichannel approach enables your people and apps to speak to a customer using one voice, instead of requiring a customer to reintroduce themselves every time they switch channels. Retail Dive reports that consumers ranked omnichannel experiences as a must-have expectation.

Your digital engagement strategy will be unique to your business and your customers. That said, every digital customer engagement strategy shares the same core elements:

• Business goals: Establish what you want to accomplish, along with the key performance indicators you'll use to measure success.
• Digital audit: Evaluate the digital tools and touch points you currently have at your disposal so that you can leverage existing investments.
• Customer understanding: Create a customer profile that specifies who your customer is, how they measure success and how they want to digitally engage with your brand.
• Digital channels: Based on your customer understanding, specify the channels you'll use to engage with them. This may include ones you've already established as well as new channels or tactics.
• Customer relationship management platform: Use customer relationship management software to easily share customer purchase and interaction data across channels so that you can leverage all your customer insights across every touch point.
• Personalization: Personalize the digital customer experience whenever possible by using customer interactions and purchases to predict their needs and intentions.
• People: Digital customer engagement doesn't mean customers stop talking to people. Establish when and how customers will interact with staff to make the transition between digital and human interactions seamless.
• Automation: Incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide more relevant cross-sell/upsell offers while powering channels like chatbots.

If digital customer engagement was easy, everyone would be doing it. These are the key challenges that hold many engagement efforts back:

• Lack of leadership: If every team is working independently, it can be difficult to deliver a cohesive experience. Not only that, but gaps may start to appear between different channels and departments, creating points where customers are more likely to drop out of the buying cycle.
• Inconsistent experience: If all your efforts sound and act different than each other, your brand can feel disjointed, making it difficult for a customer to build a trusting relationship.
• Unengaged audiences: If your content isn't relevant or if you're not on the channels your customers prefer, you're likely to end up with an audience that struggles to pay attention when you speak.