Digital is everything right now. Even if you run a brick-and-mortar business, the fact is that your customer is going to be mostly online. Engaging and connecting with digital customers is key for your business’s future success, and in 2022, engagement is easier than ever.
We took a look at some of the ways that brands all over the world are engaging with their customer base. What tools they are using, what platforms are trending, and what strategies are really working as well as what your customers really want when it comes to their favorite brands engaging with them, so let’s have a look.
Everything in your business should focus on the customer journey eCommerce, or otherwise. This includes everything on your site from your marketing to your sales channels. The customer experience should be a carefully crafted blueprint for your business, which everything should work off of.
Let's look at your site for a moment. Whether you are launching a new site or continuously managing and upgrading your existing one, the ROI of an effective CXM strategy is higher than you’d think. You are continuously fed with data and insights about your customer for you to map out your future strategies.
This allows you to reduce churn on your site, deepen customer loyalty, amplify the voice of the customer and identify trends that are resulting in customer dissatisfaction. Using the relevant metrics, you are able to establish where your digital customer journey is going wrong and what your customer would prefer going forward.
Every single one of your customers is different. They like to communicate differently and prefer different channels of engagement. So, give them different options. If you have not already provided them with real-time quality customer service in digital format, now is the time.
Chatbots are an affordable and simple integration into your site for your client to communicate in real-time with you. They allow your customer to connect instantly with a company representative and ask questions about your products or services, find out more information, or solve a problem.
You can also automate the process as much as possible, so representatives will only be needed once a certain amount of information is collected and established with the automated service. In many cases this may allow for the query to be solved, but, should it not be, the customer representative will have a basis of information to work off of and be able to solve the query from there. These have been shown to reduce churn and cart abandonment and increase customer satisfaction levels.
Content should be a key component of your digital marketing strategy. If it is not already, start a content strategy as soon as possible. Content that goes out to your digital customer should be educational, informative, insightful, and entertaining. Your customer should actually be able to learn something new from your content. But, your content that goes out should also be relevant and competitive.
Keyword research is critical at various stages of the content lifestyle. Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, what keywords are trending, and what your customers actually want. You can then structure your content around this. This will also help improve your SEO - the more you put up on your site and through your social platforms that have the relevant keywords, the more your targeted audience will see your brand.
Focus content on your blog, through your emails, and across your social platforms. If you see a social post getting a lot of natural, organic traffic, put some money behind it for it to be cast beyond just your audience. You will want to get even more eyes on it and engage with an even larger audience.
We mentioned metrics a bit earlier, but let’s unpack it a bit more. Let’s take these social posts and emails as an example. Say you put up a great blog that unpacks a how-to or a guideline around your products or services. You then share this blog across your platforms, on your emails and send it to various media partners. You will need to track how successful this campaign was.
Tools like Google Analytics are great for that. You can use it in conjunction with the metrics that the social platforms and your mailing tool provides to measure the success of the campaigns. So, how many opens did the email have? How many clicks did the Facebook post get? And, how much traffic came through to the site from each channel?
You are then able to plan future campaigns with this data and information to ensure that they are as successful, and what your customer wants to see.
Each strategy that you launch in your company needs to have the digital customer journey in the back of your mind. Engagement with your digital customer is easy once you know what they want and how to position it effectively for them.
