5 ways to boost customer engagement using digital platforms

Engaging customers isn’t easy. Countless brands flood our online spaces with their messages, and customer expectations around immediacy and personalisation have changed. In fact, 52% of consumers now expect a brand response within one hour.?

If you’re looking to increase engagement by providing a consistent customer experience, you’re in the right place. Discover the strategies we recommend you use to boost your customer engagement (and ultimately loyalty and revenue) across digital platforms.?

Why does customer engagement matter?

Customer engagement is an ongoing conversation between you and your users; the more consistent you are in solving their problems and offering helpful recommendations, the more loyal they will likely become to you.?

And with studies suggesting that acquiring a new customer can cost 5-7 times more than retaining a current one, customer engagement and loyalty could be the lynchpin on which your revenue and ROI depend.

So are you doing the most you can to engage your customers and keep them coming back to your brand?

Well, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how you can boost customer engagement across your digital platforms, and how a digital product partner can help...?

1. Pinpoint issues that exist for customers & create trust

To support your business with genuine engagement with your customers, the first step is understanding the problems your customers are facing in their digital journey that could affect their purchase.

So what kind of problems could they be facing? These could include trust in the brand, product quality, consumer perception, lack of personalisation or cost. On a deeper level, it could also be due to fragmented customer journeys, information overload, privacy concerns, and shorter attention spans.?

As stated in a study, Advances in Economics Management and Political Sciences, a crucial facet of customer engagement is that,,”‘in the process of designing shopping websites and communicating with users, brands need to effectively establish a bond of trust with consumers”.?

2. Prioritise areas of opportunity?

Our next focus should pivot towards prioritising the ideal solutions that could address these issues.?

Depending on your objectives, this process often includes enhancing customer personalisation across all of your digital touchpoints.?

This could be offering helpful recommendations, sending hyper-personalised emails, or whatever personalisation looks like for your users. But stats from Ninetailed show that 90% of marketers say personalisation contributes to business profitability, and 80% of companies have seen an uplift in revenue using more personalised engagement with users.?

And personalisation has been shown to improve user satisfaction too, with 52% of consumers in the same survey saying they will continue to shop with brands who make their experience more personalised.?

Another customer engagement area of opportunity is through deeper social practices. In fact, according to Accenture, 77% of consumers are influenced by a company’s environmental achievements when they decide who to buy from, and 76% of consumers won’t continue to buy from companies that don’t prioritise the environment or their employees.

And an obvious way to boost engagement and solve consumer pain points is by developing a loyalty programme. But with every Tom, Dick and Harry now having a loyalty programme of some kind, true loyalty programmes now need to create emotional connections with customers to make them feel valued and appreciated. And, when it’s done right, just a 5% increase in loyalty can see profits increase anywhere from 25% to 95%.?

To begin the process of finding areas of opportunity, we do extensive research and analysis to determine the pain points that can be addressed as soon as possible to position your business as one that actively listens and responds to its consumer needs.?

3. Improve your digital estate

With poor customer experience now costing companies $75 billion a year, if you aren’t prioritising improvements to your digital estate, you’re likely missing out on the chance to fully engage your customers, accelerate financial and operational success.?

Yet, to know where you want to go, you need to understand where your current digital estate sits, what you want your digital transformation to achieve for the business and users, ? and where you want your digital maturity to eventually be.?

While that sounds much easier said than done, there is a solution: by engaging with a digital product partner, like 383, you can gain guidance and support in conducting a thorough assessment of your business’s current digital maturity, and where you can make changes to achieve your business goals and outcomes and do more to support customer engagement and loyalty.?

Fortunately for you, quite a lot of these changes are usually quick wins, which means you can see the changes taking place rapidly, for maximum impact.?

4. Getting full alignment across the business?

Customer engagement improvements don't happen just inside a digital product team. That's why we help you achieve lasting digital transformation by aiding the buy-in of every department within your business.?

This is an area that cannot be underestimated in its importance in improving customer engagement. If your board, stakeholders and business aren’t aligned behind proposed changes to your digital platforms, things will never improve.?

We know that making changes cost money initially, but when the returns are so rich, they are worth investing in. We work with you to get the much-needed buy-in from your leadership, stakeholders and the rest of the business using detailed insights, data, and outcomes that illustrate the expected ROI, revenue, and customer engagement from their investment.

5. Employ techniques to increase AOV, conversion rate and purchase frequency

Once we've illustrated the quick wins to your customer engagement initiatives, we can look to make the real, significant changes to your digital platform, and the focus should shift to unlocking all the untapped potential your digital estate includes.?

The process involves learning and using strategies to increase average order value (AOV), conversion rates, and purchase frequency.

An example of this implementation in action is our work with Worcester Bosch, where we created a seamless and personalised experience for their customers looking to purchase a new boiler.?

As something that is very infrequently purchased, but often stressful when it is, we wanted to provide an online platform that guided customers through each step of the boiler purchase process giving them peace of mind and confidence that they had chosen the right product and service for their unique home needs.?

The result for customers was that they trusted that they had selected the best option for themselves through Worcester Bosch, and for Bosch themselves, it increased conversion rates by 98%, increased completed orders, and unlocked ￡600,000 of untapped revenue.?

How 383 supports customer engagement?

Like many businesses, you may be feeling quite overwhelmed when it comes to boosting customer engagement. There’s a lot to consider, analyse and iterate - that’s why we recommend partnering with a digital product studio, one that is well-versed in using a data-driven approach using customer data, analytics, and insights to inform strategies.

We use a variety of techniques to get to the heart of your business and customer needs, to support your customer engagement.?

From customer and stakeholder interviews, to tailoring recommendations based on current digital estate and areas of improvement, to UX recommendations, we show you the hidden revenue in your digital platforms, and how to unlock it.?

Boosting customer engagement using digital platforms

We know all businesses are full of busy professionals, and finding the time to source the solutions to improve customer engagement through digital platforms is almost impossible. That’s why we recommend partnering with a digital product and technology agency like us at 383.?

Need help nailing your loyalty and retention? Discover the power of using AI to personalise your user journey! Join us on Wednesday, 26 June, as we bring together product and marketing leaders to learn how to unlock the full value of your data assets and implement AI to personalise your user journey.