Before the digital age, businesses had few channels to connect directly with customers: phone, snail mail, and in-person interactions. Then came the internet. In 1994, 16 million joined this new public network; by 1996, that number had surged to 70 million. Today, more than five billion people—nearly 70% of the global population—are online.
This explosion in internet use revolutionized how companies and consumers interact. Social media, digital marketing, live chat, and email now allow businesses to engage with customers across multiple channels, any time. Digital engagement is arguably the best way to build and nurture customer relationships. An engaged customer base can provide better insights, build loyalty, and increase profits—all key to a thriving business.
Here’s how to build a digital engagement strategy to grow your brand and connect with your audience.
What is digital engagement?
Digital engagement—or digital customer engagement—is a broad term encompassing interactions between your company and customers through digital channels, including social media, email, and website interactions. Digital engagement strategies are important to every modern business, but they’re critical for ecommerce businesses without physical storefronts and in-person interactions.
Today, a basic online presence may not be enough. In 2023, nearly half of US consumers said they prefer to shop online rather than in-store. These customers increasingly expect brands to understand their demographics, purchase history, and preferences to create online shopping experiences catered to their needs. By prioritizing digital engagement, your brand demonstrates that it respects those shopping preferences, which can improve the overall customer experience and increase customer loyalty.
How to build digital engagement
- Understand your customers
- Personalize your communications
- Implement omnichannel marketing
- Tap into social media
- Create interactive, compelling content
- Keep the conversation going
- Analyze customer feedback
Keeping up with ever-changing customer expectations can feel daunting. Here are seven concrete steps to build a successful digital engagement strategy:
1. Understand your customers
Learn as much as possible about your existing and target customers through surveys, third-party customer data collection, and marketing analytics from customer engagement tools like email marketing software or customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.
This information, including demographic data (e.g., age, gender, education level) and behavioral data (e.g., spending habits and how individuals use your product or service), provides valuable insights about where to direct your digital efforts. Use it to create customer profiles, steer content creation decisions, personalize marketing efforts, and find the most effective digital channels.
For example, social media analytics may show you that the vast majority of your Facebook subscribers are located in Texas, allowing you to research local trends and culture and decide on a content strategy tailored to them.
2. Personalize your communications
According to surveys, 65% of shoppers expect brands to understand their unique needs and expectations. Add a personal touch to your customer communications to indicate that your business goes above and beyond to improve the customer experience. This extra effort can create a positive cycle of increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and future referrals.
Use your customer data to determine the appropriate marketing personalization for your audience. You might offer discounts on repeat purchases, schedule promotions to your audiences’ shopping patterns, or reward referrals with a custom thank you video.
For example, if a customer makes their 10th purchase with your company, include a personalized note in their package acknowledging the milestone and thanking them by name for their loyalty. You might also analyze their purchase history to provide tailored product suggestions.
3. Use omnichannel marketing
Your customers all use the internet in different ways. To reach more potential customers, your ecommerce business must operate through many digital engagement platforms—like SMS, mobile apps, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, and social media. Omnichannel marketing integrates all your digital channels to streamline your efforts, extend your reach, and deliver a consistent brand experience.
Decide which channels to invest in by analyzing your target audience’s usage patterns, then clarify your brand position, personality, and values to establish consistent messaging across channels. Consider using automation software, like Shopify Flow, to help you gather data from multiple sources and run marketing campaigns across platforms.
4. Tap into social media
Social media is a great way to engage with customers. In 2023, more than 106 million people purchased items through social media—a figure expected to grow more than 10% by 2027.
With this increase in demand, creating a thoughtful social media marketing strategy is a must. Ensure you choose the right platform for your audience, pick content options that suit your brand and abilities, and allocate the appropriate time and resources.
Social media planning tools like Buffer or Hootsuite can help you organize customer interactions across platforms like Facebook Messenger and TikTok. Many tools monitor digital engagement analytics to create reports on high- and low-performing content and use social listening software to gather customer feedback, keeping you up to date about what people say about your business online.
5. Create interactive, compelling content
Original content creation is an effective way to increase digital customer engagement and build a strong brand. Put a spin on the latest social media trend with your brand voice, or create an educational TikTok series, like the skin care brand Dieux Skin.
Aim to deliver relevant content across digital touchpoints. Add eye-catching graphics to your marketing emails, or include helpful explainer articles in your website’s customerservice. For example, razor company Dollar Shave Club creates tongue-in-cheek videos on social media and shares helpful shaving and grooming tips on its Club Chronicles blog.
6. Keep the conversation going
Engaging a customer through a digital touchpoint is just the beginning. Help customers connect to your brand and each other by building a community through social media groups, blogs, or forums.
Customer engagement is a two-way street. Actively manage your communities to monitor customer sentiment, answer questions, thank customers, and gain feedback. Many sales and marketing platforms offer solutions that streamline or automate customer conversations, including intelligent chatbots like Shopify Inbox, which use artificial intelligence to handle consumer requests.
7. Analyze customer feedback
A successful digital customer engagementstrategy adapts to customer responses. Use your managed communities, and feedback tools like Zigpoll or Asklayer, to ask customers what they like or dislike about their interactions with your business. For instance, survey their opinions on specific social media ads or send follow-up questionnaires after an automated chatbot conversation. This feedback helps you maximize your digital engagement investment and can inspire new business ideas.
For example, Minted New York shares its product development journey on TikTok and solicits feedback throughout the process. The brand’s highly engaging posts encourage commenters to express their product preferences, and the company adjusts accordingly.
Ways to measure digital engagement
- Customer effort score (CES)
- Bounce rate
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Social media metrics
- Click-through rate (CTR)
Once you develop and implement a digital customer engagementstrategy, measure its effectiveness with these key metrics:
Customer effort score (CES)
Your customer effort score (CES) measures how easily customersinteract with your business, typically using surveys or other feedback tools that ask them to quantify how easy it was for them to take specific actions. The formula is:
CES score = (Sum of all customer responses / Total number of respondents)
This data helps identify strengths and pain points in your digital engagement strategy and is a 40% more accurate predictor of customer loyalty than customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).
Bounce rate
Bounce rate measures the percentage or number of customers who visit your website and then leave, or bounce, without visiting another page or engaging or taking a desired action, like signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. Bounce rate reveals a lot about users’ first impressions of your brand or site and can guide decisions regarding user experience, search engine optimization (SEO), or landing page content. The formula is:
Bounce rate = Single-page sessions / Total sessions
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction by gauging how customers feel about their interactions with your business. It’s typically calculated using surveys or other feedback tools that include ranked questions like, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”
NPS is an excellent starting place for digging deeper into customer engagement. Low scores can give your business a reason to follow up with individuals and get more information about how to improve.
Social media metrics
Social media planning tools, content management systems (CMS), and social listening software—as well as the social media platforms themselves—offer a variety of key metrics to measure how customers interact with your accounts.
Keep an eye on clicks, impressions, likes, comments, reach, audience growth rate, conversion rate, and more complex measurements like sentiment analysis, which tabulates how users feel about your brand or their interactions with your company.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) measures how often a customer clicks on an ad, social media post, link, or email relative to the number of times they are shown. Calculate CTR with this formula:
Click-through rate = (Number of clicks / Number of Impressions) x 100
CTR can give you a good sense of what content engages your customers and where users typically end their customer journey.
Digital engagement FAQ
What drives digital engagement?
Digital engagement, or digital customer engagement, is a broad term encompassing any interaction between a company and an individual consumer through digital channels. You can drive digital engagement by connecting with your online customers.
How do you engage customers digitally?
You can digitally engage your customers in several ways, including sharing compelling content via social media posts and email marketing, personalizing customer interactions, and creating seamless experiences across platforms.
How can digital engagement improve a business’ ROI?
High-quality, thorough, and personalized digital engagement helps customers feel valued by your business, leading to higher customer loyalty, lower bounce rates, and fewer pain points across the customer journey. Improving these markers is a great way to increase conversions and create a customer base that returns to your business.
