How can one enhance digital engagement? Recognize the demands of your target audience and refine your messaging accordingly. According to research, 3 out of 4 of customers want businesses to be aware of their needs and preferences. Businesses will be able to foster enduring relationships if they understand customer behavior and use interaction data efficiently by leveraging emerging technologies such as AI to unlock true power of that data.

Let's examine what digital engagement is, why it poses a challenge, and how AI and a sound digital strategy can help you get past that challenge.

What is digital engagement and how significant is it in today’s context?

The way your business communicates with both existing as well as potential customers via digital platforms is known as digital engagement. Every time a customer or prospect interacts with your brand via your website, email, and social media, a unique digital engagement experience is created, and that experience is crucial for acquiring and retaining customers. You may create enduring relationships with your customers by implementing a strong digital engagement strategy.

Examples of Digital Engagement

• Using self-service tools like chatbots on a portal, website, social media page or app
• Accessing product videos and educational material on popular video platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, etc.
• Engaging with social media posts
• Visiting a web page via internet search while looking for a product or service
• Reading a blog article or email newsletter
• Visiting a website or landing page via a link from an email or SMS marketing campaign
• Engaging with targeted ads on a website
• Posting a review, answering a survey, or leaving feedback on a social media page

Marketing challenges in digital engagement and their solutions

Nowadays, companies in all sectors have prioritized their online presence. In addition to our increased use of digital shopping, a large portion of our daily lives, including working, booking appointments, planning travel, and much more have moved online. Consequently, the digital realm has become quite crowded, which makes digital engagement a big challenge for marketers. Companies need to:

• Using self-service tools like chatbots on a portal, website, social media page or app
• Face off against a plethora of online advertisements and digital content.
• Ensure a smooth experience across a range of new digital platforms.
• To increase ROI, connect with the appropriate target audience.
• Keep up with the constantly evolving laws pertaining to data privacy and security.

It's also critical to keep in mind that regulations governing how businesses get private customer information are evolving. In certain states, third-party data collection—which has historically been a crucial source of information for marketers—is being outlawed. You must make sure your data collection techniques are up to date if you want to maintain compliance while continuing to provide the tailored digital experiences that customers have come to expect.

You can use first-party data, or information acquired directly from the customer, to overcome these challenges. This covers previous purchases, phone conversations, website visits, social media interactions, email and SMS click-throughs, feedback and surveys, and more. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are often used to collect, organize, and analyze first-party data. Another useful tool is generative AI, which can help you interpret first-party data and produce tailored content at scale.

Best practices for AI-powered digital engagement

Nearly half of marketers surveyed by Salesforce indicated they need to learn how to make the most of generative AI, even though many have started experimenting with it and see its revolutionary potential. Let's examine AI's potential for successful digital engagement in more detail.

Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots can help you customize future marketing campaigns in addition to being an affordable means of promptly resolving consumer concerns. Consider a clothes store, for instance. When a consumer completes a return through the chatbot on the retailer's website and informs the chatbot that the fit is too big and the color is darker than they would like, the retailer gains more insight into the customer's preferences. Personalized, automated, real-time product recommendations can now be sent by the marketing team through social media advertisements, SMS, or email.

Email

AI has the potential to revolutionize email. Users scan receipts and read recipes online or through an app at one well-known food supermarket, which uses a rich database from its education funding program and internet recipe sites. All of that information is analyzed and entered into the business's CRM. Customers are then given personalized product and recipe suggestions by AI. Based on past engagement history, AI also assists the business in segmenting its audience to determine the optimal moment to send an email or SMS. For the food industry, this strategy is helping to treble engagement.

Content creation

It can be difficult to get your audience's attention when there are so many online advertisements. Brands can use content marketing to keep customers interested in campaigns across multiple digital channels by providing instructive content in the form of blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, reports, and downloadable PDFs.

One key question remains. What are the topics you ought to cover? What is going to drive engagement? Currently, over 70% of marketers use AI to help them write copy. You can make a significant impact by using an enterprise-grade CRM with AI capabilities (like Salesforce) and a native SMS for Salesforce app to analyze content performance and identify what appeals to your audience the most.

Targeting

Naturally, all of that excellent material is useless unless it is seen by the appropriate people, and AI can assist with that as well. AI can find the preferences, behaviors, and interests of your target audience that would otherwise need hundreds of man-hours to interpret by analyzing all of your customer data. It can also ensure that the proper context is presented to the right audience. Figuring out their favorite channels and the times of day when they respond most to marketing campaigns, can also help ensure that your message reaches them at the most opportune moment on the device of their preference.

Embrace an omnichannel digital engagement strategy.

Every customer wants a smooth experience as they interact with a brand across multiple channels. This necessitates the need for a digital engagement strategy with omnichannel capabilities (email, website, app, social media channel, etc.).

If it saves your customers time and effort, the likelihood that they stick with you increases.

Connect data with your CRM.

A seamless experience is also achieved by integrating your CRM with all of the key components of your customer engagement process. In addition to recording fresh data with every interaction, it facilitates anticipating and responding to their concerns more quickly and easily.

Analyze customer feedback.

To make the best use of the content your customer shares with you, analyze it for the following:

• What causes them to bounce or make a purchase?
• Website and app impressions
• Customer satisfaction, recommendations, and feedback

Developing a sound digital engagement strategy

You have the customer data. And you have integrated AI into your digital engagement platform. AI has been integrated by you. You have created tailored experiences. It's time to make sure your digital engagement plan works.

1. Visualize the customer journey

For every customer persona, marketers usually develop a customer journey map which is a is a visual representation of a customer’s experience across your brand’s platforms. For instance, millennials typically use social media to identify things, do their research on rating and review websites, and then use their device to make a purchase. You can better anticipate and plan for prospects' future actions across various digital channels with this information, coordinating your marketing, sales, and customer service initiatives accordingly.

2. Adopt an account-based marketing strategy.

Let's unlock the power of those customer journey maps. By focusing marketing, sales, and customer service on accounts, account-based marketing, especially for B2B businesses, enhances the customer journey. To provide tailored content at the appropriate moment, teams collaborate side by side to nurture leads.

Using this strategy, a significant ride-sharing company has sent retargeting ads to various audience segments, especially those who have ceased using their service. In order to offer the right content and keep leads moving down the sales funnel, the marketing team feeds CRM data into third-party online advertising networks.

3. Personalize the experience across every channel.

According to Salesforce, a majority of customers (70%) have come to expect brands to be aware of their needs and preferences. Using first-party data is key to driving personalized engagement across all channels.

It's how a global automotive racing brand delivers a tailored customer experience for both digital and live events. By leveraging CRM first-party data, brand marketers are aware of the fan's name, preferred driver, and previous purchases when they attend an event on race day. Following the race, the marketing reps can propose event merchandise or send out follow-up messages on their favorite driver.

The sheer volume of first-party data needed to carry out these three processes might be difficult for marketers to analyze. In order for marketing teams to create campaigns based on facts rather than conjecture, a robust CRM can assist in centralizing all customer data and organizing it in an easily accessible manner.

Understanding our customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors is key to developing a successful digital engagement strategy. You may demonstrate your understanding of your customers as unique individuals by putting these best practices into effect. The kind of trust and loyalty that compels people to keep coming back is created by that high level of personalization.

GirikSMS is a 100% native Salesforce SMS app and provides all of its customers with the tools they need to run successful batch text campaigns in their businesses. To learn more about enhancing your business communication options, visit GirikSMS today.