Today’s business is conducted through digital interaction. It links potential customers with brands, promotes information sharing, and offers insights that businesses and potential clients may utilize to inform their choices. Digital engagement can foster long-term bonds, but only if it is used correct way.
However, in the alternate case, it could tarnish your marketing efforts and brand by adding to the already noisy atmosphere. The corporate environment is changing day by day and businesses need to keep up with its dynamics. Therefore, digital engagement has become an important pillar to develop fruitful client-business relationships.
What is digital engagement?
Source: salesforce
Digital engagement, as its name tells, is a way to get customer attention and interaction digitally. It involves using digital channels like social media, email, instant messaging, and other CRM technologies. It is not about just selling your products online, it is a user-centric approach to connect and communicate with them. Digital engagement improves customer-business interactions. It makes them more individualized, quick, and enjoyable. Brands can connect with every individual from any place in the world. This removes the physical and spatial limitations and increases engagement potential.
Why digital engagement is important?
Digital engagement is all about putting the needs and preferences of customers first. Using digital channels helps your brand to initiate and maintain communication with customers. When brands curate a digital engagement strategy thoughtfully, their engagement can become a lot better. This is because customers will get exactly what they want to have or need. However, in the opposite case, if brands will not consider user’s interests, it will affect their engagement negatively. Businesses can risk losing customers without a strong connection. Therefore, having a digital engagement strategy can be a precursor to better conversion rates and brand awareness.
Strategies to increase your digital engagement
Create valuable content
This is the first and most important step to get maximum engagement for your brand. Always create content that is relevant to customer demographics and demands. It is important to understand what customers want and give them something they truly value.
Source: preview
Gucci launched a fun campaign, named the ‘’GucciModelChallenge’ on TikTok. This allowed users to dress up and pose like models. It was fun, creative, and easy to join, which made it go viral. This shows when your content feels relatable, people are more likely to interact with it.
Use visual and interactive elements
Remember that the engagement equation consists of more than just delivering your message. How you convey the information also matters. Using different types of media formats and interactive elements to make your content more digestible. This gives visual stimuli to users and promotes active engagement.
Dior launched an interactive AR filter to celebrate Christmas in a fun way. By scanning the holiday packaging through mobile phone cameras, customers unlock an immersive festive experience. They can see virtual butterflies around them and capture fun snaps with butterfly-filled AR filters. This experience helped the brand to connect with the audience in memorable ways.
Offer personalized user experience
Studies show that nowadays, 65% of customers expect brands to be interested in their needs and provide personalized experiences. Making experiences customized to user interests makes them feel seen and respected. Therefore, analyze AI algorithms to get information about user’s past shopping history. This will help you provide personalized product and styling recommendations to users.
Source: Kivisense LinkedIn
Burberry has collaborated with a heritage bamboo weaver and artist Qian Lihuai, to create a meaningful campaign for Year of the Snake. Lihuai has created nine unique snake sculptures inspired by traditional Chinese art. Each sculpture blends heritage and modern designs and embodies different emotions and cultural meanings.
The brand launched an interactive experience, “New Year’s Weave“, on WeChat. It lets users create personalized bamboo art from five patterns and over 37,000 color combinations. Moreover, Burberry also introduced an AR try-on feature for customers to check out its iconic scarves online. These experiences show how combining culture with innovation can be a precursor to building strong connections with customers.
Gamification experience
Gamification of marketing content with interactive and immersive elements can be a total game-changer. The addition of gaming elements, like rewards, challenges, and competitions makes digital engagement more fun. Users get the chance to interact with products in a gamified environment that keeps them engaged for longer times.
Source: hollywoodreporter
Balenciaga collaborated with Fortnite to bring high fashion into the world of gaming. The playful campaign lets players dress their game characters in the trendy fits of Balenciaga. It turned gaming into a virtual fashion show, with players showing off their styles through gamification.
Build a sense of community online
You should foster a feeling of community around your business. For that, create opportunities for customers to connect with one another. Encourage conversation, monitor online groups, and make networking easier. Actively maintain your communities to get feedback, acknowledge customers, respond to inquiries, and track customer sentiments.
Source: chaak.medium
Chanel created a campaign, named ‘’InsideChanel’’ to connect its loyal customers. The campaign gives users behind-the-scenes and exclusive sneak peeks about new launches. This makes their customers feel like insiders and keeps them engaged.
Take feedback and adapt accordingly
Keep an eye on what customers are saying and listen to their feedback actively. This will help you get information about what customers want and where you need to do better. Moreover, this will give you an overview of your digital marketing strategy outcomes. This feedback helps you make the most of your digital engagement investment and can spark new business ideas.
Source: latestmagazine
Prada noticed that people were asking for more sustainable fashion products. In response to that, they launched the Re-Nylon collection which was made from recycled materials. This showed how the brand cares about the values and opinions of customers and builds trust.
Digital Engagement Best Practices and Use Cases
Embrace social media with AR
Brands can leverage social media platforms to introduce interactive try-on experiences to customers. They can promote immersive explorations through social media posts. On these platforms, there are high chance that younger generations, especially Gen Z will interact with your posts. This will increase your exposure and give you a solid edge over other brands.
LOEWE introduced a delightful augmented reality filter to celebrate Qixi, the Chinese Valentine’s Day. The filter uses a hedgehog to show how love has a gentle nature below the tough exterior. They can use the cute hedgehog filter, along with butterfly and star filters to snap romantic shots with their loved ones. They can tap for photos and press and hold for videos, saving their sweet moments to cherish later.
Gamification
Gamifying the marketing content with augmentation makes it more immersive and enticing. Jordan’s exciting launch of its first high-end flagship store ‘’World of Flight’’ is a perfect example of this. The event was filled with many AR-powered immersive experiences that kept the visitors hooked.
AR navigation guided them to the store building where they witnessed the spectacular opening of the AR cockpit by scanning the building. They could see virtual elements, including the famous AJ1 shoes, taking flight in the sky using Landmark AR. The stunning visuals kept the audience entertained and looking for more.
In another example, Nike introduced its latest offering, the stylish Nike Pegasus 41 Blueprint Men’s Road Running shoes, through a gamified AR try-on campaign. Users could enter the Nike Energy Station through the WeChat Mini Program. Using their mobile phone camera, they could see themselves wearing the shoes.
Moreover, they could record the interactions with the stunning lightning filter effects in motion. Participating in the lottery would get them precious Air-themed gift boxes, adding fun value to their fun interaction. The campaign garnered great impressions and engagement for the brand.
Stunning AI Key visuals
Use of AI to create high-quality key visuals can bring you a lot of engagement with little effort. These key visuals are highly realistic and can be personalized to meet the localization needs of brands. Kivisense has helped YSL Beauty to create spectacular visuals for its beauty products during Double11.
This helped the brand to top the Tmall beauty sales leaderboard with impressive figures. With our AI-driven solutions, the brand saved up to 65% on costs and got a 75% boost in efficiency and workflow. This shows how AI-generated visuals can get maximum digital engagement without any extra expenses.
Automated customer journey mapping
Automation tools can map out key touchpoints and interactions by analyzing past data of customers. This makes the user journey more optimized and smoother. Automated customer journey planning makes sure that your customers get the right information at the right time, which improves their whole experience with your brand.
For example, Burberry has introduced a one-of-a-kind virtual try-on feature for scarves, in collaboration with Kivisense. This lets users see themselves virtually wearing the exquisite Burberry scarves using their mobile phone cameras. Users can explore different styles and make confident purchases by checking out a variety of options online. This way, virtual scarf try-on reduces the hassle of product return and boosts customer satisfaction greatly.
Virtual events and online webinars
Hosting virtual events to market the merchandise and display product demos is a great way to increase digital engagement. It lets customers interact with scarves and other fashion products in immersive scenarios using augmented reality. They can browse, select, and buy any desired items in a few simple clicks. This way, their shopping process becomes more hassle-free and satisfying.
A smooth omnichannel strategy
Try to give your customers a smooth experience across all of your platforms. It makes sure that no matter what channel customers use, the messaging, branding, and user experience are consistent. This smooth omnichannel strategy helps brands create an unforgettable aura of the brand in the minds of buyers.
Conclusion
Digital engagement is the key that helps e-commerce brands keep thriving. It provides users with real-time immersive interactions and boosts the brand’s conversion rates and ROIs effectively. Therefore, having an optimized digital engagement strategy is a must for all e-commerce brands these days. Kivisense is a leading tech-driven company that uses innovative techs like AR, VR, and AI to help e-commerce brands get more revenues. You can contact us to start your digital engagement journey now.
