Last updated - February 28, 2022
A customer engagement strategy determines the relationship between brands and customers, and enables businesses to carefully define brand/customer interactions. A good strategy enables brands to keep customers happy and loyal and often leverages customer data to accomplish this satisfaction. Today, many brands are incorporating AI to derive greater insight from customer data and apply these insights more effectively. However, while there are many AI tools available, understanding which can benefit you and how can be a challenge. In this article, you will learn what an Effective WordPress Customer Engagement Strategy is and how you can use AI to improve customer engagement. You’ll also be introduced to some tools you can use to incorporate AI into your WordPress sites.
What Is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is the interactions that occur between customers and your brand. It can include interactions in person, via social media, with chatbots, on forums, and through email. Common methods of creating customer engagement include blog content, quizzes, contests, and loyalty programs.
Engagement is a powerful tool for building relationships with your customers, improving their experiences with your brand, and increasing brand loyalty. It does this by offering customers something more than the products they purchase. Additionally, it shows customers that you care about their interests and value interacting with them.
How Machine Learning Is Used to Promote Engagement
When developing their customer engagement strategies, many brands take great strides to collect as much customer data as possible. However, this data is ineffective without proper analysis. Machine learning models can provide these analyses and help brands apply the results effectively.
Some of the most common applications of machine learning in engagement include personalization, automated assistance, and recommendations.
Personalization
Personalization is a strategy that uses customer data to customize interactions. For example, greeting returning website visitors by name, following up on recent purchases, or automatically changing the default language of a site based on location. It is a way of making customers feel special and letting them know that you are aware of their individual preferences and needs.
Automated assistance
There are many types of automated assistance that brands can implement with the help of machine learning. For example, many sites now include chatbots that offer help once a user has been on a site for a given amount of time. These bots use machine learning, such as natural language processing (NLP), to hold conversations with customers, answer questions, and provide customer support. Below is an example of WSChat – WordPress live chat plugin.
Recommendations
One of the most frequent ways that machine learning is used is to determine correlations between products or services. Models help you determine which products are similar, which are likely to be purchased together, and which are favored by certain types of customers.
You can then apply this information to making meaningful recommendations to customers. This helps show them that you understand their personalities and can help them better understand their options.
The Human Element: How To Build a Customer Engagement Strategy for Your WordPress Site
While technology is essential for effective customer engagement, nothing can replace the human element. Here are a few ways you can build customer engagement strategies that deliver real value for consumers.
Define your customer journey
A customer journey is the path that a customer takes to get to your brand, to purchase products or services, and to return for future purchases. One of the best ways to make sure you understand this journey is to map it out.
The map you create should include all likely routes that a customer can take, both beneficial and harmful. Once you understand your customer’s options, you can then begin identifying points of impact and strategies for keeping customers engaged. For example, sending a reminder about items that a customer left in a cart. Or, following up after a returned item to see how a customer’s experience could have been better.
Seek customer feedback
One of the most obvious but neglected ways to improve customer engagement is to seek feedback from current and past customers. This feedback can help you determine what customers like and want more of as well as what prevents them from engaging more.
This feedback is especially important when you are making changes to your operations, for example implementing new plugins or opening a new media stream. Seeking feedback also gives you an opportunity to show how important customer opinions are to you and your brand.
Familiarize yourself with engagement tools
While you can create an engagement strategy that relies only on live agents this is not scalable and generally not practical. Instead, you should work to create a strategy that leverages the available technologies and plan to supplement with manual interactions.
When getting started, the easiest way to incorporate technology is to start small. For example, adopting a platform that helps you automate social media posts and centralizes comments needing your response. Once you get comfortable, you can begin integrating additional tools and creating a more sophisticated system.
Plugins That Can Improve Customer Engagement in WordPress
There are many plugins available for WordPress that you can use to accomplish the above engagement techniques and more. Below are a few options to consider.
Wootomation
Wootomation is a WooCommerce AI plugin that you can use to provide product recommendations to customers. It uses previous and future purchase data to determine correlations between items. Wootomation then suggests those items in an added cart section, much like Amazon’s “also bought” section. This plugin works in the background and is transparent to users outside of the added section.
ChatBot for WordPress
ChatBot for WordPress is a native plugin that adds a customizable chatbot to your site. You need no machine learning knowledge to use it. ChatBot enables you to deliver predefined messages, display FAQs, gather support requests, or allow customers to leave contact information.
ChatBot offers an option to combine NLP and Menu Driven modes. This will allow you to automate chats or control interactions as needed. You can integrate it with Google’s Dialogflow if you want to override the built in controls. You can also extend the plugin for use with Facebook messenger or live chat.
WordLift
WordLift is a plugin you can use to improve website content in the eyes of readers and search engines. It scans your content and uses Google Knowledge Graphs to automatically recommend facts, images, and links relevant to content based on web ratings. The plugin learns your preferences and site content as you use it to produce better recommendations. These recommendations can help make your content more informative and engaging.
Conclusion
A customer engagement strategy defines the relationship between brands and customers. This is not a task you should delegate to the machine. You should be the one defining customer journeys, assessing customer feedback, and researching tools. Doing these tasks will enable you to remain in contact with your customers, and understand their needs and desires.
The more you know about your customers, the more customized offerings you can serve them. Of course, you do not need to be the one serving this content. You can leverage AI applications for personalized or hyper-personalized content. You can let chatbots do basic customer service, but you will need to help out when the chatbot encounters an unfamiliar request.
There are many aspects with which technology can assist you. However, it is assistance that these technologies provide, and usually very specific assistance. It is also important to remember that each tool you introduce into your WordPress Customer Engagement Strategy should be compatible with existing infrastructure. Ideally, each component of your strategy should integrate seamlessly into your customer engagement ecosystem.
Also read about Building customer relationships.
