Why You Need Digital Transformation to Engage and Retain Customers?

If you once thought that your brick and mortar store was enough to get you good business, the current pandemic must have forced you to think again! To bounce back from low sales and poor profit due to change in consumer behavior, lockdowns and social distancing, what you need is digital transformation. It is essentially about revamping your business processes through a set of online tools and technologies. And the purpose is to improve collaboration, optimize the customer acquisition process, and boost profits. As per Smart Insights, 34 percent of companies had undergone a digital transformation by 2019. The number has further soared in 2020—wondering why? Read on.

A few months ago, the entire world came to a halt due to COVID-19. Owing to restrictions and precautionary measures, people stopped going out altogether. And businesses had no choice but to go online to survive.

In fact, in June 2020, retail websites witnessed around 22 billion visits globally, which is a sharp increase from the 16.07 billion visits recorded in January.

While some of the online players kept selling their products online, the others embraced the digital world to retain the loyalty of customers. Thanks to web-conferencing technologies, domains like entertainment, fitness, education, and even healthcare have also moved online now. And many of them have availed the support of Gurgaon-based agencies offering digital marketing services, for this purpose.

Over the last few months, consumers have gotten used to ordering all essentials through online portals and apps, and this trend is expected to continue in the post-pandemic era too. So, to thrive and gain a competitive edge in the near future, businesses have to embrace digital transformation.

The benefits of digital transformation are many, as listed below:

• It helps businesses to attain a competitive edge, which inspires employees and shareholders too.
• The company culture becomes more innovative and progressive.
• Digital transformation makes your vision more humanized and modern, which earns brownie points from customers.
• By going digital, you improve the customer journey and make it safer, thereby boosting conversions. Better experience means more loyalty too.
• Efficiency and decision-making ability becomes better across different departments.
• Collaborations among teams and departments become smoother and if any of your team member or even you want to personalize your skills for better results, you can also do that.
• Analyzing and understanding data and deriving actionable insights becomes easier, leading to greater ROI.

Now, let’s see how the different departments of an organization can embrace digital transformation and obtain benefits.

By using a set of online techniques, it is possible to enhance the search engine rankings on Google and Bing. HubSpot reported that 64 per cent of marketers are already investing their time actively in SEO (search engine optimization) methods. This transformation has given many new firms a chance to not just compete, but also perform better than corporate giants. Plus, you just need to spend a fraction of what you do on traditional marketing methods.

Other ways to promote your brand online is by running ads on Google and Facebook.

Digital marketing also enables marketers to optimize their marketing efforts. Gone are those days when you banked on gut-driven decisions to promote a brand or its products. Now, digital technologies let you plan your marketing efforts using real data. For example, if you are running Facebook Ads, you can create and test two ad campaigns. Based on the immediate reactions on the ad copy of each campaign, you can decide which one to go with. It’s possible to continually improve the campaigns based on the responses at different times.

Digital transformation also allows organizations to optimize their sales processes with invaluable customer data. For example, delivering personalized messages during the lead generation stage can be a smart move. Lead scoring is another crucial tool that the sales team can use to enhance this stage. Lead scoring involves the use of behavioral and demographic data to give the prospects a numerical value. Based on these values, you can decide which ones are “hot leads” and which ones can be ignored.

The customer data also helps you when you want to up-sell or cross-sell products. By studying the usage behavior of the services and products, you can offer recommendations to existing customers. Or, hire a digital marketing agency to install company-wide CRM solutions that let you streamline your sales and gain useful insights.

The best example of digital transformation in customer support is tapping into the potential of social media. These days, people don’t just call a brand to ask something or share feedback. They turn to social media accounts and share their concerns openly. And answering the questions passively doesn’t satisfy customers. In fact, most of them won’t mind looking for alternatives if they don’t receive satisfactory responses. So, you need online marketing strategy experts who can respond to customers correctly to retain their loyalty.

Many companies proactively support customers by sending emails to offer valuable information related to products and services. Others create how-to videos and articles to help the customers get answers to common questions.

For the successful digital transformation of your business, you need to combine technology and strategy smartly and have a plan in place. Just incorporating some online tools in your daily operations won’t be enough. So, try and follow these tips:

• Make sure you have a clear idea about what you want to achieve – be it brand awareness, conversions or loyalty. Your plan should be to use technology strategically to achieve your goals and grab the best opportunities in the market.
• Seek help from experts who have in-depth knowledge about digital strategies and how you can implement them to attain your objectives. They can assess the pros and cons of different strategies, study your customers and zero in on the best marketing plan.
• Digitize your recruitment techniques to make a selection of the right candidate smoother and more efficient. Invest in innovative training programs and use the latest tools to manage work better. Identify the best digital channels to get more business and build relationships.
• Understand what techniques are popular among masses, easy to use as well as innovative and eco-friendly. This will boost your brand image.

All in all, digital transformation is essential to improve the bottom line of any company that wants to survive and thrive during these challenging times. By utilizing digital transformation methods efficiently, you can beat the competition, boost customer engagement and experience, and attract and retain more customers. Just make sure that the digital marketing agency you hire in Gurgaon is well-versed with technologies and trends that ensure seamless digital transformation.