Smart Design for Customer Engagement

Innovative techniques and examples of engaging web and mobile designs

Gone are the days of promoting your brand face-to-face or through those mailbox flyers and ads in the local newspaper that no one reads anymore. And unless you have a marketing budget equal to the "big boys" you won't be buying commercial time at the next Super Bowl. Today, you will have to be "lean and mean" with your marketing dollars and get very smart and creative about the design of your content, so that you achieve continued customer and potential customer engagement.

Engagement is an Emotional Phenomenon

People "Engage" when their emotions are triggered, either positive or negative. Thus, the goal of content design must be to stimulate emotions that will influence behaviours and motivate customers/potential customers to act. As important as it is to define your target market, then, it is just as important to stimulate emotional engagement, happiness, excitement, surprise, and satisfaction. When these emotions are triggered, studies say, customers will:

1. Recommend you
2. Become repeat customers
3. Will be less likely to shop around
4. Will be less concerned with prices

Engagement is All About User Experience: A Case Study

Jack Daniels is an internationally-known brand, and one might assume that the company does not have a huge need to continue to engage users through content design on a website or through social media. But Jack Daniels knows what every smart marketer knows, that user experience and engagement must be continuous, and content must be designed to do that.
In September, 2014, Jack Daniels teamed up with Arnold Worldwide, an advertising agency, and MediaMonks, a digital production company, to launch a new content marketing campaign that would engage in unique and exciting ways. The basic concept was to solicit great bar stories from bar owners, bartenders, bouncers and patrons from all over the country and then to produce these stories through unique and exciting multi-media. There are videos, of course, but also audio tales told via pay phones, small amounts of text that is hand written, and great special effects of one story melting into the next.

The launch included 30 stories, but many more have been added since. Teasers for these stories occur on YouTube videos and Facebook, and followers are invited to comment and, of course, submit their own crazy tales for potential use. Watch final result here.

Another Facebook campaign has teamed up with Vice Magazine to hold a photo contest. Followers are asked to submit unique photos of bars anywhere in the world. Once the contest ends, the winning photo will be featured in a Jack Daniels ad.

The Conceptual Aspect of Engaging Content Design Comes First

A recent post on Creativeblog.com by Irene Pereyra, well-known user experience designer, pointed to the steps that must be taken as a conceptual framework is developed for engaging content design. Here are just a few of her suggestions, although reading the entire post would certainly be valuable:

1. Stop designing for yourself and start designing for your users. What is their demographic, what do they want to know, how will they best engage, and are they tech savvy? You can use analytic tools, of course, but how about reaching out to your customers and just ask them?
2. Study your competition. What are they doing that is great that you can re-purpose for you own uses? What mistakes are they making that you know you want to avoid? You can pick up a lot of best practices this way!
3. Things must be simple when they get to your site. Cut down on their tasks and walk them through your site adroitly.
4. Pretend that all of your users have large fingers. Use big buttons and large input fields. One example of this was the Messages for Japan website that was launched after a huge earthquake in Japan. Everything was big, so that users could write messages easily in a big input field, and there were large buttons for the "send a message" and the "make a donation" options.
5. You can do your quantitative analysis, but get a third party to do your user testing. You will not be objective.

Specific Engaging Content Design Suggestions, Even on a Small Budget

You may not have the advertising budget that Jack Daniels has, but you certainly can get creative with content design that engages your customers and visitors with content that they will love and want to share. Here are some strategies that you can implement, using free and reasonable apps, along with some imagination and creativity.

1. Feature Your Customers: What a great way to recognise and appreciate your loyal customers. Sweet Equi Tees designs and sells T-shirts to enterprises of all types. Each month it features photos of customers wearing their T-shirts. What a great way to engage customers and feature your products at the same time.
2. Hold virtual theme parties via Skype and have full interaction among you and all of your customers. They can share their stories, ask questions, etc. in a group gathering.
3. Feature your customers in blog posts with photos, videos that they have shared, and their stories. They will share that blog post everywhere. And if you do it really often, think about how many shares you will achieve with the "skyscraper technique".
4. Use unique animation. ShipServ, a shipping company wanted a unique and engaging way to present its online directory, so it created a great animation of Lego figures to walk users through it. It was a surprise, but a nice one and will not be forgotten.
5. Always be accessible. No reply emails are a real turnoff. Invite your customers to contact someone in your organisation. This is the way you build a deep bond with your customers, and the deeper the bond, the more they remain with you and recommend others.
6. Get a fan club and publicise it everywhere. Feature on Facebook those fans who have shared specific pieces of your content, and offer awards for doing so.
7. Engage customers by activities/fun that don't relate to your product or service. Anthropologies sells clothes, but on its site it has a section on DIY drink recipes, tailored for each season.
8. Never use text when a visual will do. Look on this amazing interactive table of contest for blogpost on getver.com blog.

Make sure you have interaction often, especially on all of your social media sites. It is so easy for people to share when they have had a good laugh, taken a survey, or been entertained. One more special method is creating viral content that will spread a word about you itself.

Use email for interaction, not just to announce specials, sales, etc.

1. Get a catchy or punchy subject line
2. Go interactive in the email itself. People don't want to link to another place anymore.
3. Your email should have great content and buttons for sharing right there.
4. Put surveys, polls, videos and downloads in your emails, so long as they are compatible with all browsers and devices.
5. Make your email recipients feel special and think they are part of an exclusive group. You need to show that you care about them and you are not selling here ñ you are building relationships
6. Incorporate some gaming techniques. Starbucks has email campaigns that let readers earn stars by performing certain actions (like sharing the email). These stars were worth free drinks. Incorporate games that go on over multiple emails and that are released on a scheduled basis and those emails will get opened!

The goal of content design is to engage. The more customers and visitors are engaged, the longer they stay, the more they participate; the more they participate, the more they bond; and the more they bond, the more loyal they are, and the more they share and recommend.

Thanks to Andy Preisler for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Andy Preisler is an experimenting content marketer and blog writer of GrabMyEssay You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.