10 Key Affino.com Customer Engagement Elements

In our opinion so many sites fail at this basic level of engagement - using staff picture portraits / avatars to accompany contact elements on the page. People generally relate best to other people, they want to know that they're dealing with someone real and genuine - so you need to show your real and genuine customer-facing members of staff.

This is a recent update to this site - a dedicated page that users are taken to immediately upon completion of Registration - giving them a clear and simple overview of the key parts of the site which may be relevant to them, and recommending those areas with selective content highlights.

So much of the digital domain is impersonal, alien and anonymous - far too many companies neglect to display what should be their key assets - or more specifically - their principal personnel. As previously stated, we humans relate best to other humans, and desire a personable and a personal experience with sympathetic, intelligent and like-minded individuals.

This element allows potential customers to view / review the biographical details of the company's personnel, alongside their editorial contributions. You get a quick snapshot overview of what other areas of the business and site they are involved in, including of course all their contributed editorial content and Forum post.

No business has just one level of customer - at the minimum you have 3 - potential, recent / casual and regular. The first group needs the briefest of overviews with the barest of details, the intermediate level requires a little more scope and depth to help them get more out of what you offer, and the long-standing customer probably wants the kitchen-sink version of everything, so they can apply ever finer nuances of improvements. On Affino we sort of have 4 core levels of content from very brief to long-form or at least increasing levels of detail and complexity - ranging from Glance, to Blogs, through Insights and onto Affino Features.

The whole idea behind this is to provide sufficiently valuable content to make people want to register to read more than the 2 articles freely available. Obviously the content has to be wholly relevant and worthwhile for anyone to be likely to register, and then their registration is made in exchange for the value contained within the insights.

This is another humanising element - where content is connected to pictured authors, and linked in turn to those Author's Public Profile pages, as well as social engagement tools - for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as appropriate. This gives prospects and customers a clearer picture of who they are dealing with, and within what circles they operate.

Much like Content Metering is a tool to encourage Registration, we use Comments in the same way - having them require user registration for participation. We also use Twitter Cards for broader context, and to connect content with social media, social media followings through to social media influence.