The question of how to facilitate customers’ digital wellbeing is important, but knowing what you can do professionally without sacrificing company revenue is a bit of a head-scratcher.

However, you might be surprised to learn that these two considerations are not mutually exclusive, and integrating digital wellbeing elements into your consumer outreach strategy can actually be great for brand loyalty.

So, how can marketers help their customers and prospects improve their digital wellbeing? If you’re looking for answers to this, then read on.

Why Digital Wellbeing is Important for Customers

Digital wellbeing has been a growing concern for everyone in recent years, as the effects of  a poor relationship with the internet and the digital devices that drive it have become better understood.

We’re written an exhaustive information hub on digital wellness in the modern world, if you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating subject. Ultimately, digital wellbeing is about capitalizing on the benefits that the internet has to offer, without sacrificing what’s important to us in life.

However, it can be tricky to prevent digital overload; the internet is the portal to almost every aspect of modern life, making it difficult to separate the online world from the real one in many respects. 

Added to this, our devices have been designed to be highly addictive, making it hard to switch off even if we want to.

What’s more, the internet is as much a marketing showroom as it is a place to interact with friends, or to find out information about the world. Wherever we are - from Google Search, to Facebook or YouTube - we find advertisements that are targeted to our online behavior and purchase history.

As such, and whether we want to admit it or not, marketing campaigns only add to the endless noise that disrupts people’s daily lives.
 

What can Marketers Do?

Internet users - and particularly the younger generation - are well aware of the value of digital wellness, and this has created avenues for companies to connect with them in new and engaging ways.

Ultimately, consumers are receptive to things that will help them control their digital lives, from data privacy and security improvements to intellectual stimulation and learning - anything that feeds into their physical, emotional, or spiritual health.

This section will run through some tips to help them to this end:
 

Improve the Quality of Content

One influential check on achieving real digital wellbeing is the huge amount of content that is waiting for us online, meaning that our own marketing outreach can get lost in the mindless scrolling that characterizes a lot of internet usage.

A lot of content is created purely from an SEO perspective, or is clickbait that only serves to waste the time of internet users who are tempted into reading poorly written content.

As such, improving the digital wellness of customers means that you should only add to this noise if your content provides internet users with real value. This could be something that strikes an emotional chord with users, provides them with useful information, or offers them a product or service that could actually improve their lives.

But fundamentally, it means providing customers with quality content - something that has been key to marketing success for a long time already (even if its relationship with digital wellbeing is a fairly recent discovery).
 

Fine-Tune Email Marketing

Internet users often sign up to a company website, only to be constantly bombarded with endless emails that they have no interest in, and never open.

This is an important issue since email is recognized as a key distraction for many people (after social media), and the constant notifications they receive whenever a fresh email lands distracts them from what they’re doing.

As such, reduce unnecessary emails as much as possible, ensuring that customers only receive the messages that are most relevant to them. 

And, within each email, provide them with an easy way to unsubscribe from emails they don’t want - not only will they appreciate this, but this is also a key requirement for modern data privacy regulations.
 

Integrate Wellness Ideas into Website Design

Despite all the advances in internet technology, a company’s website remains the control center for their marketing efforts, with signups a key metric for success.

What this does mean however is that, with a little thought, the website can be designed in a way that builds digital wellness into the user experience.

Ideas here include minimizing advertisements and popups, adding white space into the overall design, and removing any automatically triggered videos that can distract or overwhelm users.
 

Enhance Data Privacy and Security

This is a key component of digital wellbeing since concerns about what happens to personal data can - on a long enough timeline - make people anxious and cause other mental health issues.

It’s also a legal requirement in the modern world, with modern data privacy laws a powerful check on what marketers can do with the personal data of internet users - even if these regulations are still ignored by many.

And, beyond backend changes that customers won’t be aware of, work here could be something as simple as using a chatbot to welcome visitors with information that outlines how your company complies with data privacy laws, or facilitates their cookie preferences.
 

Increase Awareness of Digital Wellness

Given that concerns about digital wellbeing are higher than they’ve ever been, integrating this issue into marketing campaigns can be a great way to increase brand loyalty.

This could be as simple as building a social media campaign around Digital Wellness Day - May 7th, since you asked - or shifting across to real world marketing events where possible.

Alternatively, you could inform customers about what you’re doing internally to support the wellbeing of employees - something that would resonate with customers - or support environmental or local causes, which would further improve the reputation of your brand.
 

Be Creative!

While the term “digital wellbeing” has only existed since 2018, it is fast becoming an important consideration for marketers - consumers are demanding it, and digital wellbeing issues are being integrated into government policy around the world.

And beyond the ethical good of promoting digital wellbeing in the user journey, any company can realistically integrate some aspect of this into their business model and/or brand with a little creativity.

If you’d like to learn more about digital wellbeing, we’ve created a resource hub on the subject.