Customer engagement strategies for digital offerings: An empirical study of B2B suppliers

Digital offerings have grown to be a significant segment in business-to-business markets. Suppliers of digital offerings are faced with unique circumstances in managing customers, requiring specific strategies to increase customer engagement. We argue that suppliers may adopt different strategies to increase engagement depending on how the engagement is influenced (i.e., directly or indirectly) and their focus on the engagement process (i.e., dispositions or activities). This study explores customer engagement strategies for digital offerings. Specifically, based on a field study of suppliers providing digital offerings, we introduce four customer engagement strategies: initiating early awareness, role-centric activation, collective alignment, and scaling supplier-initiated activities. By exploring digital offerings as a new type of engagement object, we add to existing customer engagement literature. For practitioners, we also offer guidance for how the identified strategies can be combined to increase customer engagement based on firm-related and contextual factors impacting the choice of strategy. • Identifies four customer engagement strategies for suppliers of digital offerings. • Develops a conceptual framing of customer engagement strategies. • Explores how the customer engagement process can be stimulated directly and indirectly. • Conceptualizes digital offerings as a new type of engagement object. • Provides practical guidance for selecting strategies based on contextual factors.