Updated
July 28, 2021
Written by
Merlene Leano
Have you tried checking your social media posts last Monday? No likes yet? What about your blogs? Zero readers? How about your newsletter? Still, no subscribers?
Surely, you’ve been trying your best to produce high-quality content. Yet how come it seems like you’re still being left behind?
Let’s look at it from a different perspective.
Perhaps the problem is not in your content, but in the way your brand engages with your customers.
Customer engagement may sound like an easy task, but several businesses tend to fail in this area more often than not. Without improving your engagement strategies, it is still difficult to market your brand no matter how hard you try to make great content.
As the unwritten rule of business management and growth goes, ‘The more efficient your efforts to get people to commit to your brand, the more they become satisfied with your products and services.’ Fostering an interactive and emotionally engaging connection with customers increases the likelihood of them staying loyal to your brand.
Does it sound laborious for you? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! This article will tackle everything you need to know on how to increase customer engagement using different customer engagement ideas and strategies. In addition, we will enumerate valuable metrics and break down the reasons why capturing and retaining end-user interest matters.
Read on!
Before we proceed to discussing tips to enhance how you gauge customer interest, you might want to have a refresher about it first. Similarly, if you are new to this concept, then spelling it out the right way is essential.
Customer engagement is the process or practice that revolves around the interaction between your customers. From the moment they saw your brand, to their purchasing phases, all the way through after-sales interaction. The process may be executed both online and offline, and when done correctly, plays a vital role in maintaining loyal customers and acquiring new ones.
Take a look at this example of customer engagement:
A customer visited a website for the first time. They don’t have the slightest idea what the brand has in store for them. Thankfully, the website has a trusty welcoming message pop-up (or live chat widget) in place to help them get started. The customer then proceeds to the products and services page. With the help of an interactive live chat widget that enabled FAQs answering and self-service features, the customer found the info they needed within minutes. The next day, the customer went on to purchase some of their best-selling products.
In this scenario, the live chat widget served as an important component to set the tone of your brand. By disseminating useful details for people to gauge what your business is about, you create thought-provoking B2C discussions. Without the need for a human operator, you are guiding site visitors to decide whether to buy or not. The scenario above is just one of the endless examples of effective customer engagement.
The goal of a feasible and successful effective approach to keeping people intrigued by your business, is to create a positive link between you and your customers. Know that when engaging with customers, you must provide something beyond a funky slogan, a catchy TV commercial, or a typical sales talk. Emphasizing the value of impeccable customer experience, outstanding content, and even efficient after-sales services are what count. More than a memorable ad, bridging gaps with your target market leaves an impact on how well your business does in the global industry. Eventually, it will affect your business’s stability in the long run.
The practice is not just limited to a mere sales pitch. Rather, there are several inherent characteristics involved in this practice that you must know to make your customer involvement strategies work.
Let’s explore the different types of customer engagement.
Interactive engagement involves the combinations of different communication channels to foster an interactive conversation with your customers. Using traditional methods of engagement in conjunction with advanced channels, as in mobile and social media, enables you to open a two-way communication where your target market proactively discuss among themselves and experience your brand first-hand. In turn, you gain customer insights and feedback to help you produce services and products that adhere to their needs. Next thing you know, you're able to expertly anticipate your next marketing move.
When working in a corporate landscape, sometimes businesses tend to focus on launching different products to counter their competitors. The downside? It leaves them neglecting the importance of customer emotions in the process.
Little do they know, emotion proves instrumental in creating stronger engagements. Since you are operating to cater to an emotion-driven crowd, it is just practical to stay aligned with their subjective preferences. Remember, customers with an emotional-level connection to your brand are more likely to compliment your brand instead of complain about it.
Several studies show that the majority of customer purchases are based on emotions. That is why colors, designs, messaging and other emotionally stimulating factors must be considered at all times.
With the internet gradually reshaping the usual sales process as we know it, it becomes easier for customers to gain knowledge just by reading comments on social media or merely skimming through their newsfeed. Their knowledge base on a particular product is highly influential to their buying decision, and it doesn’t even require direct contact with the brand’s physical store.
Thus, it is important for businesses to maximize the use of the internet to provide concise and knowledge-rich information about their products and services. Provide in-depth details about their best-sellers to secure a spot on spectators’ decision-making process. Layout a comprehensive FAQs page on websites and other online channels so that consumers won’t have a hard time finding answers to their queries.
Embedding a conversational communication tool into your website is a plus. Doing so builds a more personalized communication with your customers and dramatically attracts more leads to visit your website.
Technological advancements in the past years have become increasingly useful in gaining in-depth understanding of different consumer behaviors. Gaining enough customer insights results in more effective end-user retention.
With the availability of different channels to reach your customers, it becomes easier for you to connect with them in real-time. You can even improve not only your pre-engagement but also your after-sales services. For example, you can communicate with your past customers by sending them monthly updates about your new products along with some free content and special offers. These include newsletters, eBooks, or even exclusive discount vouchers that are relevant to their previous purchases.
Combining this type of engagement tactic with interactive, logical, and a hint of emotional touch goes a long way down to achieve impeccable customer engagement.
Generally speaking, a remarkable customer engagement strategy not only lays a foundation for a successful end-to-end customer experience but also enables you to get one step ahead of the competition. Consistently retaining end-user involvement is so prolific that it allows you to think beyond your boundaries to boost customer experience. Keeping your customers fully engaged with your brand in every phase of their purchasing process helps you build a more loyal user base.
Additionally, here are three notable reasons why customer engagement is important for your business.
Keeping your customers engaged with your brand establishes a lasting relationship. Acquiring new clients costs more than retaining old ones. Ideally, you want your avid customers to go alongside you as your business grows. That is why maintaining a compelling engagement strategy proves useful in getting your customers invested in your success and becoming part of your advocacy.
Having a loyal consumer base means more sales. Customers who have an emotional attachment to your business tend to do repetitive purchases, but they also become your brand ambassadors for more referrals.
Since you’re making your own brand ambassadors out of your loyal customers, expect a surge of referrals. Together with your existing customers, these newly found ambassadors will propel your ratings to sky-high developments.
Using the power of word-of-mouth, social media, and different review sites, your loyal customers will prove to the world how good your brand is. They will make your brand visible across different online channels.
This will then give you a chance to prove yourself by improving your current marketing approaches to accommodate your growing consumer base.
Now that you know the “what’s” of customer engagement, it is time to know the “how’s” of it. Let’s have a look at five effective customer engagement strategies that you can use now!
It is your job to be an immediate solution provider to your customers. In order to do this, try to be in your customers’ shoes. In other words, you must have a background of their needs as well as their corresponding pain points.
Prioritize finding ways to help your customer whenever they reach out to you. If possible, provide products and services. Share valuable info that will surely meet their demands, solve their challenges, and help them perform well (in their jobs, for instance), be it in the form of blogs, how-to videos, webinars, written guides, and other source materials that they can use as references.
Creating and providing content exclusively tailored to address user pain points and difficulties is paramount. Combine it with an open space for communication to maintain your target audience’s attention and fortify your relationship with them for long-term.
Never disregard the power of social media. It is a useful anchor for maintaining online stability. Possibly, social networking sites are where the majority of potential customers hang out.
Your job is to nail how to be socially visible if you want to change how your prospects perceive your brand. Show your personality and voice by sharing relatable, unique, funny, and meaningful posts to pique the interest of your audience. Don’t limit yourself to posting promotional content. Try adding a more personal approach to your posts.
Social media highlights convenience and accessibility, making it a more appealing platform to put your marketing campaigns into practice. Maximizing social media introduces your identity as a reputable brand and makes your customers feel comfortable with you.
Responsiveness bridges the gap between you and your potential customers. Use different communication platforms to stay interactive with them.
Take Facebook, for instance: You can use the comment section to answer their queries aptly and instantly. Not only does it strengthen your online credibility but improves your customer relationship at the same time.
If no one is asking, try adding a follow-up question to your post. This will open an opportunity for your customers to communicate with your brand, share their thoughts, suggestions, and feedback. Moreover, doing so invites your supporters to communicate with fellow supporters and share their DIY tips, struggles, and relatable information concerning your brand.
Aside from using the comment sections of social media to interact with your customers, you can go further by creating an online community for your supporters. This is a great way to keep in touch with your supporters.
This space will prove useful for your supporters’ interaction with each other. Since they have the same experience, they can freely post it in your closed group and make tthreads dedicated to the items you sell.
The approach becomes more effective if you are present to facilitate your community. As always, be responsive. Allot a time to assist them whenever they ask questions that fellow members cannot answer. Be interactive, create threads that will appeal to your members. It doesn’t have to always be business-related. You can also post quizzes, polls, content such as articles about the latest events, a meme, or any other content as long as it can keep your members engaged.
Moreover, use your closed community to post future products, milestones, upcoming webinars, and other related content.
Creating a community for your supporters allows you to know what part of your business needs improving or reassessing, value your avid supporters, be one with their standpoints and beliefs, and ultimately, create more impressive and organic engagement.
It is important to have a website that lets customers reach you faster. But don’t stop there!
You can also use social media, messaging apps, email marketing, live chat, and any other types of communication channels to boost traffic and keep visitors deeply interested in what you have to offer!
Maximizing omnichannel not only provides convenience to your customer but it also gives you tons of opportunities to strengthen the ties between your business and patrons.
When implementing strategies, you must know that effectiveness varies from one strategy to another. And with different tools to entice your prospects at your disposal, knowing which has the strongest impact among them is vital. What area falls short on engagement? How can you know that choosing this particular strategy will steer you in the right direction? You need to know what areas are worth investing in before you make your next move.
Highlight your end goals, be certain with your objective and see to it that you envision your brand’s future when choosing a strategy to fund. You can do this by measuring your customer engagement metrics. By following these customer engagement success metrics, you will gain better insights and knowledge of how your customers interact with your marketing approach to know whether you need to recalculate and reassess your existing marketing content or not.
Here are some metrics to measure customer engagement:
Measure how well your social media pages are faring. How many retweeted your post? Are there several comments in your last Facebook post? What’s the impression rate of your story?
Staying aligned with your audience’s preferences helps foster more interactions. The more interaction you create, the more you improve your customer engagement.
Loyal customers will show off how great your brand is to their family and friends. They can also go as far as spread the word on their social media accounts. In return, expect to see more leads from referrals.
If you want to track the growth of your referral rate, you can use referral codes as references or you try asking them directly how they found or where they first heard about your brand.
When sending out email marketing content such as newsletters and press releases, you can track whether the ones in your email list are engaged with your brand. You can do this by measuring your click-through rate. Compare the number of individuals who clicked and opened your email to the ones who binned it. By keeping tabs on how well your marketing strategy impacts your customers, you’ll know whether you need to change your approach or stick to your current strategy.
Keep track and have a concise breakdown of data about the interaction of your community and forum members to your content. How many customer replies do you get per post on a weekly basis? How about monthly? Keep your customer engaged and watch these numbers grow significantly.
In order to strengthen your bond among your customers, you need to devise effective ways on how to get closer to them.
This can’t be stressed enough, but the benefits you get with impeccable customer engagement are endless. When done properly, you inspire more individuals to spread the word about your brand. Eventually, more business opportunities follow through. It’s a domino effect.
Although some customers may switch to other brands, there’s nothing to worry about. You can always open newer ways to encourage them to come back. Using the right strategies, earning their trust for the second time has never been this easy.
If you are having a hard time knowing where to start, we might be able to help you!
We believe that online customer engagement starts with your website. With trusty live chat software to assist your website visitors in real-time, your potential customers feel valued and it becomes easier for you to build trust and improve conversion rates.
New Media Services offer innovative live chat services that cater to businesses of all types. As soon as a user lands on your website, a conversational live chat widget will pop out to assist them throughout their decision-making process. By providing online assistance powered by both human and machine learning technologies, you’ll convert mere visitors into paying clients in no time.
Do you want to know about our live chat service? Contact us today!
Help us devise custom-fit solutions specifically for your business needs and objectives! We help strengthen the grey areas on your customer support and content moderation practices.
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