The Power of Customer Engagement
Connect and interact with your customers at every touchpoint to strengthen the relationship with your brand. Highly engaged customers buy more but more importantly, they become advocates of your business helping drive revenue growth.
Customer service, and customer experience, are huge concepts in the world of marketing and sales.
No modern company can hope to compete without paying serious attention to these areas. In fact, brands that prioritise customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than those that don’t.
However, there’s more to the picture. Customer engagement is about going beyond customer service and treating the customer relationship as more than just a one-off transaction.
What does that mean? Well, essentially it’s about showing your customers you value your relationship with them, not just their money. It’s about building a strong bond and regularly nurturing that bond even when there’s nothing specifically for sale.
54% of the customers think companies need to fundamentally transform how they engage. Moving to prioritise customer engagement is a key part of achieving this. In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways you can make customer engagement a part of how you run your business.
Beyond Transactions: Building Relationships
Gone are the days of transactional customer interactions. Customer engagement goes beyond one-off sales and focuses on creating a community of loyal brand supporters. Statistics show the power of this approach: According to a study by Temkin Group, companies that prioritise customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than those that don't.
The Benefits of Customer Engagement
Implementing a robust customer engagement strategy offers a multitude of benefits for your business:
- Increased Revenue: Engaged customers are more likely to spend more frequently and consider your brand for future purchases.
- Reduced Customer Churn: By addressing customer needs and fostering loyalty, you can significantly reduce customer churn, saving you the cost of customer acquisition.
- Improved Brand Reputation: Positive customer experiences fuel positive word-of-mouth marketing, enhancing your brand image and reputation.
- Increased Customer Lifetime Value: Engaged customers become brand advocates, promoting your products or services to their network, leading to a higher customer lifetime value.
Customer Engagement Strategies: Building a Community Around Your Brand
Now that we understand the "why" behind customer engagement, let's explore the "how." Here are some key strategies you can implement to connect with your customers on a deeper level:
1. Personalisation
Personalisation is a crucial part of forming closer bonds with your customers and followers. It’s already a well-established fact that personalised approaches tend to work better when it comes to marketing and customer experience.
80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personal experiences. In fact, 72% of customers in another report said they only engage with marketing messages that are tailored to their specific interests.
Customer engagement takes this concept and goes one step further. It’s about engaging with customers outside of the sales environment and building that personal relationship on an ongoing basis.
Here’s how to do it:
- Collect customer information through surveys, forms, social media interactions, and more
- Use that information to send personalised emails, messages, updates, and occasionally offers
Remember that personalisation isn’t just about using names and personal greetings. It’s about showing your customers that you understand their problems and needs and care about solving them.
2. Build a Distinctive Brand Voice
Your brand voice is the tone that runs through all your communications, from blog posts and videos to emails and chatbots.
If you rely on a sterile, boring voice that sounds like any other brand, your customers will be quick to forget about you and you’ll find it much harder to engage effectively with them.
Instead, take some time to craft a brand voice that’s unique and entertaining. This will make your brand relatable and memorable and will make customers want to interact with you and engage with your content.
If done correctly, this also helps establish your brand as knowledgeable and reliable, and customers will soon associate your voice with solid advice, pleasant interactions, and trustworthiness.
3. Omnichannel Engagement
One surefire way to maximise your customer engagement is to make use of multiple channels. Some examples include:
- Blog content
- Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
- Video platforms like YouTube
The goal here is to share your brand far and wide and, most importantly, to forge that ongoing bond with your audience.
This is another area where personalisation is all-important. Talk to your customers, solve their problems, and don’t necessarily ask for anything in return. It’s less about seizing every opportunity to make a quick sale and more about nurturing those long-term relationships.
Show off your brand’s personality, always respond to comments and interactions on posts, and share personal, relatable stories.
This is an area where an omnichannel approach can be a wise move. In fact, omnichannel customer engagement is preferred by almost 78% of customers, according to research by Salesforce.
What is omnichannel marketing? It’s a little different from a multichannel approach (which involves lots of different channels working separately for the brand). Omnichannel is more interlinked and cooperative — every channel works with the others and the customer is always at the centre.
4. Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing is where you recruit an army of chatbots and similar tools to start and maintain a conversation with your customers.
Chatbots are incredibly useful to businesses for a wide range of reasons. Here are the main ones:
- They allow for one-on-one interaction with customers, allowing you to solve their main problems and questions with AI
- They’re available 24/7, aren’t restricted to a particular time zone, and can even be programmed to speak multiple languages
- They help take the load off human staff, fielding common questions and doing basic engagement while leaving people free to deal with more complex interactions
- They’re extremely low maintenance and are relatively cheap and simple to set up
Chatbots allow you to interact with your customers across the entire buying journey. They can pop up when someone arrives on your website or function on another platform like Facebook Messenger.
The best chatbots maintain your brand voice and are genuinely helpful without being annoying.
5. Look After Your VIP Customers
VIP customers are those who have been with your brand for a long time and spent a lot of money on your products.
They’re extremely important, not just because they’ve been personally responsible for a lot of your revenue, but also because their loyalty often means they’re evangelists for the brand, telling their friends about you and providing valuable free marketing.
This is one area where customer engagement is extra important. According to research by LinkedIn, 68% of customers will leave your company if they believe you don’t care about them.
You should reward your VIP customers for their loyalty, giving them special promotions and offers that less committed customers don’t have access to. Let them know that you value them and their support.
6. Create Interactive Content
Text-based content is a powerful asset for any business. However, to really drive customer engagement it can help to sprinkle in some variety.
Interactive content makes use of things like images, videos, and quizzes, giving the reader activities to do beyond simply looking and reading. It keeps them focused and engaged and creates a more memorable experience.
7. Implement an Affiliate Program
Affiliate programs reward customers for sending friends your way. The reward could be something like a discount or voucher.
This has multiple benefits. It provides an incentive for driving new traffic to your company, but from a customer engagement perspective, it keeps you at the forefront of your customers’ minds and encourages regular, mutually beneficial interactions.
Conclusion
Building genuine connections with your customers is no longer a luxury; it's the cornerstone of sustainable business growth. By implementing these customer engagement strategies, you can transform fleeting customer interactions into long-lasting relationships. Remember, a community of engaged customers is your most valuable asset.
Ready to build stronger customer relationships and drive business growth? Schedule a free consultation, with our customer success experts today!
