As a savvy marketer, you already know how essential customer engagement is to your digital marketing strategy.
An engaged customer is a loyal customer.
Engaged customers return to your business again and again while also referring you to everyone they meet.
You just need some effective customer engagement ideas for customer success.
We’ve got 15 sure-fire strategies to skyrocket your customer engagement marketing, so keep reading!
What Is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is the art of cultivating customer relationships and nurturing them along the customer journey to develop a long-term bond that increases customer loyalty and retention.
There are many ways you can engage with your customers.
For example, you can offer discounts, rewards, or other incentives to get them involved in your business.
You can also provide personalized content that best serves people’s needs and interests.
Customer engagement can include mail, email, social media, and text messaging. Better customer engagement has been proven to generate high levels of customer satisfaction and is key to increasing customer retention rates.
What Is a Customer Engagement Strategy?
A customer engagement strategy is a marketing strategy that focuses on enhancing the customer experience by building better connections with the customer.
It’s vital to have a consumer engagement strategy for potential and existing customers.
A winning customer engagement model involves three phases:
- Identifying prospective or repeat customers.
- Determining their needs.
- Providing customized messages in the right channel to satisfy their needs at the right time.
You should craft your content to appeal to your target audience.
Engage your audience, and encourage them to interact with your brand.
This allows you to build the know, like, and trust factor that drives conversions and builds relationships.
A well-planned strategy will attract, engage, and satisfy customers to create a sense of loyalty.
It’s a repeatable process of gathering customer data, analyzing it, creating new content, and measuring your results.
Strategies to Increase Customer Engagement
Here are some ways you can increase customer interaction.
1. Give your brand voice a unique personality.
The way a brand communicates speaks volumes about its personality.
Many brands struggle to develop a memorable and relatable voice that will attract a potential customer. Your brand voice will gain more awareness when it is unique.
Engage customers in a tone relevant to your target audience. Think about the qualities and characteristics they admire and use them in your voice.
Then incorporate your company’s values, culture, and message into your content to build brand loyalty.
They’re part of what makes your message unique. As you develop a deeper connection with your audience, they’ll see that you’re not just another faceless company.
2. Embrace social media marketing.
Social media marketing is not just posting status updates.
It’s being active on social media platforms where you engage with your customers.
Respond promptly to all social media customer comments (and complaints) so your customers feel heard.
When you talk directly to your customers, you get to know what they want and how they think about your company or product.
Post to your social media channels regularly.
The more frequently you can post, the more opportunities you have to connect with your audience.
Use interactive content like quizzes and polls. They create a two-way conversation between you and your audience, and people enjoy the interaction.
3. Make the customer experience personal.
Personalizing customer experiences is about making them feel like they are talking to a friend.
To do that successfully, you must understand your customers’ wants and needs.
It’s something every company should strive for because it’s good for you and your customers.
Know your customer journey. Observe how they interact with you.
Ask what keeps them up at night.
That’s how you get to know your audience.
4. Create content that exceeds expectations.
The more you know about your customer, the more you can tailor the content you provide to them.
The key is to make sure that the content you create is relevant.
For example, when you purchase books on Amazon, the Amazon algorithm suggests additional books that you might enjoy based on what you bought.
These suggestions are a delight for any avid reader because they make finding their next read convenient.
How can you create a similar experience for engaging customers with your products?
5. Wow them with video.
Video content is popular because it’s a powerful tool for storytelling.
Humans pay attention to stories, and stories create a connection between the storyteller – your business – and the listener – your customer.
With video content, customers can see the product or service being offered and the people behind the business.
While video content used to be time-consuming to produce, it’s come a long way.
You can create quality videos with just your smartphone and YouTube editing.
6. Optimize the digital experience on your website.
Your website is often the first point of contact with potential customers, so it needs to be well-designed and easy to use for seamless digital engagement.
First, optimize your site for search traffic. Stay up to date on the best practices for search engine optimization, so your site is found via search engines.
Then look at the browsing experience on your website. Is it easy to navigate? Customers should find what they are looking for quickly and easily from any page on your website.
It’s also vital to make your site mobile responsive.
And your design should be clean and easy to read with large fonts and lots of white space.
7. Make customer service a more human experience.
Imagine you purchase an expensive product online and have questions about using it. Maybe you need help with installation or customization.
With advancements in technology, customer service is getting more personal.
With video chat, customers can communicate with customer support at a contact center that can help them at any time of the day.
Co-browsing is another tool customers can use with customer service agents.
Co-browsing is a strategy where the customer and service agent can see each other’s screens as they work together to resolve a problem.
8. Add a little friendly competition to the mix.
Social media contests are a great way to encourage customers to engage with you.
And they allow you to make your customers feel appreciated, increase brand awareness, and generate publicity for product launches.
A well-executed contest will entice people to share their stories and thoughts about your brand or product, which leads to increased social media engagement.
Just be aware that giveaways and contests aren’t good sources of long-term engagement.
You’ll need a solid digital marketing strategy in place to drive them to your email list or another platform for a long-term relationship.
9. Go where your customers hang out.
With the rise of social media, it may be challenging to imagine connecting with your customers outside of social media channels.
But instead of looking for your customers on Facebook or Instagram, ask where else they spend time – a coffee shop, a sushi restaurant, an airport lounge?
Try display advertising or grassroots signage in places people pass by, such as malls, bus stops, and sidewalks.
You can put a QR code in almost any place, creating a direct connection to your business.
Delight your customers with unexpected mail delivered via the USPS. Hand-crafted cards from your company are a unique way to stand out from your competitors.
Relationships are the foundation of marketing and provide a vital connection between you and your customers.
Relationship marketing is a long-term strategy that involves nurturing and growing meaningful relationships with current and potential customers.
This customer-centric approach works by emphasizing strong customer service, quality products, and building trust and rapport with your customers.
Relationships can also be built through email marketing campaigns, content creation, and social media interactions.
11. Include push notifications.
Push notifications are messages that pop up on your screens when you’re not using the browser.
Push notifications keep customers connected with their favorite brands and businesses.
And they’re effective because they appear on the screen without users opening an app.
They can help remind customers about deadlines, deals, and other important information.
A well-timed push notification can remind customers to take advantage of a limited-time offer.
12. Engage a chatbot.
Chatbots are a great way to improve user engagement.
A chatbot is a computer program that understands natural language and responds to it.
Chatbots are simple to use, and they integrate with many platforms like Facebook messenger, Skype, or Slack.
With Chatbots, customers have a quick way to contact a company and get an answer to a question. Chatbots reduce the time people spend on hold.
And chatbots can help customers choose between products, make reservations, or complete the checkout process.
Best of all, chatbots are available to your customers after hours, so your customers can get help and attention when you’re not available.
13. Focus on customer loyalty.
Customer loyalty is one of the most important aspects of today’s business world.
Everyone knows it’s more cost-effective to keep an existing customer than it is to find a new customer.
Companies need to provide an engaging customer experience that promotes customer loyalty and retention.
A customer loyalty program, bonus points, and special discounts are great incentives for customers to shop more often and stay loyal to your brand.
And the more loyal they are to your brand, the more likely they will recommend you to their family and friends.
14. Collect insight from analytics.
Analyze the data you collect to gain insight into your customers and their behavior.
This helps customer engagement in many ways, such as:
- Understanding how customers interact with your product.
- Understanding your target audiences’ needs and preferences.
- Supporting the design process by providing insights into desired features or changes.
- Providing information to predict how campaigns will perform before they launch.
- Encouraging a more personalized experience with customers.
Using the data you gather, you can find patterns in customers’ behaviors and learn what works and what doesn’t. Then you can make changes to engage your target audience in a better way.
15. Don’t forget about your team.
Your customer service experience will only be as good as your customer service team. After all, a customer service representative may be a customer’s first point of contact.
Take care of your employees. Ensure they have a comfortable work environment with the right tools and technology to do their jobs well.
Invest in good training programs for your people, so they know how to support your customers.
Give them the autonomy to serve your customers well.
And reward them when they go above and beyond for your business.
Happy employees will provide better service for your customers.
Tactics to Implement Customer Engagement
1. Start with S.M.A.R.T. goals.
A S.M.A.R.T. goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Setting customer engagement goals is helpful, but first, you need to be sure your goals are relevant to your business.
- What kind of engagement do you want?
- How much, if any, do you want to see it increase?
- From what channels do you want the engagement to come?
- What is your definition of customer engagement?
- But most importantly, why do you want to maintain or increase engagement?
When you have the specifics laid out, it keeps everyone on the same page.
2. Start collaborating with your team.
Depending on the size of your business, customer contact might occur across multiple departments. You want everyone on the same page about customer engagement, so everyone is working towards the same goals.
Use cross-functional team collaboration to coordinate and integrate the tasks related to customer engagement. Make your expectations clear, so everyone knows the appropriate responses for helping and serving your customers.
3. Segment long-term and short-term customer engagement.
Your business needs a mix of long-term and short-term customer engagement strategies.
Sources of short-term customer engagement could be anything from a contest to a giveaway. These are an incentive to grab the attention of your current followers or customers but aren’t necessarily sustainable in the long run.
Long-term customer engagement comes from personalized content, content marketing, customer service, consistency, and the other things we suggested throughout this post.
Using both types of engagement strategies keeps your marketing campaigns fresh and relevant.
Using a customer engagement platform with customer segment and marketing automation features makes tracking engaged customers a breeze.
4. Get feedback from everybody.
Your customer feedback is not the only way to measure customer behavior.
Talk to your customer service reps, your salespeople, your IT people, as well as partners or other stakeholders.
They all have insights that can be useful to your overall strategy as you identify areas where you need to make changes.
How To Track Customer Engagement
It’s important to track your customer engagement metrics. It helps you see what your customers are most engaged with and which efforts attract the most people.
There are a few ways to track your results.
Conversion rates
Conversion rates measure the number of customers who take action after exposure to a marketing campaign.
A simple way to find your rates is to divide the number of customers who make a purchase (or other desired action) by the total number of people exposed to the campaign.
For example, if you had 50 customers buy from an ad 1000 people saw, your conversion rate is 5%.
Ideal conversion rates will vary by industry.
Time spent on page
Time on-page is a metric that measures the amount of time an individual spends reading or interacting with a web page.
Pages that don’t get attention from your customers can be reworked to make them more appealing or user-friendly.
Video watch time
When you publish video content, how long do viewers watch it? Do they click away after a few seconds? Or do they watch the entire video?
If your customers are clicking away before they reach the end, you know you’re losing their interest.
Experiment with changes to see what keeps their attention.
Are You Ready to Increase Your Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is an essential component of business success. It measures the strength of the relationship between a company and its customer.
A winning customer engagement strategy will exceed customer expectations, nurture customer lifetime value, and create a sense of brand loyalty.
Capture their attention and lead them into a long-term customer relationship with your business.
What is the first thing you will do to increase customer engagement in your business?