2020-05-22
Customer Engagement: Best Practices for Increasing Satisfaction
What does it mean for revenue when customers become engaged? What are the potential outcomes of better engagement? How can you analyze your engagement, and tailor your strategies around the results? Here, we’ll explore the basics of customer engagement, its importance to your overall customer acquisition and retention strategy, best practices on building a successful customer engagement program, and examples of well-executed customer engagement strategies.
What is Customer Engagement?
For instance, you may want your customers to read a piece of content, share a post, enter a contest, leave a review, or continue to use an app or service. Engagement activities are geared toward not conversion, but connection (though ultimately, it serves that outcome). Engagement as a long-tail strategy opens the door to repeat sales or even referrals to their friends and family.
Customer Engagement Marketing
This continual strengthening of the brand relationship is achieved through customer engagement marketing, a strategy that delivers timely and personalized messages, offers, and incentives to a customer throughout their journey.
The marketing approach can be tracked, analyzed, and improved through the use of a Customer Engagement Management platform, which allows teams to plan and deliver great customer experiences, track response rates, and tailor marketing messaging based on response insights and market data.
Why is Customer Engagement Important?
Cost Reduction
Better Lifetime Value
Reduced Churn
More Referrals
Improved Brand Reputation
Building a Successful Customer Engagement Strategy
While every engagement strategy looks different, and while your overall strategy is driven by factors specific to your business, industry, and audience, the best customer engagement strategies have a few key characteristics. These core best practices can help you collect the information you need to build rapport with your customers for the long term, even when market conditions, trends, or needs change. “
- Ask Questions: The best way to understand your customers and what motivates them? Ask! Tools such as customer profiles and satisfaction and loyalty surveys can help you understand customers’ needs and desires, beyond the information collected by your CRM or CEM platforms.
- Create Customer Personas: If you’re going to create good content, it’s important to know who your customers are. Creating detailed, data-based customer personas, based on educated assumptions about your different customers, can help you craft content most likely to catch tier attention and get them to engage. There are templates available online to help you ask the right questions and flesh out your personas to get as close as possible to your ideal customer.
- Create Great, Diverse Content: With your personas fully developed, you are ready to create content that will engage, entertain, and delight your audience. Building content based on a well-formulated buyer’s journey and the right data can help you time communications and offers effectively. Be sure to develop content across all channels indicated by your persona.
- Create an Omnichannel Strategy: Your buyer personas don’t just live in one place. Most people engage with an average of seven social media channels, according to a study by the GlobalWebIndex. Take advantage of this statistic by creating a wide variety of touchpoints with different types of content, including long and short-form written content and thought leadership, social media campaigns, video, traditional advertising, and direct mail. Each of these offers a chance to reach your audience in a place where they are likely to spend time and engage with your brand.
- Be Personable: Brand personality is a big part of getting your customers to engage with your content. Corporations like Coca-cola, Jetblue, Apple, and Purple Mattress have built followings on the emotional connections they’ve built with their audience. Develop a distinct brand voice and standards that permeate every communication and advertisement you send.
- Personalize the Customer Experience: The emotional connection you’re looking for is all about customer-focused communication. It makes the recipient feel as though a communication or experience is tailor-made just for them. Using data to create personalized experiences, timing communications effectively, responding to changing needs, and creating the feel of one-to-one interactions at scale are essential to creating loyalty and improving conversion rates.
Examples of Engaging Customers
Alleyoop
SmartRecruiters
RollWorks
Customer Engagement Made Easy
Sending direct mail, gifts, and branded swag is an effective customer engagement strategy that can increase your response rates and revenue at an excellent ROI. Using a Sending Platform can further improve your results and reduce costs by making it easy for teams to plan and implement campaigns, connect with customers on a highly personalized level, and use the insights collected from sending to improve future performance and response.
If you’d like to learn more about how the right gift can create engagement and loyalty for your customers schedule a demo with a Sending Specialist today.