Customer engagement is one of the most serious concerns facing business owners today, and it is becoming increasingly complex. Why? Why? Because it encapsulates the entire reason why people set up businesses and use marketing – to build relationships with clients that will ensure they choose you over the competition, relish and gain from your product or service, return to you for more, and recommend your product or service to their friends, family, and colleagues.
Customers must be engaged if you are to acquire, convert, and keep them, and if you want to turn them into brand ambassadors. This comes down to having the ability to interact with people in a relevant, effective, and meaningful manner
Brands can no longer depend solely on memorable slogans or publicity stunts to succeed. Social media and mobile phones have made it necessary for businesses and brands to be ready to seize opportunities to communicate with customers wherever they are and at any time.
However, it is important to not be intimidated by the prospect of taking on such a challenging undertaking! There are a variety of tactics and strategies that you can use to increase client engagement, and they do not have to be difficult to be successful. Instead, they must come from a genuine place, target the appropriate audiences, and present valid reasons for customers to interact in order for them to do so willingly and enthusiastically.
What is customer engagement?
In order to discuss how to do customer engagement properly, it is important to first have a definition of what it is.
Customer engagement encompasses all of the ways in which you communicate with customers, both online and offline. If everything goes according to plan, those interactions should cause customers to feel and act favourably about your company or brand. Consumer engagement examples that occur on a daily basis include: A customer receives an email newsletter about a new product release and visits the company’s website to learn more about it. Alternatively, a client contacts the support line to inquire about exchanging an item. Another situation may be that a customer visits a company’s social media website and views a behind-the-scenes clip describing how a product is manufactured.
There are countless examples of customer engagement, but the basic fact is that businesses that place a strong emphasis on customer engagement are more concerned with value creation than they are with maximizing income. They provide people with something more meaningful than just a marketing pitch: they look to provide a fantastic end-to-end customer experience, excellent content, and interactive, real-time customer care. When properly implemented, a good customer engagement plan will increase customer loyalty while simultaneously increasing sales.
How can you increase customer engagement?
- Give your customer a great experience
It is pretty self-explanatory, really. We have all had negative experiences with businesses that have left us vowing never to do business with them again. Customer service representatives taking an excessive amount of time on the phone, an online checkout that was too complicated or a sale that did not go through after entering all of the data, and seeing a social media post that was in bad taste can all be examples of poor user engagement. This is why it is vital to give your customers great experiences.
In order to ensure that you provide excellent customer experiences, you must first sketch out all of the ways in which you connect with them. Make an in-depth review of each channel, whether it is a brick-and-mortar store, website, social media pages, emails, customer service center, or anything else. Determine where you can make improvements in each. You should also look at extending your scope of customer support platforms – live chat applications or video are great ways to do it these days. Check out the best video chat applications by click4assistance.
- Be meaningful and relatable
Successful customer engagement is more than just providing a seamless and efficient user experience, although this is certainly a significant component of it. It is also about developing a brand personality that customers will want to engage with.
This is where the importance of brand awareness comes into play. The customer must be aware that a brand exists and that it has something unique, relevant, or valuable to offer before he or she will consider engaging with it.
Brands must strive to instil a sense of significance and purpose in the minds of their customers in order to capture their interest and open up doors for further interaction with them. A large part of it will come from the sense of integrity you can instil in your brand.
Authenticity is communicated by brands in almost every aspect of their operations, including their advertising. Obtaining goods from providers who share your ethical and moral principles may be necessary for some people. Others may draw inspiration from their own personal story of how the brand came to be, as well as the passion that drove them to establish it. Whatever it is that distinguishes your firm, search for opportunities to allow its true self to show through so that customers may become aware of it, identify with it, and engage in it.
- Hone your social media strategy
Being present on social media platforms is now a must-have for businesses of all sizes. Every entrepreneur understands the importance of being present on social media; the question is how to best engage with clients on it.
Social media networks are busy places, with a plethora of brands and items vying for the attention of their followers. As a result, actions aimed at increasing client involvement must be extremely targeted.
Despite the fact that responding to consumer comments on social media can seem like a hassle, it is extremely vital, especially when the comments are negative. Companies should recognize that customer complaints are also opportunities for engagement, and they should take the time to respond to them carefully and thoroughly. This has the potential to change a terrible engagement into a positive one.
It is also critical to post on a regular and frequent basis to maintain credibility. While this does not necessarily imply posting information on a daily basis, there should be a regular stream of content and communication with which customers can interact. Additionally, rather than simply chatting to customers on social media, strive to start interactions with them. Interactive content such as polls, contests, and quizzes can encourage involvement and debate among your audience. And make sure to follow up with clients once they have expressed interest so that they know they have been heard and taken into consideration.
- Think about customer retention
Maintaining clients is far more cost-effective than obtaining new ones for a business. Current consumers spend more money and do so more frequently, as well as being a brand advocate to their family and friends, some of whom become customers as well.
Consider this: a consumer will only return to a brand or business if they have had a positive experience with it in the first place. Customers will be more engaged and satisfied if they have a constant succession of pleasant, dependable, and beneficial experiences with a business. They will also be more likely to return.
Customers return to companies time and time again when they feel appreciated, well-cared-for, and enthused by new and innovative offerings from the company.
Customer retention and customer engagement go hand in hand with one another. It is impossible to have one without the other. As a result, every successful customer engagement plan would include methods for retention – that is, tactics for keeping customers delighted over the long term and over the whole lifetime of their connection with a company.
- Engage with video
Video is, without a doubt, one of the most effective marketing techniques now available. And, as global audiences spend more time on mobile devices, connecting customers with appealing tidbits of video at various points in the customer journey has emerged as one of the most popular marketing methods.
Excellent video storytelling is the key to generating high levels of engagement. While digitization has fundamentally altered the way we live, some fundamental human characteristics, such as the desire to tell tales, will remain unchanged. Narratives have a magnetic pull on our brains. In order to make sense of the world and everything that happens around us, we must first make sense of ourselves. Companies who use their brand videos to tell engaging or moving stories will go far further in terms of increasing client engagement than their competitors.
In addition to developing videos that convey tales, it is critical to consider the audiences to whom you will be presenting those stories. When you use social media or native advertising to target relevant films to certain client demographics, you increase your chances of attracting their interest and engagement.
Conclusion
Today, there are more options than ever before to interact with clients. This means that firms have a plethora of options to attract consumers’ attention and convince them to join them.
The ability of companies to connect with and interact with customers at every conceivable opportunity is essential in order to increase consumer engagement and loyalty. In the end, whatever consumer engagement tactics you use, be sure they are consistent. Create messages that are consistent with the brand and appropriate for the target audience, and ensure that customers have a pleasant end-to-end experience from the moment they interact with the brand through the whole brand journey.
Providing customers with a consistent and great experience will result in their trust, loyalty, and engagement.
