Best Customer Engagement Strategies You Need To Know
Customer engagement strategies are key for any business to be successful, here are the best customer engagement strategies you should be using.
Entrepreneurship is the dream for many. This is, of course, an impressive challenge to overcome.
I think that most budding entrepreneurs understand that there are significant hurdles in setting up a successful business. I also believe that it’s a real eye opener to actually live it, seeing how hard it truly can be. There are a wide variety of things that business owners need to do so that they can succeed. One of the most important is incorporating customer engagement strategies.
Many people, however, do not know what this is, nor how to do it. That is why we are going to talk about it extensively.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is a method entrepreneurs use to encourage customers to interact with them through various communication channels. Savvy brands use this to create a more personal communication experience allowing customers get to share the experience they have when handling/using a particular product/service. Now that you are conversant with the term “customer engagement,” customer engagement strategies will be easier to understand.
Customer engagement strategies are mechanisms that help business owners engage with their customers.
The reason customer engagement strategies are so important is because this is the root of how brands draw in new customers, keep existing customers happy, boost customer loyalty and ultimately increase sales.
So, what are these strategies?
Customer Engagement Strategies for Brand Building
1. Personalize Information
Customers always want to feel like they are connecting to you as a brand on a personal level. This just means that you need to treat them as part of your company’s family. One way of doing so is conveying a message meant for a specific person only.
A good example would be to send a “Happy Birthday” message to a client on his/her birthday. To add a more personal touch, it would be amazing if you add their name to the message. This will make them feel special and it will be a great way to engage them in your brand.
2. Humanize Your Brand
Another way of engaging clients is through humanizing your brand. This essentially means that you need to move away from operating as a company and just be a “human.”
Although it should be obvious that good communication with customers should be the backbone of any engagement strategy, many companies get it wrong. Every day, brands falter on both listening and engaging with their audience — you know…the human part.
A great way of accomplishing this would be through brand storytelling. Brand storytelling helps businesses become unforgettable to their target audience.
In fact, business storytelling works so well, it has become an integral part of the marketing process. Through storytelling, businesses just like yours, can better connect with your target audience, increase trust in authority, and stay engaged with your customers.
3. Embrace Customer Engagement Solutions
Technology is changing the way we engage customers, and in the case of eCommerce for the better. Engaging customers has always been a bit challenging, but technology such as AI has bridged the gap between automation and personalization.
SeeLevel HX is an excellent example of one such solution. With the mystery shopper process, customer engagement for online businesses skyrockets ultimately bringing ROI up exponentially for these stores.
There are many different ways to improve customer engagement through technology, you may want to check out this list of the Top Automation Tools to Boost Engagement and Sales.
4. Prioritize Customer Experience
Your customers are the people who keep you going as they help you gain profits and many other benefits. If your customers are not your number one priority — they should be. This is the same attitude that your staff should have. Basically, this means focusing on providing the best customer experience.
Customer experience is important, in this case, because it provides you as a business owner an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you want to use this particular strategy, you will first need to ask yourself some tough questions. With your current business model, how can you best serve your clients? When your products/services needed the most? At what time(s) do you offer these services/products? When you are able to answer these questions, you will know you are on the path of successfully implementing this strategy.
5. Provide Valuable Information
In the past, many businesses viewed providing high value information a “weak” customer engagement strategy. Many businesses were afraid that if they provided too much information their customers would simply do it themselves. Over the past several years we’ve come to understand that you simply can’t provide too much information to a potential customer. Your potential customers are in desperate need of solutions, and your here to help!
The provision of valuable information can be in many forms. If you are selling mobile phones, for instance, you can post instructional videos frequently about phone-related various things.
Many of our clients make use of a low cost outdoor banner stand at events or tradeshows to communicate valuable information. Yes, all of your marketing materials should be designed to engage your specific audience.
6. Exchange Rewards With Actions
Many clients would be happy to reciprocate once you reward them with something of value. Therefore, when your clients take a particular action that is good for your venture, you must reward them with something that they like.
A Customer Loyalty Program is easy to implement to your online store which boost engagement and incentivizes not only purchases but return customers.
Also, these programs are offered to every customer to enroll into so that they become brand loyal and reap benefits every time they come back and shop with the same brand. This way the brand gets loyal customers and customers through the loyalty program gets discounts, freebies, coupons, cash back and more on going back every time.
7. Share Your Client’s Stories
When you want to engage with your client, you should consider reducing the brand’s messages and focus more on sharing the client’s stories. People are more likely to respond and interact through these stories rather than the messages. The reason is quite simple. The clients you have dealt with are real people, and that is what resonated with them better.
Social media could be the best place to share these stories. In addition to the fact that it teaches people fast and quite easily, it provides options for you to engage. The stories could be in any form that you like. It can be in the form of reviews, testimonials, photos, or anything else you would like.
8. Learn From Your Mistakes
Human beings are generally emotional beings. These emotions are usually brought out by particular things that happen in the surroundings, like being offended. That is why you will find an unhappy client expressing him/herself in a certain way.
When people are emotional, they need to feel heard and understood. Many business owners usually just offer solutions without hearing them out. Doing so usually makes them feel like you have not taken the time to listen, and this is not good.
The best thing to do would be to listen to them keenly and see things from their perspective, and after understanding them, you better accept your mistakes. It is after this that you plan on how you are going to handle the situation. Through this, your customers will feel a lot better.
Furthermore, unhappy customers can often be the most honest critics. Harvest the complaints and analyze them. This will give you an insight into two or three things in your company.
Conclusion
Customer engagement is a tricky sea to navigate through, but with the strategies above, you will be able to sail through.
Don’t forget personlization begins with every message you send your customers. Make sure that when you communicate, you do so in a way that makes your customer feel like a part of your brand. If you’ve got tips that are really working for your brand, please include them in the comments below, because others want to know.
