Your How-To Guide for Engaging with Your Customers

Engaging with your customers effectively directly results in an increase in page views, time on site and yes, conversions, learn how to improve customer engagement.

Engaging with Your Customers

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

To build business relationships with your consumers made to last, you need to engage and connect with them. Increased engagement can lead to extensive customer loyalty, improved sales, and overall better experiences for everyone involved. 

So what is meant by customer engagement?

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is about the interactions and connections you make with your all-important consumers. When you’re engaging with your customers, you’re developing an exchange with them, building upon the foundation of your relationship, and also making sure that you’re doing everything you can to keep your customers interested. 

Customer engagement can be achieved through various interactions and content, such as social media posts, live chat, comments, or physical dialogue. 

Why is Customer Engagement Important? 

You may not think that customer engagement matters all too much if you’re still getting a customer to make a successful purchase. However, customer engagement can truly transform the experience for both you and your customer, and it can also change your customer’s opinion of you for the long term. 

 

Customer engagement is important because it goes beyond simply supplying a product or service. It incorporates everything about the customer experience, aims to make a connection, and also increases the chances of customers staying interested in your business. 

 

Customer engagement can begin long before any commitment to make a purchase, which is why it’s so important: it can shape the whole buying process and make a difference as to whether your customer chooses to do business with you or not. 

 

5 Signs You Might Not Be Engaging with Your Customers the Right Way

 

  1. You’re having limited interactions on your social media posts. Posts may not be getting any comments or responses, or if there are conversations started, it may filter out.
  2. You’re having limited website traffic. You may not be drumming up enough interest to have a high number of visitors to your website.
  3. Your sales are down. Perhaps the biggest tell-tale sign, you might not be doing enough to engage your customers and encourage them to make a purchase.
  4. If interacting with your customers in person, you may simply be able to tell that they’re not interested — or eager to get away from you! 
  5. Your customers are choosing to buy from competitors after speaking with or interacting with you. 

 

How to Better Engage with Your Customers 

 

Start Conversations 

 

You want to give customers a reason to talk to you, about you and with you. Therefore, looking for opportunities to prompt discussions is a great way to encourage interaction — and one of the best ways you can do this is on social media. This is because there is so much potential for others to join in the conversation, easily share the posts, and also because it can be seen publicly — meaning attracting the attention of even more customers if the conversation is interesting enough. 

 

To encourage as much engagement as possible, think about hot topics or interesting discussions relating to your product and service. Choose something customers will want to happily talk about or thought-provoking questions they may want to get involved with. 

 

Interact with Customers 

 

Social media isn’t a one-way street, and consumers can really appreciate it if you like or interact with their posts, too — especially if they’ve gone to the effort of interacting with yours. It can be difficult and time-consuming to do this with all customers. Instead, what you should focus on is interacting however and whenever you can. It could be a quick like of their comment, a like of one of their posts, or giving them a follow back. 

 

Optimize Your SEO 

 

This is very important for driving user engagement and encouraging a greater amount of traffic to your website and content. Optimizing your SEO means tailoring your keywords and content to the right people and providing them with what they need in order for them to find your site. This also includes local SEO, which you can learn more about if you’re not sure how to optimize your SEO for local searches, such as using Google My Business. 

 

Host Contests or Giveaways

 

This can be extremely effective when you have an easy and fun product, and especially giveaways you can do through social media. This can encourage excitement, interaction, and community spirit, as well as helping consumers to react positively to free items. 

 

Competitions and giveaways also have the power to grab the attention of consumers who don’t know much about you if they’re interested in winning free gear. 

 

Reward Loyalty 

 

Engaging with your consumers isn’t just about doing what you can to grab the attention of new customers. It’s also about rewarding the customers who have stuck around with you long enough and making sure they’re still feeling appreciated and connected. 

 

Rewarding loyal customers on a regular basis is a good way to strengthen relationships and encourage consumers to return. Loyalty can be rewarding individually or on big occasions, such as your business birthday or around the holidays. 

 

Listen to Your Customers 

 

Giving your consumers a platform to speak their minds about your product or service is a good way to strengthen relationships. If you can take negative feedback and take it on board to do better next time, this can encourage better connections if your customers can see that you’re trying to improve and make a difference. 

 

Gaining feedback and encouraging feedback can help your customers feel more connected with your business and consider their overall experience with you. 

 

Let Your Consumers Peek Behind the Curtain 

 

Customers will love seeing behind-the-scenes information or hearing stories from the business side of things. Being open with your customers and willing to share can help to foster better relationships. 

 

This could be uploading a site tour of your business, creating videos of how your product is made or packaged, introducing the team behind the company name, or anything else which allows them to find out more about your business and its story. 

 

Summary

To conclude, engaging with your customers should be an enjoyable experience for both of you. It’s the perfect way to improve the brand experience as a whole and hopefully create loyal customers that will return to you for years to come.