Innovative Ways to Increase Customer Engagement

Successful brands have good communication with their customers, if you’re looking for ways to increase customer engagement communicate on a personal level with your customers.

Innovative Ways to Increase Customer Engagement

It’s common knowledge that a happy customer is usually a repeat customer.

As a brand or company, making an effort to communicate with potential customers can be the difference in whether you are making sales or building a customer base. While it may seem obvious that positive customer engagement can improve your company’s reputation and sales, knowing how to go about it can be difficult.

Not to worry…

In this article, I’m going to go over some important and simple ways you can increase customer engagement to ensure they keep coming back.

1. Communication

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.

 

Effective communication lies in both hearing your customers needs and responding effectively.

Not paying attention to their customers is what got Kodak to file for bankruptcy, refusing to change their products when their customers started asking for digital cameras instead of film.

 

Successful communication often doesn’t even come in the form of words but in the action you take.

For example; Blockbuster, the biggest video rental company in America, essentially went under because of their refusal to acknowledge their customers’ wants and needs. Blockbuster didn’t fail due to streaming or DVD mail rentals, it went under because consumers didn’t want buying movies to be an uncomfortable chore.

 

Some of the best ways to interact with your customers to show you are participating in their conversation include:

  • Make accounts on every major social media network and respond to direct messages and posts about the company.
  • Running a company blog gives you a platform to address concerns from your consumers. This helps improve your site’s rankings on Google.
  • Emailing and newsletters, when used sparingly, can be a great way to send a message to any customer about products or issues.

2. Interaction

There are many different ways to interact with your customers, and the way you do could make the difference on whether or not they’ll be back.

For example;

If you’re an online based company that provides SaaS as your business model, it goes without saying that you’re set up to address customer complaints through online measures. Utilizing different APIs to your advantage can make a website more user-friendly and offer an experience that sets your company above the rest. A great way to improve customer engagement through API would be to change an outdated call center for a customer service API that can take care of any customers based on the way you program it. You can also use a shipping API, which will greatly benefit an online shop’s ordering experience by making ordering and reordering more accessible. Consequently this also increases the chance at a secondary engagement.

Brick and mortar stores also should have a well developed online customer support system, but as an in-person experience goes, your employees are the gateway to customer engagement. Your day to day interactions is largely dictated by how your employees behave with patrons and can facilitate customer engagement on a broader scale. Whether you are a restaurant, retail, or any other type of business that has the opportunity to directly interact with consumers, you should know your employees are the face of the company. It can be hugely beneficial to create further opportunities for engagement such as in-store surveys, obtaining their email addresses, or encouraging them to write reviews.

3. Humanization

In this day and age, the way consumers and brands interact with each other has drastically changed compared to the past. It used to be that a standard professional interaction was expected by every company and that purchasers were expected to do the same. This is starting to fall out of favor because many people find that the bland and standard responses have become un-relatable and impersonal. In order to really reach out and have genuine communication with your customers, your brand should carry its own personality and approach.

 

Creating a brand that is relatable with a specific identity can make customers more inclined to want to engage further with your company. More than just that, there is also the benefit of emphasizing your brand identity which can further make your company unique and give a more memorable experience.

 

Following these tips can make your brand more approachable and increase customer engagement across the board. Of course, having good customer engagement will help your company sell and service, but more importantly, it’ll give your customers a better experience.