Customer engagement is more than a way to gauge how connected customers are with your brand. It’s an umbrella term for the various processes you can use to create and foster customer relationships.
The right engagement strategies can have a tremendous effect on the success of your business. These strategies help enhance the customer experience, increase customer retention rates, and help you attract new business.
While a loyalty marketing strategy is essential, here are 7 other ideas to help foster customer engagement.
1. Understand the Customer’s Journey
You can’t improve or implement a customer engagement strategy without understanding who your customers are and how they’re currently engaging with your brand. Take a look at your customer journey.
See what your customers experience and note any challenges, touchpoints, or bottlenecks they face on the way to conversion. This allows you to understand more about their behavior and needs and identify new opportunities for customer engagement.
2. Offer Personalized Service
Personalization is one of the top customer engagement strategies out there. Today’s consumers expect more.
They expect personalized service, and they want it fast. Using their first names in emails, location-based ads, and AI hyper-relevant services are all personalized options.
It comes down to knowing your customer and understanding what they’re looking for and when they want it. Personalized service can be as simple as using a pre-chat survey to gather customer data or offering buying suggestions while the customer is on your website.
The more you know about your customers, the more effective your personalized strategies will be.
3. Make the Most of Social Media
Social media is now at the forefront of digital marketing. Making the most out of this opportunity involves refining your message and how you deliver it.
Social media provides an avenue for customers to directly engage with your brand. You can target and tailor your message toward the customer’s wants and needs.
To get the most from social media, be sure your postings are relevant, timely, and consistent. This helps build brand familiarity and inspire engagement with your company.
Using social media as a public forum helps demonstrate your willingness to address customer concerns and your commitment to excellent customer service.
4. Implement a Chatbot
Implementing an AI-powered chatbot allows you to speak directly to visitors and analyze customer data. A chatbot can make recommendations to your website visitors or help them choose products to buy.
A chatbot can be a smart engagement strategy. It functions based on the customer’s needs and feels natural. It can use “triggers” that analyze data and send messages based on a customer’s time on your site, the pages they view, or their location.
Chatbot helps you extend your business hours. Although employees aren’t around, your customers are still engaging with your brand and being led through the buyer’s journey.
5. Capture Relevant Analytics
Analytics is a must for any successful company. This allows you to see what’s working and what your customers like and dislike.
Customer feedback gives you the tools to make necessary changes in your business strategy. You can gather customer data from customer interactions, satisfaction surveys, or a customer service platform.
You can see which pages on your website get the most views or result in the most inquiries. You can evaluate how your team is performing and see when and how often they engage with customers.
Having this kind of data at your fingertips is priceless and critical for long-term success.
6. Try Visual Engagement Tools
Tools that use visuals help customers engage and enjoy a more human experience with your brand. Co-browsing is a tech tool that allows a support agent to interact with customers in real-time.
For example, if a customer has difficulty filling out a form, a support agent will initiate a co-browsing session to guide them through the process. Co-browsing is easy to use and secure. It provides an opportunity to reach customers who would otherwise give up and leave your site.
Video chat is another powerful tool that can create a more personal connection with online customers. Live video communication gets customers’ attention and provides an opportunity for engagement and conversion.
7. Provide Conversational Service
Today’s customers want attention and personalized service, and they expect you to meet their needs. Consider moving your customer service strategy towards conversations rather than interactions.
Building customer relationships involve more than superficial interaction with your brand. Talk to your customers and build long-term relationships.
A customer-centric culture focuses on the value of the customer, and it keeps them coming back. Storing their data and interaction history helps make all team members aware of previous conversations and issues they may have had.
“How can I help you” becomes “I can see the issue you’re having. Let me help you resolve this.” Conversational service adds a personal touch and helps foster strong customer relationships.
Build Your Customer Engagement Strategy
Every interaction you have with your customers cements your brand in their memory. When these interactions are favorable, you can develop loyal, long-term customers who will return to your brand time and time again.
If you’re interested in leveraging loyalty marketing to hep in choosing the right customer engagement strategies that can make a difference for your business, we’re here to help!
Contact us today to learn more.
