Introduction
The internet is littered with various definitions of customer engagement, but one thing they all share is this: customer engagement is about the interactions between you and your customers. These interactions can happen on a variety of channels and help strengthen your relationship with customers.
Customer engagement begins with a customer’s first interaction with your brand and extends beyond the point of purchase. Ongoing interactions between your brand and your customer are a clear sign your customer is engaged. Customers consuming content on social media, websites, blogs, and email marketing are all engaging with your brand.
Delivering cross-channel experiences gives customers the choice to decide where they engage with you. By offering them a choice, you’ll be able to discover the type of interaction and content they find valuable. This will ultimately lead them to develop a stronger emotional bond with your brand.
You need to deliver content and experiences that add value to create meaningful customer experiences. When customers feel as though they are getting more than just a product or service from your brand, they connect to your brand.
Why is customer engagement important?
Brands are so often concerned with acquisition, clicks, and conversions, that it can be easy to forget the importance of the moments in between. Engaging customers between and beyond purchases will strengthen their emotional connection with your brand. Stronger connections between your customers and the brand will help you retain your hard-won customers.
Beyond simply driving customers down the marketing funnel, customer engagement is about connecting beyond the key touchpoints in your customer journey. Successful customer engagement will keep your brand at the top of the customer’s mind when it comes to the decision-making process. It’ll also make them more responsive to your marketing efforts.
Cross-selling, up-selling, and average order value are just a few metrics that will increase as your customer engagement improves.
Why do you need a customer engagement strategy?
A customer engagement strategy is like a feedback loop. Every engagement or customer interaction provides the opportunity to develop customer loyalty, yes. But it also allows you to collect valuable customer insights. Without those insights, you’re more likely to have missed opportunities for the business, like making more informed marketing decisions, honing your sales process, or reinvesting in the brand experience.
And when 88% of customers say the experiences provided by a company are as important to them as its products and services, it’s important to take note because it has a direct impact on business success.
Customer engagement is a step beyond customer satisfaction.
On the other hand, customer satisfaction is how much consumers like or dislike your product, service, or experience. Both are essential when interacting with consumers, but customer engagement also involves listening to build a rapport and provide a tailored solution. Effective listening is a powerful skill that affects the entire customer experience. The better a rep can listen, the more they can tailor a solution based on the customer’s distinct job role, problems, and intended results.
As a result, brands that better engage customers are also more profitable. A study by Gallop discovered that when companies successfully engaged customers, they reported 63% lower customer attrition, 55% higher wallet share, and overall performed 23% better than their competitors.
6 major benefits
Increased sales are every company’s big-picture goal. However, many other benefits to customer engagement will position your brand for long-term success and improve your return on investment. Applying proven tools and best practices, your company can strategize and implement a customer engagement plan that:
- Improves customer relationship
- Boosts loyalty and customer retention
- Uncovers up-sell opportunities
- Streamlines purchase cycles
- Increases users
Relationships have been the backbone of traditional storefront businesses forever, but are challenging to maintain in the digital age. Technology makes it easier to discover and market your business to new leads, but it’s become harder to maintain customer relationships.
Regular communication with customers across platforms helps build rapport. Customer engagement doesn’t start and end with the purchase, and consumers often have questions throughout the process. Effective engagement strategies allow you to connect with and consider consumers’ needs from initial awareness to purchase and beyond.
Boosts loyalty and customer retention
An effective engagement strategy will ensure that you always know how your customers feel about your product or service, the qualities that they value, and any areas of improvement needed to provide a better experience. What upgrades would enhance usability? Does your customer service team need a training refresh? What relevant data or trends will help them in their industry?
You want your customers to feel heard and appreciated, which, in turn, helps protect against customer churn. When you show genuine interest in your customers, they’ll be more likely to buy from you again. Instead of being a company that merely offers a product, you become the holistic answer or solution to their problem.
Uncovers up-sell opportunities
With a loyal customer base, you can easily promote and sell products with additional features. In general, it’s simpler to sell to a current customer versus a new lead. The likelihood of selling to a new prospect is just 5–20%, but the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70%.
Upselling saves time and costs, and it can also help you more quickly earn a profit. Using consumer trends and data, you can quickly assess product performance and identify up-sell opportunities, such as recommending products that are frequently bought together or purchased by similar buyers at a later date.
Streamlines purchase cycles
Customer engagement helps you organize your activities to convert and retain leads. Modern engagement platforms use AI-driven technology and data to automate interactions and repetitive tasks and create a personalized experience that encourages a prospect to make a purchase.
You can assign roles quickly, anticipate needs, and create custom, timely responses that address common questions and concerns. With detailed insights into your account and sales activity, you can easily retarget potential customers and shorten the buying process. Furthermore, streamlined purchasing gives your team time to focus on innovation, growth, and other higher-level tasks.
Increases users
Consistent engagement helps win over customers or, at the very least, pique their interest in your business and offerings. When it comes to retaining customers, many brands go out of their way to give incentives and freebies to show appreciation. Discounts and promotions are fast ways to attract potential leads, but you want to ensure you’re also providing value.
Companies that give customers relevant content that answers key questions see a significant increase in users. As those users grow more familiar with your brand, it will eventually become the go-to choice and the product they seek out over competitors. Some companies find that the more they get in front of customers, the better. However, less is more for some audiences, so use a data-driven approach to determine your frequency and channel mix that best appeals to your target market’s needs and interests.
Address: Harmilap Nagar, phase 2, Baltana, Industrial Area Phase 2, Zirakpur, Punjab 140604
Contact No: 6283835609
Email Address: visualfoxx80@gmail.com