It’s been a while now since businesses in the present time have started shifting from strict customer acquisition plans toward customer retention. Though they’re on the right track, their strategies surrounding retention still need work. The key is investing time and effort in customer engagement.
Customer engagement is a vital element in nurturing strong brand-consumer bonds. Studies show repeat customers spend 67% more on purchases than new customers. It just goes to show how critical it is to engage consumers to boost sales.
What is Customer Engagement?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s address the elephant in the room. What even is customer engagement?
Simply put, customer engagement concerns any effort put toward reaching out and interacting with potential clients. This could be through emails and texts or social media platforms. The goal is to communicate with prospective customers and share information about your brand to turn leads into conversions.
But it doesn’t end there. Engagement also means continuing contact to supply optimal customer service and experience, so they keep on coming back.
The Importance of Customer Engagement
Engaging customers is an integral part of any brand’s strategy because it directly leads to generating loyal bonds.
We already discussed how crucial customer retention is, but it’s worth repeating. Not only are repeat customers directly more profitable, revenue-wise. They offer continual indirect support that helps brands grow.
Repeat and fully engaged customers tend to showcase their loyalty and spread the good word about a brand they are attached to, to their friends and family. In fact, engagement increases brand awareness regardless due to the company adopting a proactive marketing method.
Finally, customer engagement also provides valuable consumer experience insight. This allows businesses to work on feedback as well as create a more personalized consumer experience.
Read why Customer engagement matters?
3 Engagement Strategies to Reduce Customer Churn
Now that we have a clear understanding of just how important customer engagement is, we can move on to talk about the best ways you can build a winning strategy around engagement and, consequently, increased sales.
1. Broaden your Customer Engagement Avenues
The defining tactic of customer engagement is going to where your audience is. This means you need a wide variety of platforms to cover all possible communication avenues and maximize customer interaction.
You can achieve this by diversifying your engagement tools. So, integrate social media marketing with personalized emails to increase the contact.
Furthermore, another option is expanding your social media presence. You might already be using all the well-known channels such as Facebook and Instagram. However, you might consider adding Snapchat and TikTok to your brand profile as well.
2. Focus on Human Interaction
In an age where automation is all the rage, it turns out that human interaction when conducting business is still a dire need to most people. Customers look to connect to brands by looking beyond the services and price in an attempt to forge a connection with a business based on its values and team.
Especially in the event of an issue or confusion, customers prefer to have an actual person to communicate with instead of a chatbot or some self-service help system. A report by PEGA regarding customer service insights relates that 62% of customers would like to chat on a call with a representative for help. In comparison, only 13% are satisfied with a chatbot.
3. Increase Personalization
Personalized consumer experience means tailoring a customer’s journey with your brand according to their preferences to harvest a genuinely personal bond.
There are many ways a brand can achieve this. The easiest method is providing quizzes to potential customers to gather as much information as possible regarding their likes and dislikes. This will make it easier to manage the automated content and emails you present to them.
Personalization can also extend to brands sending out custom digital greeting cards to celebrate birthdays, holidays, and cultural events. Consider using CardClan to create custom cards and pre-schedule sending them out.
learn more about How to Boost Community Engagement with CardClan
Final Thoughts
Targeted effort in customer acquisition alone is now a thing of the past. In the present time, it’s important to see your customers for what they are, people with preferences, thoughts, and the ability to form loyal emotional connections.
As that realization sinks in, you will understand the ultimate need to stimulate their attention with an active customer engagement strategy. As it happens, our recommendations of broadening your engagement avenues, focusing on human interaction, and increasing personalization will help you construct an effective strategy in no time.
