The customer engagement concept has changed recently, as many companies look for more innovative and creative ways to retain loyal customers and attract new clients. Before, simply offering quality services or products was enough.
However, new analytical tools and data show that customer engagement is one of the top influencing factors when it comes to purchasing decisions. Now everywhere you go, customer engagement remains the main topic of discussion.
So, What Is This Customer Engagement?
Basically, customer engagement refers to the process of establishing a good relationship between customers and businesses. It involves customer communications in the course of the customer lifecycle and usually focuses on helping them get value from products while strengthening the ongoing relationship.
Successful customer engagement depends on sending an effective message to the right audience and at the right place and time so as to get the desired results.
The communication channels may differ, but the main ones include a mix of messaging types, including in-app messages, customizable bots, and email.
Types of Customer Engagement
When companies engage with customers emotionally through their brand imaging, communication channels, and online and offline touchpoints, it facilitates them to connect with customers, know their requirements, and deliver what they ask for. This ensures companies perform better and even gain long-term loyalty and trust.
In addition, when engagement is done with full information about the situation and customer, businesses will understand clients’ needs through the right collaboration and communication, resulting in personalized and effective discussion and solutions. Other types of customer engagement businesses can use include:
- Social engagement
- Engagement of convenience
Why Customer Engagement Works
Like every businessperson, you want your brand to be omnipresent to ensure your team will be there when customers need help from you. But being omnipresent might become very exhausting for the biggest organizations without enough resources to spend.
Basically, customer engagement works since it takes all the pressure from one team to produce the best customer experience. This kind of strategy involves the whole customer journey and the staff in the company that supports the entire thing, from sales and operations to customer service.
How It Looks Like
Customers can engage with your company at different levels. For some customers, it happens at the product level, but for others, it’s the level of the brand that counts.
Engagement can be abstract or specific, like visiting a certain store brand within their region since it is more welcoming and better managed than others.
At times, it can be integrated with a service or product itself. In this case, the question is not whether the customer engages or not, but rather how meaningful those moments are.
Trends
With new factors, like wearables and technology, the digital experience is not combined with the physical experiences of customer engagement.
For instance, a business may use beacons to know that customers are in-store and send them messages about products in the abandoned shopping cart online, depending on their presence.
Engagement of customers is as well moving beyond the realm of traditional or retail product sales. Industries, such as healthcare, are using technological advancements, like customer portals, so as to engage patients in communication with doctors and health regimens.
Wearables are also identified as the key tool in the engagement of patients, allowing them to measure different health indications and even track health regimens.
Loyalty Program and Customer Engagement
The more you engage your customers, the more they get invested emotionally in your business. The emotional investment makes them do business with you and becomes loyal clients.
Many customers also don’t want to miss out on something. When you consider adding value to your engagement strategies, you will be able to create a strong switching barrier.
Loyal customers not only do more business often, they as well have an order value, which is around 13% higher than non-members, making them an important part of your growth strategy.
Measuring Customer Engagement
As a businessperson, you need to understand the need for metrics. If you are going to dedicate your resources and time to improving customer engagement, you have to learn how to measure the outcome of your work.
Depending on your goals and business, there are several strategies you can implement. For instance, you can use the AOV (average order value) to know how much customers spend in general when buying on a website.
Normally, repeat customers spend around 7x times more than new or one-time buyers. This means that the higher the metric, the more repeat customers will return to your site. Other ways you can use to measure engagement include:
- NPS (net promoter score)
- Pages per session
- Newsletter open rates
- Repeat purchase rate
- Purchase frequency
Strategies of Engaging Customers
Customer engagement strategies involve setting up a plan to capture the attention of the existing clients and ensure they have a great experience when interacting with your business throughout.
One of the great strategies you can use is to create a good experience for customers. Almost everyone has had a bad experience with a company, which made them swear to never return.
Rather than creating a bad experience for customers, focus on creating good ones. Ensuring to deliver a good customer experience means you need to map out ways you can interact with clients.
Whether it is a website, emails, social media pages, customer support center, or brick-and-mortar stores, thoroughly analyze all of them and know where you need to improve.
Importance of Customer Engagement
Usually, customer engagements benefit suppliers and buyers alike by meeting current customer expectations and increasing close rates.
Be sure to keep your customers engaged in the purchases so as to collect valuable customer details and develop customer loyalty.
Mostly, customer interactions make buyers find your business valuable and even offer you customer insights. Those insights will inform marketing decisions, like content development, retargeting, and sales processes, including:
- Outreach methods
- Messaging
Final Remarks!
The most successful brands these days focus on engaging customers beyond their transactions. Focusing on this too means that your business stands a chance to bring in more repeat purchases and keep clients as the focal point for customer experience through incentives and offering educational content.