Customer engagement tips

Customer engagement is the emotional connection between a customer and a brand. Highly engaged customers buy more, promote more, and demonstrate more loyalty. Providing a high-quality customer experience is an important component of your customer engagement strategy.

Marketers now need to provide real-time, personalized experiences that reach customers just as they need them. Businesses need to provide an unbroken and highly relevant conversation across channels, responding to and even anticipating customers’ ever-evolving needs. In today’s terms, this is known as “customer engagement,” and it can take many forms. It’s the promotion that pops up when a customer passes a store selling a product he’s likely to want at that particular time. It’s the mobile alert on exactly when an order will be delivered. In other words, it’s about providing customer engagements that are relevant, convenient, responsive, and reliable.

Here are seven customer engagement strategies that can build a loyal customer following:

Customer Experience Is Priority #1

Think about your business model and how you can best serve your customers. When do your customers need you? What hours do you need to be available to them?

It’s about looking at all of your customers and delivering exceptional service no matter if they are worth $1 or $1M to your business. Remember, in the long run, your customers will determine your revenue.

Humanize your brand

At the heart of everything, it’s important to understand that every customer wants to feel you understand their needs and that they can relate to your brand. find a personality within your organization who is passionate about your brand and a natural communicator. Grow that person into a thought leader and give them a voice to humanize your brand and engage your audience.

Get Social

Social media is a great place to let your brand off the leash a little. Voice personas are common on Twitter, and it’s a great way to get interested, interaction, and even viral traction for your brand

But Understand Where the Line Is

Sassy is good, but offensive is very, very bad

Personalize Customer Communications

70% of US retailers are making customer personalization a priority in 2017 [Emarketer]. Personalization should be about making the user feel welcomed and known without feeling like you’re strip-mining their data.

Create Useful Content

According to this Google study, 48% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from companies whose mobile sites provide instructional video content.

Using content to educate customers was a previously underused customer engagement strategy but it’s now becoming increasingly common to enhance the customer experience and increases satisfaction.

Really Listen to What People Are Telling You

The flip side of using social media as a way to differentiate your brand is using it to listen to customer complaints and really respond. Whether or not social listening informs your long-term goals, it helps people to feel heard by your brand, and it’s a great way to get negative feedback.

Ultimately whatever customer experience strategies you employ, be consistent – think about the brand messaging you employ, your customers’ end-to-end experience from their very first interaction and the various departments these customers will move through.

Give them a consistent (and exceptional) experience and you’ll be rewarded with their trust and loyalty.