Customer engagement is not something you should take lightly or ignore if you want your business to prosper in 2022. Statistics shows that about 79% of customers engaging and receiving a timely response with the business they’re buying from is very important. In 2022, doing business has moved beyond buying a product or hiring your company for service. It’s more about the customer experience.
The importance of having an engagement strategy is the impact it can have on customer acquisition and retention rates. A happy customer will likely engage more with your brand, comes back to buy more and share their experience with their friends and families.
So what strategies can you put in place to engage more with your customers? In this article, I am going to explain some strategies that can help your small business boost your customer engagement. Stay tuned.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is the process of building a relationship or connection with your customers. This relationship goes beyond the transaction level. It’s an intentional, consistent approach by a company that provides value at every touchpoint, thus increasing loyalty. It refers to all the ways you connect with your customers at each stage of the customer journey which includes physical contact( stores and offices), emails, social media platforms, phone calls, customer service and more. Developing a strategy around these interactions will lead to more engaging customers which are likely to buy more and refer their families and friends.
When your brand engages with your customers in the right way, the following happens:
- Your customers will buy more and refer more people
- They will promote your brand and business
- Increase loyalty to your business
Customer engagement strategy on the other hand is a plan to increase customer satisfaction by having more positive interactions with them. It can be through any channel like social media, email, in person, phone calls and more.
Having a great strategy can take customer engagement from negative to positive.
6 Customer engagement strategies
1. Leverage social media platforms
Social media platforms are one strategy you can use to build your customer engagement. This is a powerful tool used by millions of businesses to not only promote goods and services but also engage with customers on a more personal level. With social media, your customers can like, follow and comment on your post. This gives you the opportunity to build rapport with your customers and find out what they think about your business.
Furthermore, social media is also a great platform to host various giveaways, organize contests, and provide customer support. Your customers can also share feedback about your product and services.
With social media, you can obtain customer data and then analyze it to get ahead of your competitors. This will allow you to understand your customer’s needs, expectations, and pain points and what you can do to help them.
2. Let your customers be involved.
Let’s face the truth, everybody like to feel very important. By involving and carrying your customers along, you are showing them that they matter.
One way to carry your customers along is by hosting a contest or giveaway. By doing this, you will not only grab their attention, but you will also be rewarding them for their effort.
One way to do this is by telling your customers to share a video about how they like your product or the benefit of using your product. They will do this using a unique hashtag. This way they are not only engaging with your business, but they are also indirectly marketing for your brand. You can give the winner a gift card or other attractive prizes. after all, we all like free stuff. So take advantage of that.
You can also host webinars by featuring an expert in your industry to talk about a particular topic that will benefit your audience. Another way you can carry your audience along is by hosting giveaways.
3. Leverage feedbacks.
Feedbacks are important if you want your business to grow and prosper in 2022. You can ask your customers to fill up survey forms through social media and emails. You can also make use of Google forms or monkey survey to collect customers feedback about your business.
These surveys and polls can help you engage with your customers and find out if they actually like your product. This way you are engaging with your customers and gaining valuable insights that can help your business grow tremendously. When you implement this feedback, you are showing your customers that they matter and you listen to their feedback. Any negative review can help you further improve your products or services.
4. Create Quality content
Creating high quality and engaging content can draw customers to your website or blog. Content can come in the form of videos, blogs, images infographics, testimonials and many more. When you create value people are more likely to engage with your business. Don’t only sell your product to people, create value for them.
Social media is a great platform for promoting content, especially blog posts, offers, giveaways and contests.
You can also promote how-to videos of your product, behind the scenes of your companies, testimonials and reviews and funny memes to make your audience laugh.
Just make sure you create content that will resonate with your audience. Make it engaging, educative and entertaining at the same time. Make use of important hashtags for your social media content.
5. Personalization
The strategy of personalization is another strategy you can use to boost customer engagement. Like I said earlier, everybody loves to be treated specially. With the use of personal data, businesses can create a customer experience that is unique and personal to gain customers attention. There are many businesses that are selling the exact thing you are selling or offering. What will make you stand out is a personalization strategy to effectively target your customers on a personal level.
Sending personalized emails like welcome emails, addressing your customers by their name, sending them a happy birthday message and happy holidays message are good examples of making your customers feel special.
6. An effective customers service
Your customer service team is the face of your business and the people your customers are likely to interact with the most. First, ensure you employ people with good communication, problem-solving and people skills. Secondly, ensure you train your team about your products and services and the overall business.
Furthermore, you can support your customer service team with technology that will aid them in providing s good customer service. You can use CRM tools and live chats to aid your customer service team. Live chats are software installed on your website that provides instant answers to visitors queries and transfers to live agents those ones that can’t be answered.
Conclusion
Making use of the above point will not only help your business engage more with your customers but ensure customer retention and more revenue.
Note that the process of customer engagement is not a static one but a continuous process in finding the best way to engage with customers that will bring about customer retention and more revenue. Therefore, as a business owner, you must make your research to find the best way to ensure customer satisfaction.