Customer engagement is a way of strengthening your relationship with a customer. Using a variety of channels, you should be connecting with customers in the space where they’re communicating or consuming content.
Improving customer engagement can seem like a mammoth task for a busy marketer. Where are you supposed to find the time to introduce new initiatives to engage customers when you’re busy trying to smash your marketing targets?
When it comes to customer engagement, it shouldn’t be a case of one or the other.
Your marketing strategy should be focused on delivering timely, relevant, and personalized messages. But that’s also at the heart of customer engagement marketing. A customer engagement strategy should be focused on creating positive interactions to increase excitement in your brand.
The more engaged and excited customers are, the more likely they are to open and interact with all your marketing efforts.
In this blog, we’ll be outlining our top tips to help you improve your customer engagement.
5 strategies to improve customer engagement
1. Find out what drives your customers
Knowing your customers is essential for marketing success. Their needs are at the center of your brand. If you don’t understand the needs of your audience, you can’t offer them a solution.
So, to engage customers, you need to know what’s driving them to connect. What is the solution they’re looking for? Why did they sign up for your marketing? What are their interests?
Gathering this data on your customers will help inform your strategy and direct your growth and development. From the first welcome email, you should be collecting preferences. Regularly asking customers to update these will help you identify audience trends and maintain relevancy.
2. Run a contest on social
Social media is one of the strongest channels you have to engage customers. In the list of customers’ demands, meeting them on their channel of choice is right at the top. Customers want to be able to receive updates about their favorite brands on their favorite channels. If you’re not utilizing social media channels, you’re missing out big-time.
One of the best ways to drive awareness of your online presence and improve engagement is competitions.
We all love the chance to get something for free. If all we need to do is tag a couple of friends it’s a no-brainer, who wouldn’t be interested in that?
As well as engaging customers, social media competitions also help turn your followers into brand advocates. By using tag-a-friend to story posts as a means to enter you’re effectively amplifying your message to new, untapped audiences.
3. Highlight customer reviews
Social proof plays an important role in customer’s decision-making processes. Every type of customer turns to reviews when they’re considering committing to a brand. Highlighting your customer reviews can help them through this stage.
Review platforms like Trustpilot, Feefo, and G2 Crowd are great sources of product and service feedback. Their independent status gives customers added confidence, so these are great to feature across your website and on product and feature pages.
You shouldn’t be afraid to use customers to shout about your success. Again, social media is a brilliant channel to do this. Keep an eye on your mentions to see what customers are saying about you. Including this in your social media marketing engages the happy customer delighting them by interacting with them and shows prospective customers that you’re a brand that can be trusted.
4. Check-in on quiet customers
Quiet customers tend to mend unengaged customers. If you really want to improve your customer engagement, these are an essential segment you need to be targeting.
Customers can go quiet for a lot of reasons, which means it can happen at any time. Tracking customer behaviors through eRFM, lead scoring, or email opens helps you to identify unengaged audiences. Using these you can trigger re-engagement and win-back campaigns.
The perfect re-engagement campaign will ask these dormant customers to update their preferences while showcasing your brand’s story and USPs. It may be the last thing you want to do, but it’s also important to offer them the choice to unsubscribe. Ultimately, this will ensure your marketing lists are full of your most engaged customers.
5. Reward switched-on customers
You mustn’t only target unengaged customers. Engaged customers become loyal customers who promote your brand to their friends, family, and peers. To convert switched-on customers into loyal shoppers, you need to reward them for their engagement.
Loyalty programs where customers can earn points based on their interactions with your brand give customers a reason to keep engaging. The more customers feel appreciated, the more they’ll turn to your brand in their time of need.
