An effective customer engagement strategy should capture the attention of existing customers while ensuring they have a stellar experience with your brand.
The first step towards developing and implementing the right customer engagement strategy is understanding your customers and how they interact with your business. Next, map your customer journey to determine the vital touchpoints, bottlenecks, and other challenges. This evaluation will identify needs and behaviors along with opportunities for engagement.
Harness this information to construct customer profiles and look at signals that matter, like location, motivations, and interaction history. From there, employ the following six strategies to engage with each persona.
6 Customer Engagement Strategies
Create a loyalty program
A loyalty program is one of the most effective ways to improve customer engagement. Incentivizes loyal customers, encourage repeat business and improves brand loyalty. Starting a loyalty program that includes earnable points, discounts, unique gifts, and referral bonuses boost engagement and improves retention rates.
Personalize your service
Personalization is a customer engagement strategy that is growing in popularity. You encourage loyalty and repeat business by giving customers products or services tailored to their needs. This strategy can be as simple as location-based messaging, using the first name in an email, or as complex as utilizing machine learning and AI for hyper-relevant services.
Create an AI chatbot
An AI-powered chatbot that can analyze data can make recommendations or answer questions that site visitors may have. It can steer customers to products they like, all with a semi-natural, conversational tone. AI chatbots work based on the user’s needs and employ certain triggers to send relevant customer messages. This AI feature helps you personalize your approach, as these messages can be based on criteria such as location.
Chatbots also improve your customer engagement by providing service after hours. Around-the-clock customer service allows you to grab customers’ attention and collect contact details while you sleep.
Study your business analytics
Analytics is the key to great customer engagement strategies. Data helps you better understand what your customers like and dislike, and customer feedback is a key tenet of this data. Gather and analyze customer data from surveys, social media content that includes polls, or long-term insights collected from customer interactions.
Your website data can also be extremely valuable when analyzing your customer engagement strategy. For example, do you know which of your web pages results in the most live chat inquiries? Vital data from your site is at your fingertips whenever you need it. Choose a few primary KPIs that you can track to determine the success of your strategies.
Use conversational service
Make the customer service process more efficient and enjoyable for everyone by focusing on conversations instead of interactions. Avoid treating customer issues like they are support tickets and focus on conversations. You can build a long-term relationship when you speak with a customer. In addition, this approach creates a customer-centric culture in your business, which is vital to your success.
Keep and utilize interaction history across all channels to foster a casual atmosphere in your strategy. Give every team member access to a customer engagement report or CMS dashboard that is aware of past conversations to arm them with context as they enter every customer interaction. Did this customer send an email about an issue they had? Have they already spoken to us via live chat or social media? To the customer, these conversations are all part of one customer relationship, so your team must think the same way.
Here is a simple example of how the everyday customer experience makes a difference: “How can I help you?” is replaced with “I see you’ve had an issue with your item; let me help.” You can quickly see how this creates a better experience for your consumers.
Ensure your team has the right support
Customer service teams equipped with everything they need to succeed result in a satisfied customer base. Friendly customer service representatives make all the difference in engaging customers. If you support your employees like you support your customers, you’ll see a positive impact on customer engagement.
Take care of your team and ensure they have the right technology and training, even down to ensuring they have access to quality customer service phrases. Then, keep them motivated by always rewarding good results. This method is a surefire way to deliver the best possible customer experience.
Employ one of the customer engagement strategies above today
By trying the above customer engagement strategies, we are confident you will see a swift improvement in your brand’s engagement. The digital space has made all markets more competitive, and the best way to navigate this competition is to focus on your customer service. After all, happy customers mean repeat business and quality word-of-mouth!
Luke Carlino: Luke is a Copywriter, Content Creator, and Social Media Manager working freelance for various clients, businesses, and agencies. He has many years of experience crafting quality content for various marketing requirements.
