When you’re running a business, whether big or small, one of the most important facets you have to consider carefully is your customer engagement strategy. Bringing in new customers is crucial. But your job doesn’t end even after you’ve introduced them to your website or business. In fact, you now have to work harder to ensure that your customers stay engaged with your business.
A good customer engagement strategy enables you to hold on to your existing customers. Eventually, these customers will become loyal patrons of your business, which is a significant advantage for you to increase profits and remain competitive in the market.
Customer engagement strategies refer to the tactics that your business employs to build and maintain a strong relationship with your customers, often with the use of the best customer relationship management software. This encompasses all ways that you connect with your clients: through in-person communication in your store or with digital platforms like mobile apps, email, and even through your website. Creating new customer engagement strategies should, therefore, focus on these areas so you can provide satisfaction and reliable support to your customers.
With that said, this article contains insights on how you can create winning customer engagement strategies so you can continue pleasing your existing customers.
- Create A Pleasant Customer Experience
Creating a pleasant experience for your customers is one of the best ways to keep your customer engagement strong since this strategy effectively encourages them to be loyal to your business.
When you think of it, perhaps you’ve been in that position too before as a customer. Do you remember how unpleasant it is to have to wait on hold in the phone line for ten minutes only to end up having your call dropped? While this may seem like an extreme situation, it does happen, especially with businesses that have very little regard for their customer service.
After that call, you most likely stopped patronizing that business, cancelled your subscription, or went to its competitors immediately.
The same can happen to your customers. So, to prevent this from happening, you have to ensure that you identify your customers’ desires and target those areas. This begins with mapping out all the ways that you interact with your customers. Then, for each of these points, look for areas where you can improve on.
- Hold A ‘Tag A Friend’ Contest On Social Media
Many businesses have started holding ‘Tag A Friend’ contests. As its name suggests, the only thing a customer has to do is to answer a question in the comment section, tag one or more friends, and like the post.
After doing this, the brand conducts an automated raffle where the entries are the users that tagged friends on the comments section. Winners then receive products from the brand.
These are all over the place because it’s a popular and effective way of boosting customer engagement. Not only does your customer engagement increase through the buzz that’s created surrounding your social media post, but it also brings in more followers to your business. The more friends your current customers tag, the more that others on the internet will know about your brand’s existence.
Doing this can effectively increase your market share and, therefore, make your business invite more customers.
- Keep Your Brand Relatable
Third on this list is keeping your brand relatable. This means having a brand image or personality that makes it easy for your followers to relate to and resonate with. In doing so, your customers will be more likely to engage with your brand, simply because they can identify with your products, services, personality, and even your company culture.
In your pursuit of keeping your brand relatable, it’s important to focus on brand awareness—a key marketing strategy. Without strong brand awareness, there will be a tendency for your target audience to not even know that you exist and that you’ve got something special to offer to the market.
The more aware your customers are about your existence, the higher the chances that they can also see your brand as relatable. This can encourage them to keep in mind that whenever they’ve got to make a purchase, they’ll choose your brand over a competitor.
- Use Different Channels
Businesses have a big advantage now that they’ve got multiple channels that they can use to communicate and engage with customers. So, take advantage of these as well. Don’t just limit yourself to one channel, even though it’s the one you’ve gotten used to, or you’ll be missing out on a large number of potential customers on another channel.
Use as many channels as you can, including social media sites, websites, and vlogs, among others.
- Enable Notifications
Enabling notifications means that your account gets notified immediately whenever someone comments on your posts on your social media accounts. This is where having a dedicated social media manager comes in, especially if you’ve got a large following and your business is already quite big.
It helps to improve your customer engagement when you take the time to respond to all of the comments made on your social media accounts. Your customers won’t just feel like you don’t care about what they have to say because all their comments go unnoticed.
Take the time to respond to as many comments on your social media sites in a day as you can, even the negative ones. That way, you’ll show your customers that you truly care about them, what they’ve got to say, and their concerns about your products and services.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are so many ways for you to improve your customer engagement strategy. When your aim is to drive in more customers towards your website or business, you should focus on strategies that drive results. Don’t waste your time on strategies that don’t bring in results.
Especially in today’s business environment where the competition is getting even stiffer, you have all the more reason to prioritize and succeed in customer engagement. It’s already a good advantage to have enough customers coming in. Now you’ve got to take it one step further by doing what you can to hold on to them in your business.
