Whether as a startup or an established business, there is a great need to interact with your target customers. These are the people you depend on for your revenue, and it’s important you keep them aware and loyal to your brand. This is where the concept of customer engagement comes in.
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement is how a brand creates a relationship and continuously interacts with its customer base. This can be executed through marketing mediums like posting blog content, videos, newsletters, and outreach through mobile devices.
The purpose of customer engagement is to create awareness of the brand in the minds of its target audience while building customer loyalty through emotional connection.
Why every business needs customer engagement
With digitalization and e-commerce creeping through every corner of the economy, starting a small business has become relatively easy. But this ease serves to overcrowd the commercial world, making companies focus more on clicks, conversions, and customer acquisition costs.
But unfortunately, acquisition costs are quite high, and you cannot depend on customer acquisition to grow your business. A prospect who you successfully convert may never return for another purchase, and then you have to search for another. That isn’t very sustainable, hence the need for customer engagement.
With customer engagement, a brand can follow up and build a strong relationship with an individual who has made a purchase. By doing so, the customer becomes a repeat customer and becomes an ambassador of the brand – that is, they tell their friends about how great the brand is. Customer engagement helps you retain long-term customers by creating a connection with them.
According to a Twitter survey in 2016, 30% of customers who receive a response from a brand they tweeted are more likely to recommend it. Customers who receive no replies from brands tend to turn away and never look back, increasing churn rate.
How to engage your customers
First of all, you have to be able to reach your prospects where they are. You could do this by posting blog content that answers their frequently asked questions and creating awareness about your brand on social media. But even most importantly, you should be available to give quick replies to the feedback your customers leave on your website, social media handle, mail, or telephone.
Social media is a great way to engage customers as it offers a fun and personal environment like you are interacting with a friend rather than with an international organization.
Furthermore, businesses can engage their customers by sending notifications to their mobile devices. This can be done using a customer engagement platform. Many brands are now adopting a unique customer engagement platform that targets customers through their mobile devices in real-time and pays every customer a dollar for responding to the brand’s content.
This serves as a great way to incentivize individuals to quickly and happily interact with your brand, thus offering you a high-quality response rate.
Measure your success
While customer engagement can be fun, it is an essential part of your business growth. Therefore, you have to stay abreast of your success by keeping track of metrics such as response times, click-through rates, customer interaction with links on your website, social media analytics, likes and shares, and growth of your overall customer base.