Are You Doing Enough To Engage With Your Customers?
In a modern world where consumers and business customers alike are constantly being beamed with messages from one brand after another, it’s not always the case that a great product or service is going to be enough to retain them. Undoubtedly, it plays a huge role, but companies are learning that they also have to be consistent and persistent with them, keeping customers engaged. It reminds the customer that you’re there, ready to help, and it can foster new levels of loyalty and appreciation for your business.
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Have a memorable story
People can build a personal connection with brands, which can happen in various ways. Sometimes, it can occur due to them making a good rapport or relationship with a member of your team. However, good brand stories can do the trick as well.
Something that is memorable that your customers can relate to and a reason to support you beyond your products and services can make them feel much more engaged. Companies are run and staffed by humans, and sharing your story, mission, vision, and priorities can help remind your customers of this fact. It is even better if you can find a story that resonates with their needs.
Plot out the customer journey
For the best possible engagement, you want to ensure that you don’t miss any beat when it comes to the opportunities to touch on your customer’s journey. Take the time to work out who your customers are, how they learn about your brand, and how they interact with it every step of the way there.
You can map the customer journey that they take. Not only can this highlight your opportunities to engage them a little further, but you can also see where there might be challenges or barriers within this journey that you can remove to ensure a much smoother path towards conversion. If you can figure out which engagement metrics to apply to each step, that’s even better.
Make onboarding a priority
The more engaged you get your customers, the easier it is to manage those engagement levels as your relationship with them progresses. To that end, the onboarding process is vital. You can improve onboarding by making efforts to provide the best deals and the most accessible customer journey for those who are using your site or app for the first time.
Once you can provide a positive experience, you can engage them with ways to further that experience, whether by signing up for emails, linking up on social media, downloading an app, or otherwise. Try to remove barriers from the onboarding processes as best as possible while adding value and capitalizing on successful conversions.
Get in their inbox
Email marketing has come leaps and bounds as a marketing strategy over the past decade. There are all manner of email campaign software tools that can make it much easier to create beautiful, branded emails that pop.
Of course, these emails still need to be sent to offer value, whether in the form of offers and discounts or content your audience will want to use. This is especially true in B2B environments, where your customers might be used to checking their emails multiple times daily. The devil is in the details, but email marketing can be a greatly effective way to make sure that you can get the best of what you offer, content or deal-wise, directly to your audience.
Make your site a personal experience (if they want it)
Some customers are happy to log into a website to impersonally order precisely what they want and speed their way through checkout. However, you might be able to engage them more by offering a more personal on-site experience.
This can include using chatbots or live chat features that can pop up to offer assistance if and when they want it. Online retailers have also been making use of video shopping technology, offering one-on-one video interactions that can put a human face to the company while also providing assistance, advice, and demonstrations of products. Just be sure not to force these on customers, make them an option they can engage with if they wish.
Build an app
A business website might make you accessible online, but creating the right app can ensure you’re in your customers’ pockets, ready and waiting for them to engage at any moment. What your app does is up to you, but with the help of an app development company, you can ensure that it’s expertly designed not just to look great but to feel great to use. Many businesses create apps to allow customers to easily make orders or manage their services. Take the time to figure out which app might serve your needs best, and ask the professionals for ideas if you’re stuck.
Work it into an omnichannel experience
Having a good website, a great app, and other ways that your customer can engage is all well and good. However, it can be even better if the various components of how your customer engages with your business all tie in together.
The omnichannel approach is helping companies retain more of their customers. The ability to jump from ordering something on the app to picking it up in-store is one example that offers customers convenience and choice. Customers are allowed to customize their journey, which means if they don’t like one way of engaging with services, they can choose another way instead, which is going to make them much more satisfied.
Get the teams working together
When you identify the various touchpoints at which the customer is likely to engage with the brand, you may well note that it’s not the same team within the company that might be engaging the customer at those different steps. Marketing, sales, support, and other teams can each step in to fit the role that the customer needs.
As such, if you want to create a consistent and customer-focused approach to business, there should be collaboration between these teams. Sharing resources, such as by working on a shared profile within a CRM system, can lessen the load on each of these teams while ensuring that the customer doesn’t have to provide the same information repeatedly to different people within the same business.
Get Social
One way that brands have seen engagement with their customers skyrocketing, as of late, is through social media. Social media can offer businesses the opportunity to share news and great content, work with customers on a case-by-case business, offer support and information, and show a more human side to the business within these interactions.
Care has to be taken, with brands sometimes erring on the side of being too casual and informal for their audiences while others can feel on the stiffer side. Take the time to work out which voice and approach will work best for your audience and which platforms you should spend your time engaging with in the first place.
Engagement is a delicate balancing act. You want to make sure that your customer is frequently in touch with your brand, but you want to be able to add real value, not just annoy them with branded messaging. The tips above can help you formulate the best strategy for your business in that regard.
