How to Build a Strong Customer Engagement Strategy

Building the right customer engagement strategies can significantly impact your business results. These approaches will lead to improved customer experience and better retention rates, eventually attracting more customers to the company.

Therefore, strongly focusing on customer engagement and consistently delivering an excellent customer experience at every touch point should be the primary objective your brand intends to achieve.

But how can you achieve this? In this post, we will discuss how to build a strong customer engagement strategy, the benefits of customer engagement, and different types of engagement that can improve your conversion rates. Read on for more.

Understanding customer engagement strategy

A customer engagement strategy is the process of organizing activities and interactions in a streamlined manner to create a positive customer experience before and after the purchase.

It involves leveraging various communication mediums to build relationships, proactively nurture customers through their journey, and improve satisfaction. A successful and effective strategy is measurable, time-bound, and responsive to client’s needs, enabling you to gather feedback, customer performance data, and inputs to strengthen your marketing campaigns accordingly.

Simply put, this is a plan of capturing your existing customers’ attention and ensuring they get the best experience during their interactions with your brand throughout their shopping journey, both online and offline.

Why do you need to build a strong customer engagement strategy in your business?

Regardless of your business size, digital customer engagement tools are essential benchmarks for the success of any organization. A strong customer engagement strategy is about leveraging digital communication mediums to engage customers, deliver expected value, and meet their expectations.

With a robust engagement approach in place, businesses can realize the following benefits:

1. Improved overall customer experience

When you offer a satisfactory experience to your clients, there are high chances of them making a purchase, but it doesn’t always occur instantly. Sometimes people have to interact with your brand several times to place an order.

On the contrary, it only takes a single negative experience to send them away to your competitors. It is imperative to know that customer engagement and experience are sometimes used synonymously, but each has a unique role in the customer nurturing process.

Customer engagement is a measure of how your prospects interact with your company, including their decisions, reactions to your products and services, and how they communicate with the brand.

On the other hand, customer experience is how people view your business or how it is perceived and accepted from their perspective.

2. Improve the quality of your customer relationships

Nobody likes a disingenuous and pushy sales pitch. Giving empty promises to customers ends up on deaf ears, and those who do not buy may not buy from you again in the near future. They don’t enjoy a good relationship with your, making your business one of their many options instead of being top on their list.

But when you build a strong customer engagement strategy, your clients will trust that you provide value and boost loyalty, making a significant difference in their purchasing behavior and decisions.

Irrespective of the new sales promotional campaigns, trends, or customer promises, prospects are 23% likely to purchase from brands they trust. Businesses involve relationships, and this entails giving and taking.

When you build a strong customer engagement strategy, you shift your focus from the benefits you get from customers to what you are offering to them.

3. Boosts your chances of getting referrals

When people receive a good or bad experience, they’ll need to share the message with their friends, peers, or relatives, whether through word of mouth or in the product review section.

When you exceed their expectations, they will also want to share it. They refer their friends, co-workers, or family without being compelled.

Furthermore, a senior decision maker who likes your brand will always be your loyal customer, even if they get a new job in a different organization.

In this era of technological platforms like Google, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Facebook, customers can publicly document their experiences with your business. Like physical interactions, positive feedback is a game changer in your sales conversion efforts since most people say they check online reviews before making a purchase from any brand.

On the one hand, a negative review can impact your business poorly, and remember, bad news spreads faster than positive ones, hence can cause irreversible damage to the business reputation a big deal.

4. Helps build a customer-focused mindset

Customer engagement systems compel you to put on the consumer coat and do sales and marketing from the client’s perspective. The best way to ensure satisfaction in your business is to provide prospects with what they want.

From data collection via your sales engagement platforms, CRM, or sales automation software to customer forums and feedback. Building an engagement strategy requires as much research and social listening as brand promotion.

The more you understand your customer and provide engagement platforms they relate with, you get to build business operations that are customer focused across every department.

5. Facilitates sustainable growth

Building customer relationships on repetitive sales pitches and discounts doesn’t last longer because they are not easily remembered. However, customers will not forget a personalized and quality experience, and they will always come back to your brand.

It isn’t easy to scale your business if you are always looking for new revenues. By investing time, money, and resources to build a strong customer engagement strategy and improve the experience, you can anchor your company’s success on a loyal client base that is ready to grow with your brand.

6. Improve your brand value

A practical customer engagement approach focuses on value instead of the bottom line. Your company is more than the products and services you provide; you are the go-to solution to their problems and a valuable resource.

Conventional marketing techniques prioritize the transaction process, but customer engagement is aimed at offering value to clients so that they can plan to purchase from you more and more.

It gives customers the purpose and power to make them sole decision-makers, not just receivers of the experience in the process.

7. Increase the brand’s revenue

Engaged customers are the business’s backbone. They are more loyal with a high chance of purchasing than the disengaged ones. It is also easier and more convenient to upsell to sell to people who have built a rapport with your brand.

Although attracting and converting prospects is the norm of the business, retargeting new clients needs fewer resources and effort and gives a shorter conversion period. Setting ways for your business to upsell gives it another channel for building revenue.

How to build a strong customer engagement strategy

A strong customer engagement strategy identifies objectives and actions at different stages of the customer journey. The best way to start coming up with ideas is immediately they convert and then moving ahead from there.

Follow these steps to build a strong customer engagement strategy;

1. Understand your customers’ journey

You can’t begin developing and executing a customer-centric approach like engagement without knowing who your clients are and how they interact with your brand. A good starting point is customer journey mapping and identifying critical touchpoints, challenges, and bottlenecks your prospects face.

This way, you will learn more about their behaviors and needs and discover new engagement opportunities. Analyzing customers’ behavior and attributes helps you build personalized customer profiles and allow you to monitor and track signals that matter to the business, like income, locations, motivations, and many more.

With this knowledge, you can come up with strategies that address specific customer personas or profiles.

2. Identify metrics for engagement

Customer service engagement metrics track and measure the quality and frequency of contact center interactions with the business. The metrics should not be a final decision; instead, they need to guide you through creating engaging activities and tracking results toward your business objectives.

To capture new clients, you would want to win as many prospects as possible, learn their favorite things in your business, and make them your brand ambassador.

To achieve this, you’d want to monitor and track active users, net promoter score, and feature usage. Suppose you’re going to boost your revenue from the existing customer base. In that case, you need to check customer lifetime value and track opt-out metrics to identify disengaged customers and bring them back.

However, remember to look past the numbers to hear the stories they tell to others. You should know what your clients do, why they choose a specific feature, or even why they have unsubscribed to your newsletters.

This is why you should use metrics alongside qualitative data from discussion groups, forums, live chat platforms, surveys, and interviews.

3. Use tools to monitor and track engagement

Metrics rely on valid and accurate data. And to track your business engagement metrics, you should have the following tools, at the very least.

• Data collection tools: these include tools for data collection, ingestions, processing, cleansing, validation, and storage. You should set your data system to be able to collect information from all the engagement channels, like customer support chats, websites, and email campaigns.
• Analytics platform: optimize and configure your analytics software to track the chosen metrics to allow gain insights from the collected data. An efficient analytics platform should be able to reveal various trends from your data.
• Customer segmentation tools: every business has more than one type of customer. With a customer segmentation tool, you can identify these groups and run an engagement group of loyal customers, those who are likely to churn, the new ones, and many more.

4. Focus on onboarding.

The onboarding stage is an essential part of a strong customer engagement strategy. This is because, at this phase, clients decide whether they’ll use your products or run to the competitors.

Check out some ideas you can use to engage users during the onboarding phase below;

• Personalize the process based on activities and actions users have completed. A tailored onboarding process makes users feel cared for and increase loyalty.
• Support your onboarding process with free educational resources.
• Create an onboarding template and email sequence to cover the entire process. Leverage marketing automation to support this step and an efficient customer data platform to customize the messages you send.

5. Communicate new features and updates

From social media to PR, push notifications, email, and blogs, you have several potential platforms to communicate new features and updates, leaving you with no excuse not to leverage them.

When you communicate with them, ensure they focus more on what the customer will achieve. Tell users how the changes will improve their experience. For example, the updates will make the process faster, more secure, collaborative, enjoyable, etc.

6. Offer multiple customer support channels

Customers contact you for help in various ways depending on circumstances and preferences. Some issues may need instant solutions, for which you provide a phone number to call or a live chat platform for immediate assistance.

Author credit: By Tomwsulcer – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19973232

Sometimes an informational FAQ directory or an email can be enough to give solutions to those with basic queries.

The aim is to minimize the pressure that customers will go through when resolving their queries, so offer multiple customer support channels that are easily accessible, starting from the dashboard, menu, or sidebar.

If you analyze and consolidate customer information in real-time, you are able to offer proactive customer support by telling users’ minds beforehand and providing solutions before they even ask.

Essential customer engagement strategies that can increase conversions

A strong customer engagement strategy should be an all-in-one solution that is aligned with the interests of customers.

Put their needs in the forefront throughout the process: what are their common concerns? What do they value in your business? Create a customer-focused strategy that provides value to clients and encourages them to engage and interact more with your brand.

Although your approach may not be the same throughout the business based on the sales team, products or services, and customer base, many tried-and-true customer engagement strategies can improve your conversions.

1. Share your brand’s story, mission, and vision

Stories are relatable and memorable. They give people a reason to believe in your business. Give your brand a human touch with messages that emphasize your story, mission, and vision.

Help your target audience understand the reason behind starting the business and ensure to involve the customers in the story and give them significant roles in it. Use the opportunity to listen to their expectations and frustrations, relate, and then develop a shared vision.

2. Personalize interactions

Generic or predictable customer experiences add up to the noise and distractions of ads, social shares, and newsletters. However, it is often vital to making your customers feel wanted and not just one of many.

The secret to creating a practical personalized experience is active listening and giving clients particular inputs that relate to them. Leverage data and customer surveys to get customer insights and tailor the interactions based on their likings, focusing clearly on their preferred formats, cadence, and how they are best served.

From curated virtual and online events to custom communications, create a personalized experience for customers to know that you are aligned with their interests and needs.

Remember, personalization does not always register with prospects, so you should not force it down their throats.

3. Provide lots of helpful content

Your clients don’t just buy your products and services; they contact you to get solutions to their problems. Offering authentic and helpful resources that address their needs depicts your brand as a go-to solution provider.

Distribute this content across every engagement channel to reach all areas of your customer base. Create blogs, social posts, and videos containing practical techniques and proven tips that prospects may find helpful.

Additionally, providing relevant content keeps you in the minds of your customers. For example, flagging major products or feature updates and key industry news for existing clients ensures that they keep coming back to your company for solutions to their concerns.

For sustainability, ensure you consistently conduct content performance reviews to identify customer responses and tweak your approach where necessary.

4. Collaborate to design and mutually agree on a strategy that works

A strong business engagement system should be a collective effort that considers both buyers’ and sellers’ inputs. A mutual action plan enables both sides to define and identify milestones, resources, and the essential information to address customer needs effectively.

This approach eliminates the guesswork and streamlines the process of closing deals, making it faster and more straightforward.

5. Support your customer support teams

Supporting your customer service teams is a strategy that offers many benefits to the business, including;

• Improved creativity and productivity at the workplace.
• Motivates staff to provide excellent customer service.
• Boosts job satisfaction.

The best way to make happy clients is to make happy employees. Customer-facing staff plays a crucial part in engaging customers, so taking good care of them is essential.

Give customer-facing employees the relevant training and technology they require to succeed in their duties. Motivate and reward them for their hard work. When your employees are satisfied, they are more willing to offer superior services to clients.

6. Use co-browsing tools to improve customer experience

Co-browsing software allows your customer support staff to navigate and interact with the client’s web browser in real-time. For example, if a customer has a problem filling out a form or purchasing a product, agents can navigate their screens remotely and help them complete the task.

This way, you will allow real-time problem-solving, reduce customer support charges, saves time, minimize friction during the buying process, and increase customer satisfaction.

7. Leverage social media platforms

Social sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have provided platforms where people can share their praise and express concerns with a brand. Either way, they allow you to access your raw feelings and thoughts about your business.

Repost customer feedback, reply to their comments, provide helpful resources, and show support for the cause to nurture a deeper relationship with them.

8. Collect and address user feedback

Another way to build a strong customer engagement strategy is to collect and address feedback. This is a way to assess your clients’ satisfaction rates. Collect anecdotal qualitative feedback and quantitative data to fully understand their experience.

Once this is done, implement a checks and balances system that ensures proper communication and timely follow-ups. Remember, even negative feedback is an excellent opportunity to know about customers and make adjustments that will boost your conversion rates.

Conclusion

Customer engagement approaches involve making use of business interaction metrics to create a satisfying experience for your clients. To build a strong customer engagement strategy, businesses need to choose engagement platforms that accommodate all the designed methods and make it straightforward for staff to serve prospects throughout their journey.

For a practical business engagement system, follow the strategies discussed in this text to increase your conversion rates.