7 Proven Customer Engagement Strategies To Expand Your Business

The first impression matters. However, how to win over a customer when you only have eight seconds to pitch your product to them?

Knowing your customer engagement strategy is crucial to growth. And we’ve gathered the 7 most successful tips that make your brand noticeable!

The Importance of Customer Engagement For Your Business

Customer Engagement is much more than just an interaction between a company and a customer. It’s the long-term approach aimed at cultivating customer loyalty and connection with a brand. High engagement means that customers want to learn more about your products or services and maybe purchase them from you.

What factors positively affect customer engagement activities?

✅A detailed target audience analysis helps create relevant customer personas and identify their primary triggers.

✅Active listening helps improve your services and establish the connection between your product and the customer.

✅Flexible communication via different channels builds an approachable brand image and increases customer loyalty.

And here’s how you can implement those three main principles for increasing your customers’ engagement.

7 Most Successful Customer Engagement Strategies

Here are 7 proven customer engagement frameworks that can help expand your business:

#1 Make Customer Experience Personalized

Research shows that 63% of digital marketers fail to implement a successful customer engagement strategy in their business. Meanwhile, modern consumers, especially Millenials and Gen Zers, stress the importance of personalized experiences when interacting with a brand.

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To create a more personalized experience, make sure you know your market niche and your audience:

• Create customer personas and identify their pain points, so you can address them.
• Gather customer feedback in real-time, assess your customer satisfaction scores, and act upon it to improve your services.
• Inspect your competitors as if you want to purchase something from them and see what features they lack.

#2 Offer Humane Communication

Modern customers expect brands to communicate with them like with old friends. Being an empathetic and active listener, recognizing your mistakes, and providing useful insights are perfect examples of humane communication.

But let’s be honest: the customer support team just physically cannot be empathetic and compassionate 24/7. So you might want to try implementing modern technologies, such as:

✅IVR software

Having a large customer support team where different agents deal with different issues, it's a good idea to have an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that allows gathering information from callers automatically with prerecorded answers and redirecting them to the right customer support representatives.

✅AI chatbots

Using AI to mimic human conversation has become a staple for most companies across industries. Chatbots offer two main advantages: an instant response and 24/7 availability. Along with increasing your business efficiency, chatbots can save you up to 30% per year on customer support.

✅Behavioral targeting

This feature helps track customers’ behavior such as app use, website clicks, searches, etc. Then, you can use the gathered data to create more personalized ads or email campaigns.

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Many companies offer full-scale customer support with AI chatbots. You might’ve heard about brands like Intercom, HubSpot, or their more affordable software alternatives. They allow you to automatize and set up customer support channels that resonate with your target audience.

#3 Pinpoint Your Target Audience

Before starting any marketing campaign, you must know whom it’s for. Identifying your potential leads, clients, or buyers will help you determine how to interact with them and how to encourage them to stay.

Techniques to identify your target audience vary from brand to brand. Most of them include market research, competitor analysis, and harvesting data. By combining different techniques, you can create various user personas and adjust your customer engagement strategies for better results.

#4 Have a Distinct Tone Of Voice

Why do some brands stick in your mind and others vanish from memory? The secret is in how they communicate! A distinct tone helps foster a brand’s values and translate them to the audience. This is important if you cater your product to the younger audience: 83% of people aged 18-34 years old reported that they’re more likely to buy from a company that aligns with their values.  

To avoid making your brand sound weird, make sure your tone of voice resonates with the contents of the message you deliver. You can also refer to world-famous brands that rock their tone of voice and borrow some practices from them.

#5 Be Active On Social Media

Social media usage among modern consumers is experiencing steady growth. Brands and marketers need to catch up if they want to add this powerful tool into their pockets. For example, 60% of customers turn to the brand’s Facebook page when they need customer service. Instagram holds second place with 39% of customers.

Integrating customer support into social media, like Facebook or WhatsApp messenger, can help you drastically increase your reach. It also builds a powerful connection between a brand and customers and lets them know you’re on the same page.

In addition, conversational commerce has proven useful to brands since it helps in remaining constantly engaged with the customer. You can help shoppers discover products and even engage in post-purchase messages.

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#6 Keep a customer-centric mindset

The “customer is always right” adage first appeared in 1909, but more than 100 years later, it’s generally bad advice. Today's customers might not always be right, but you need to ensure that they’re heard and understood.

Approach your product from a regular customer’s perspective. Is your content helpful? Is your product easy to use? Can customer support handle the requests? All these small things merge into a beautiful customer experience, so make sure you don’t have blank points.

Another way to help customers is to help them learn during the introduction stage by creating an onboarding sequence, for instance. This will help a user grasp the core functionality of a product and introduce the brand’s values in the shortest terms.

#7 Acknowledge Your Loyal Customers

If you think that loyalty programs are outdated, think again. An Oracle group report revealed that 72% of adult consumers belong to at least one loyalty program. Having incentives in the form of gifts, discounts, and specific rewards sparks customers’ interest. Moreover, they can recommend your services to their friends or family, which helps organically grow your business.

Bonus Tips:

Looking for how to increase engagement with customers in the long run? These tips will help you achieve that:

✅Use analytics

Analytics will show you which strategies are successful and weed out techniques that don’t work. You can analyze metrics like bounce rates, conversion rates, email openings, or session duration. This will help you determine what your visitors like and turn them into customers.

✅Meet customers where they are

Seamless brand integration across all platforms i.e adopting an omnichannel engagement strategy is an effective way to retain up to 83% of your customers. It offers choices for the most convenient interaction channel and allows you to cater to a wider audience.

Also, as counterintuitive as it may seem, don’t be afraid to recommend your competitors if you feel that they can handle the problem better. This may not give you any sales but it will make your brand feel more candid.

Conclusion

Keeping your customer engagement at a high level is crucial for brand awareness, lead generation, and the organic growth of your business. That’s why creating a solid digital engagement strategy and scaling it to the needs of your business is one of the essential steps you should make. These seven tips could be a perfect starting point for outlining your approach to customers and building frustration-free interactions with them.

Author Bio

Julia Serdiuk is an Outreach Specialist at HelpCrunch, an innovative platform to build relationships with customers. She is a seasoned traveler and yoga enthusiast who appreciates life and believes in the cloudless future of our planet.