With the development and advancement of online trade in goods and services, clients are getting more difficult to please, demanding companies to become more client-oriented. Though, one of the ways to make your business more appealing to customers is to engage them.
Customer engagement is a complex of activities targeted at acquiring new clients, but most importantly, retaining them. Failure to keep your customers engaged can reflect badly on your venture. At the same time, a successful customer engagement strategy that fits your business goals and objectives is almost always associated with a large client base and greater revenue.
In the following article, we are going to discuss what strategies you can use to improve customer engagement and subsequently increase profits.
Make Use of Email Marketing
Email marketing is something that never gets old. No matter how advanced technologies become or how far marketing trends go, companies of different sizes stay loyal to newsletters. However, when implemented incorrectly, your letter may end up being ignored or removed to the bin without even being opened.
A good email is personalized, customized, and interactive. At the same time, it does not include ‘heavy’ graphics that take too long to load. The balance between being simple while being catchy should be the main goal of every successful email marketer.
Moreover, email marketing has its trends, which you have to follow to improve email deliverability, grow email open rates, increase conversion rates. You must keep abreast of software updates, responsible for placing emails into your clients’ inboxes, engaging them into opening them, and, finally, grabbing their attention enough to make the first purchase.
Clients are quite demanding when it comes to emails they receive. Do not make them scroll tons of unnecessary information. Instead, make your letter mimic your website and use links to pack more into a pretty concise format. Add visuals that would support your message and catch the attention of your readers.
Below you can see the example of welcome email for new client onboarding made by Squarespace. This email perfectly demonstrates how to welcome new clients and guide them through the useful materials, including tutorials, how-to-videos, etc., without using any long lists or vague messages. Instead, all useful guides are added as hyperlinks.
This email itself is easy to upload and navigate. It looks similar to the company’s website’s main theme. In the end, the new customer sees a friendly message wrapped with excellent graphics that is easy to read and pleasant to view.
Enhance Customer Support
Today, your business should focus on providing proactive customer service rather than a reactive one. Effective customer support is no longer associated with problem-solving only. It is also about getting new clients. If you take this aspect seriously, you’ll see engagement rates coming up.
There are lots of opportunities to provide website visitors and customers with the support they need. For example, you can choose between such options as live chat, phone, and email, or apply them all together.
Another one tool that will save lots of time for your agents and allow them to focus on the urgent issues only is knowledge management software. Such tools often integrate lots of functions, including but not limited to:
- customer segmentation and categorization;
- effective search engine optimization;
- article indexation;
- convenient text editing;
- customization;
- better customer communication,
- data collection,
- analytics and reporting.
They are essential for making data you collect on every customer actually work for the benefit of your business.
Take Advantage of Social Media
When it comes to revamping customer engagement, active social media presence is a must. If your business still has no account on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, this is the first thing you have to do.
However, today, it is not enough to develop a content marketing plan and post beautiful pictures two or three times per week. Your followers expect to get information from you on a daily basis with no day-off, using the whole scope of the available instruments.
Here are the most useful strategies:
- Go live on Facebook and Instagram
Live streams are trouble-free and cost nothing but your time. You can invite opinion leaders to attract their followers and re-engage your existing customers. Make sure to prepare a worthwhile topic and hype your audience for a couple of days before broadcasting.
- Post Instagram stories
Instagram stories live only for 24 hours, but they are something that reminds your followers about your brand. Post a story every day, showcasing various activities related to your brand or product. Show people behind your brand for your audience to see the human side of your business and stay engaged and connected.
- Arrange contests and giveaways
People love gamified experiences for which they are rewarded. Thus, contests or giveaways are the best ways to win the attention of your customers and gain a broader audience. Launch campaigns promising gifts to customers who meet specific criteria, e.g. subscription, feedback, likes, etc.
- Encourage user-generated content
You can encourage your customers to take their own pictures that would be related to your business and post this content for their friends to see. This significantly increases your coverage. For example, you can incorporate this task into one of your giveaways, contests, loyalty programs, or challenges, rewarding customers for such promotion.
Launch Loyalty Programs
Customers’ loyalty begins when they feel they are attached to the brand. You should differentiate your loyal audience from irregular customers. Thus, your business must provide useful and achievable rewards to loyal clients, reinforcing their interest in the products, and encouraging them to make a repeat purchase.
Also, a good idea is to encourage regulars to spread the news about the benefits your loyalty program has. This strategy will make people want to become a part of this community. The ‘more privileged’ the loyalty program is, the more attached customers feel.
Below is the example of the successful loyalty program by SweetLegs used to trigger regular customers to make repeat purchases, share their personal information (such as birthday date), leave feedback on products, and promote the brand across various social media platforms while earning extra points. These points can be further exchanged for rewards or discounts.
Create Referral Incentives
If you still wonder how to improve customer engagement to maximize your revenue growth, the referral system is the right tool for you. This is the trick that can help you both expand your audience and reward loyal customers while promoting your goods and services.
Do not underestimate the role of referral marketing. It is 3 or even 5 times more effective than other conversion channels in helping businesses grow their customer base. Referral systems are usually based on trust: 92% of consumers get referrals from their friends, and that makes them 4x more likely to buy a product.
Referrals are subconsciously perceived by people as recommendations and quality advice. This is why they rank top in terms of trustworthiness and conversion success.
Use Double-opt in Landing Pages
Many businesses see their ultimate goal as reaching higher subscriber rates. However, it does not always mean larger sales volumes. Instead, quite often, the bottom line does not improve even when the number of followers is continuously increasing.
A single opt-in landing page is simple for you and your subscriber: they enter their email and it is automatically added to your subscription list. However, forcing your subscribers to make an extra effort to get your subscription guarantees that your audience will be more active. This, subsequently, will lead to higher conversion rates.
Switching to double-opt strategy can be useful in this case. It is similar to the two-step verification process since the email is sent to every subscriber to confirm their subscription. Apart from categorizing your audience, it also helps solve such customer issues as typos in email addresses and wrongful sign-ups.
Improve User Experience
Customers’ judgment of the company’s website credibility is 75%-based on their perception of its aesthetics and functionality. Furthermore, poor navigation and continuous interruptions are likely to disengage 85% of visitors.
There are a number of ways flaws in a company’s website design can frustrate customers and make them abandon your site right away. Thus, website design and functionality can significantly increase customer engagement. To do that, your designers should place themselves in the customers’ place and make necessary changes.
These improvements may include:
- Enhancement of website aesthetics;
- Intuitive design;
- Mobile responsiveness and optimization;
- Increasing of website speed and efficiency;
- Creating customer-centric content.
The more improved user experience you provide, the higher your website traffic and engagement rates will be. Thus, do everything to improve user experience: work on your website design, add visuals, create infographics, improve relevance, localization, and other necessary parameters.
Advance your CRM
CRM is extremely effective for customer engagement. It collects your customer information and processes it, turning it from a mass of data into useful analytics and practical recommendations.
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and other tools like these are responsible for personalizing customer experience allowing for targeting the right people with the right offers, integrating data across multiple platforms, collecting customer feedback, developing a product that meets client needs, etc.
Conclusion
Given the opportunities digital marketing provides today, being customer-oriented and individualized is no longer a privilege, but a must for every company. Yet, their customer engagement strategies may vary based on business coverage and specifics.
Failure to interact with customers can hurt corporate image and client base since people always look for better service and experience. Therefore, modern companies are obliged to engage with their audience to build a community of loyal customers. The more interactive and absorbing your marketing efforts are, the higher profit your business gets.
