The balance of power between consumers and brands has shifted significantly in the past decade. Consumers now hold more information, product choice and access to brands than ever before. As a result, marketing must embrace the new “Power of One” by developing strategies that build and nurture customer engagement at every touchpoint in the consumer journey.
The goal of customer engagement is to grow your relationship with your customers and turn them into long-term advocates for your brand. Ultimately, this drives revenue growth through reduced churn rates, upsell opportunities and cross-sell efforts. This is accomplished through consistent, genuine communication that includes email marketing, popup tools, social media messaging and SMS. A successful customer engagement strategy starts with a complete mapping out of all the ways your business interacts with its customers. This should include a review of your brick-and-mortar, online, social media, and email communications as well as your customer service center.
A complete mapping of these interactions will allow you to identify and prioritize any areas for improvement. Once you know how your business is going to engage with its customers, it’s time to think about what kind of engagement you want to see. Customer engagement strategies can be as simple or complicated as you like, but they should always be focused on creating an authentic experience for the customer that will make them want to keep coming back. For example, a coffee brand could offer tastings of rare varieties of its coffee as an exclusive, unique way to engage with its customers. This will make the customer feel special, and it also allows the brand to gather valuable feedback that they can use to improve their products.
In the digital age, technology has made it easier than ever to create and deploy a variety of customer engagement strategies. You can implement these in the form of email marketing, automated text messages, chatbots and other AI-powered technologies, social media messaging, and even automated customer support. However, these technologies can be a distraction from your core mission if you are not careful. The best customer engagement strategies are designed to drive results and increase sales, but they should also be built on a foundation of good customer feedback. The feedback you receive from your customers can help you understand what is working and what is not, which will then in turn inform your future marketing decisions.
Once you’ve decided on a customer engagement strategy, it is important to stick with it. A common mistake that businesses make is to switch tactics, channels or platforms, which can lead to confusion, disengagement and ultimately a loss of revenue. A better approach is to make sure your entire team is on board and that you are tracking your progress and analyzing your results. With this in mind, you can move forward with confidence and build an effective customer engagement strategy for your business. Happy customers are loyal customers, and that will translate to higher profits in the long run.
