In last few years, the entire concept of service has been changed. Marketing concepts have transformed completely. Organizations have started believing in the concept of “Content is king” and “Markets are conversations”. The traditional marketing concepts are slowly vanishing from the business plans and strategies are being made keeping digitalization and maximum customer engagement on the mind.
With the evolution of mobile technology and social media platforms, customers have become powerful. Customers have the advantage of finding any kind of information and also share their experiences within seconds. This forced organizations to rethink their marketing strategies and keep on finding ways to engage their customers and building a strong binding connection.
This world is strongly interconnected. Many companies think they can easily use such sources for product sale and boom straight to the top. Not that easy mate. The process to go to the top, starts with customer engagement.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is defined as encouraging and motivating your customers to interact and share their experiences, you provide them as a service provider. When implemented well, a strong customer engagement strategy will increase your brand image and brand loyalty.
Customer engagement in nowhere close to customer service. Providing good customer service is not more an option, it is mandatory. Organization those have good customer engagement, focus on adding value to each of their customer’s life. They do it with extraordinary customer experience, 24*7 online customer support, awesome social content and passionate about their business.
Here in this blog, we will discuss 7 “Must Follow” strategies for superior customer engagement.
1. Social Media Platform, No It is a Social Media Tool
Most of the companies use social media as a platform to promote their brand and offerings. Those days are gone. Customers are least interested in who are you and what you offer? They are more interested in knowing how it can help them. Use your social media as a tool to tell your story in such a way that customers can relate that to their lives. Interact with your customers, run opinion polls, online contests, run hashtag campaigns, identify most engaged customers and reward them, make each and every person in your network feel good, feel special to drive more attention and build your own network. A network of your own customers, who are happy to be there. You make difference by having your own community.
This is not the end, take the data. Generate reports using collected data, understand the trend, do market analysis and build your business strategies.
2. Content is the new king
Content has become the most important tool for your customer engagement strategy. A few years back the importance of content was not very high. Research shows, 78% of the online customers believes that companies share good content are interested in building good relationships and 63% of the consumer buying decisions are influenced by the custom content.
Companies like Hubspot, HUL, and Boston Consulting are far ahead of their competitors, because of their standard, innovative & highly engaging content that they share online, and which is backed by strong customer support team. The content they used is targeted on their customers & social problems, not own business. This helps their customers to understand trends, utilities, market standards, value addition to their life, not revenue generation for the service provider.
Online content includes blog posts, webinars, social media post, email campaigns, service brochures, newsletters, white papers etc. You can use the content of a specific blog in a newsletter and couple of Facebook posts, or tweets to engage your audience through various channels. Isn’t it cool?
3. Result Driven
Customer communication is an ongoing process. But you can’t interact with your customer only for the sake of doing it. Always keep a goal in your mind that it should increase your brand image, productivity, and customer engagement. Previously only revenue and brand image was there in the plans of business managers. But things has changed. Customer engagement is more important than these two.
The way you engage your customers, they will understand your brand in that way & your revenue depends on that. So in short, your customer engagement initiatives should lead to a result oriented direction.
If you can’t measure your efforts, you need to work on another plan.
4. Email Marketing
Many of the modern day business leaders don’t have any trust left in Email Marketing. But, email marketing has not lost its importance. There are still many companies who are getting their majority of the projects through brilliant email campaigning. Try to share valuable information through email. Don’t overdo it. One mail is a week is good enough. You can share many things through email, like monthly newsletter, feedback forms, upcoming event or tradeshow invitation, a customer survey form etc. You can engage your audience through your email with great content and with proper use of infographics.
Again, I will say this is not the end. Analyse your email performance. Find the pattern, what kind of emails are getting more response? Is it a newsletter or a feedback form? How often should send emails? What % of customer are replying to you? Put all such stats together to refine your future email campaign strategies.
5. Mobile Application
The first thing you do in the morning, the thing you do the most during traveling, the thing you do while having a cup of coffee, even before sleeping – you check your mobile. You check WhatsApp messages, Facebook updates, emails, then jump from one app to another. Mobile apps are now one of the most integral parts of our life. So it has become very important for your business to understand where the opportunity stands and invest there in enhancing customer engagement.
There is a huge opportunity in the case to mobile applications, if you want to engage your audience around your business. Research shows, around 54% of the app users check messages sent through apps by the service providers. You should know how to maintain engagement to win customers. Discounts, new features, exclusive offers, coupon codes, birthday wishes, anniversary wishes, push messages are the best way to make your customer feel valuable for your business & they will love to come back to your app again and again.
Your mobile app strategy starts from your employee first, particularly sales and marketing team. With mobile applications, customer facing employees have the tools they can foster customer engagement in various effective ways.
6. Video and Infographics
Video and infographic marketing is the current and the future of customer engagement. It may not be a top priority for many SMEs, but the huge popularity of creative marketing tool among customers are encouraging business owners. A study showed that 72% of the business believe that use of video and infographics has improved the conversion rate of their website and 64% believe that it directly led to increases sales.
An effective customer engagement campaign not only educates or interact your customers but also build a positive relationship with them. Videos & infographics do this in various ways.
There are various reasons why visual marketing is the best option for customer engagement. Few of them are; customers love it, it encourage them for action, it makes your brand stand out, it builds customer relation, it is easy to understand and also cost effective.
7. Call to Action
This is the most, I repeat “the most” important thing to add in any of you above plan. Without a call to action option, no customer engagement activity is useful. Your social media campaigns, email campaigns, content marketing items, videos, and infographics everything should have a call to action option, which may take your customers to either your web page or any of any desired page. Never allow your customers to search for your contact details. A call to action button can boost your conversion rate. This ensures that if a viewer is enthused by your content & wanted to know more about your business, they can easily navigate their way through to either more useful resources or to use your business page. Wherever possible, top or bottom of your collateral/campaign put some visual branding, include links and encourage viewers to take a specific action such as subscribe to your newsletter, download a guide, avail exclusive offers, or purchase a product.
Conclusion
Customer engagement is now completely customer driven. A decade back cold calling was an essential part of your marketing campaign, but now it is just the opposite. Customers are deciding when & how to contact you. Your job is simple, just to provide them all possible platform to communicate & interact with you and then let them choose the way to contact you. You need to put the major control on customer’s hand, which is the only option to match their needs. But in the process to match their needs, you need to make the path smooth by regular customer engagement activities. You have to win their trust, and then you can build a loyal customer base.
These above 7 strategies are very important for a sublime customer engagement. You can’t ignore any of them. Hope you liked our blog. Please drop a line, if you have any suggestion in the comment box below. You can also Contact Us to know more about how you can engage your customers and increase your conversation.
