How would you rate your customers’ engagement with your brand? Do they love your products? Do they want to stay with your business for years to come? Are you able to keep them happy and loyal?
Answering these questions can seem like a mammoth task. It takes time and effort to measure customer engagement and develop a winning customer engagement strategy.
However, ensuring that every customer has a positive experience with your businesses should be at the top of your priority list.
If you’re wondering what the best customer engagement strategies are, check out my list and give them all a try to strengthen your brand’s relationship with customers and level up your business.
Table of contents:
1. What Is Customer Engagement & Why Is It Important?
Before getting down to the nitty-gritty of creating a truly engaged customer base, let’s define what customer engagement is.
You may be thinking, “I have already built a great strategy to increase customer retention rates. Aren’t customer retention and engagement the same thing? After all, both serve the same purpose – making customers stick around.”
No, customer engagement and retention aren’t the same.
Customer retention is when customers come back to your products or services after the initial use. Customer engagement is the depth of the relationship your customers have with your business based on how much time they spend with your product or brand.
The more you engage your customers, the more chances you have to retain them. These two concepts go hand in hand, and both help you grow your customer base and achieve greater levels of success.
Simply put, engagement is about fun and the opportunities your customers have to interact with your brand, while retention is about getting returning customers.
Building a customer engagement strategy is essential because your acquisition strategies alone won’t be enough to ensure sustainable business growth.
That’s why you need to find ways to build an emotional connection with customers (and this is what customer engagement is all about).
An effective customer engagement strategy will help you:
- Improve your brand image and brand experience
- Have a better understanding of your customers’ needs and expectations
- Identify “at-risk” customers and implement the best measures to avoid losing them
- Enhance your business’s reputation
- Reduce customer churn and retain your hard-won customers
- Increase customer loyalty and trust
- Increase your sales funnel velocity
There are different ways you can calculate customer engagement. Let’s take a closer look at the most common customer engagement metrics you may want to track:
- Guest checkout rates: The number of customers who make a purchase without creating an account or logging in
- Purchase Frequency: The number of times that a customer makes a purchase within a specific period of time
- Net Promoter Score: A customer satisfaction measurement taken from asking your customers how likely they are to recommend your business to others
- User Activity: The number of daily active users and monthly active users
- Visit Frequency: The number of people who visit your site within the same day
- Average Order Value: The average amount spent each time a customer makes a purchase
- Repeat Purchase Rate: The number of customers that have made a purchase more than once with your business
- Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who cut ties with your business
With all that in mind, here’s my list of the most effective customer engagement strategies you can apply to positively impact your KPIs.
2. 8 Effective Ways To Boost Customer Engagement
- Provide real-time engagement with live chat
Live chat support gives your customers a fast and convenient way to get in touch with your customer service team.
Not only will it increase customer engagement, but it will also help you connect with prospective and new customers, boost your customer service team’s productivity, and gain an edge over your competition.
- Use collaborative browsing (or co-browsing)
Co-browsing allows your customer service team to interact with your customer’s web browser and provide fast and personalised support in real-time without the need to download or install any software.
Co-browsing is a great way to interact with customers and increase engagement, especially for subscription-based businesses where customers expect fast, personalised, and hassle-free support.
- Deliver a personalised customer service experience
Putting your customers front and centre is key to success.
As a small business owner, getting a professional virtual receptionist is paramount to ensuring a personalised customer service experience – unless you can afford to recruit, hire, train, and pay a dedicated in-house receptionist.
Personalisation does not only improve your relationships with customers but also benefits your business in converting more leads.
- Get customer feedback to improve your business
Engage and communicate with your customers by asking them for feedback to acknowledge what they perceive about your brand.
Explain to each customer that you are collecting feedback to improve their experience with your brand and find ways to better meet their needs and expectations.
Also, measuring customer satisfaction on a regular basis helps you build loyalty for your brand.
- Optimise your website
“Website engagement” isn’t just a buzzword having to do with how prospects and customers feel when they visit your website. Your website is the cornerstone of your customers’ digital experience.
That’s why your website needs to follow a logical structure, provide quality content, and include internal links and compelling CTAs.
Make sure you optimise your site’s speed and responsiveness as nothing can ruin your chances of engaging customers other than a slow-loading website.
- Communicate more effectively with in-app messages
In-app messages are messages displayed while a customer is active within an app. For example, Uber is using in-app messages to enable customers to send messages directly to the driver once they book a ride.
In-app messages are a great way to foster increased engagement and increase an app’s stickiness (an engagement metric indicating whether users come back to your app regularly).
- Host customer meetings
Meeting your customers is one of the most effective ways to build strong relationships and boost customer engagement.
Virtual events and webinars are a great way to interact with your customers, but you should also consider meeting them face-to-face (especially your most loyal customers).
Maybe you already have physical office space to host customer meetings – but no worries if not. Professional virtual offices are perfect for you if you’re running a remote business and looking for ways to polish your brand’s image and access dedicated office space on demand.
- Deliver omnichannel customer experience
In the digital age, having multiple channels to interact with customers has become a business imperative.
An omnichannel customer experience means your customers can interact with your business across multiple channels. For example, a prospect is browsing Facebook when they see an advert for one of your products or services. They click the ad to be taken to your business’s Facebook page and learn more about your business.
To engage customers, make sure you streamline all the customer interaction across multiple channels such as your website, social media, apps, etc.
Conclusion: To survive in a competitive market, all you need is to make your customers a priority and connect and interact with them at every possible opportunity.
Provide them with a truly amazing experience with your business, and you’ll be rewarded with their engagement – and loyalty.
We know that a successful business needs satisfied customers who stick around for a long time. That’s why B2B HQ can help you deliver a personalised experience to your valued customers, earn their trust, and keep them engaged. To learn more about our services and learn how they can contribute to the creation of an affordable and efficient client engagement process for your business, do not hesitate to contact us!
