Are you really engaging your customers?

You can’t build engagement without first building relationships. Strong relationships with customers are the saving grace your business can draw upon when inevitable problems arise, or when there is temptation from the competition.

Customer engagement is the conscious effort to build trust and relationships with the people who are buying what you are selling. It encompasses all the ways you connect with customers – face-to-face, emails, phone calls, conversations via social media, websites, community forums, and more. Creating a strategy around these interactions is a great way to build loyalty.

Think of suburban restaurants during the COVID lockdown periods. Overnight most restaurateurs had to shut their doors to diners and rely completely on take-away. Those that had a customer engagement strategy in place with communication channels in operation were immediately able to contact their customers with take-away offers, home delivery options, and more. No doubt they fared much better than those who had to wait for their customers to contact them.

Five ways to create better customer experiences

Here are a few tips for creating high-value engagement and delivering a better customer experience. Follow these and you’ll unlock customer experiences that deliver value where your customers most crave it.

Develop emotional connections by making your marketing more human

Customers find it much easier to engage with a brand that has a personality, and you can achieve this by making your company more relatable and more memorable.

One of the most effective ways to build emotional connections and show your personality is to prove that your customers are dealing with an actual person and not just a nameless, faceless corporation.

You can do this by introducing the people that work for your organisation through channels like email, social media, your company website, or more. Instead of replying to social comments with an anonymous brand logo and no name, use a real person’s name for a strong impact.

The same applies to blog posts on your website. By including author bylines (name and title) and short biographies, you allow your customers to get to know you and begin building a relationship. You can also invite some of your people to become brand ambassadors so they are the face of the community, which further personalises your brand. This can also work for the business owner or CEO.

Listen to your customers and ask questions

Being able to constantly liaise with customers is both a good and bad thing. Good because you can respond to problems as they arise, but bad because you need to monitor communication channels 24 hours a day.

This means you need to have systems in place that can be scaled up or down depending on the frequency of feedback or interaction that occurs. Highly responsive companies are quick to nip service problems in the bud through tactful communications. This can head off issues that would otherwise go viral from well-connected customers.

Your communication with customers does not need to be completely reactive. You can also be proactive and ask questions that invite responses. Questions offer a prime opportunity to understand what your customers and potential customers want. The responses you receive are not only an easy way to engage customers, but they also offer direct insight into where you should take your business next.

Offer customers real value with educational content

This new era of engagement marketing means that you lead with content marketing, rather than with products or services. Your content marketing must be truly useful and of genuine value to your customers for it to be a part of a meaningful engagement strategy.

One way to make your content more engaging is to focus on educating your customers without including the hard sell. By adding value to your customers’ lives via content marketing, you will cement yourself as a genuinely helpful organisation that they’ll want to do business with – when they’re ready to do business.

Personalise customer experiences

You can take advantage of the wealth of data that digital marketing offers to provide personalised recommendations based on user behaviour. For example, through email and social ads, you can target your current customers and provide personalised recommendations based on past purchases or browsing behaviour.

Through digital marketing, you can contact customers who have visited your site, filled a shopping cart, and left without purchasing to remind them. The same technique can be used with remarketing ads on social media, where you show customers what they left behind.

Read more about the great marketing moves we make with our clients.