Customer engagement is foundational to an excellent CX. But what sparks customer engagement, and how can you connect with them in a saturated market?
The customer engagement landscape has evolved tremendously in the past few years. The customer has expectations from your brand- they want you to anticipate their needs and preferences.
Building robust relationships with your customers isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a must. Brands must keep their customers engaged at each touchpoint to foster loyalty and increase retention. Here are the top strategies for customer engagement that will help you outperform your competition and make some groundbreaking progress!
The customer-centric approach
Customer-centricity ensures a pleasant experience at each phase/touchpoint of the customer journey. The customers share their positive experiences with others, resulting in referrals and eventually more sales.
A customer-centric approach is about keeping the customer central to all business decisions. The impact each outcome has on the customer guides the way forward. We have tons of reasons to be the customer-centric, but the biggest one- your business won’t survive in the long run if it can’t retain customers. The costs of acquiring new customers is much higher than retaining them.
Focus on fostering a customer-focused culture. The core business activities must align with customer expectations to deliver what they want. It’s time your business get obsessed with your customer. Empathy goes a long way!
A digital community
Brands are increasingly realizing the significance of online communities. These groups aren’t just a great advertising avenue but also make it incredibly easy to build rapport with your customers, get real audience insights, and conduct research and surveys.
Social networks provide a great platform to build such communities. You can create LinkedIn or Facebook groups with like-minded people in just a few minutes.
Before you start a community, you must have clear goals. Why are you starting this? What’s the objective? What do you want to achieve with it? Do you have the necessary bandwidth?
If you don’t know why you’re doing it, your customer may not have a reason to participate either.
The next step is to find people who would be interested and would actually benefit from this community. This will also help you understand what they want from you, and in turn, you can create content that they expect. Reach out to people you think would be a right fit for your community and prompt the existing members to spread the word!
Personalization
People want personalized marketing, not a random offer you’re blasting out to a mailing list. Leveraging customer data, focus on creating personalized experiences for your customers, making them feel like you know them.
Take direct customer feedback on the product and their overall experience to understand what you can improve. Create tailored content based on customer history, adding a special human touch to your branding and marketing.
Identify the customer journey and look for creative ways to personalize each stage. Understand how customers interact with your brand and where they drop off, trying to tweak the strategy there to keep them engaged. Segment your audience and create different communication plans that align with their behavior, needs, buying patterns, and purchase history.
The Editor’s Note
Customer engagement is meeting customers where they are and how they like it. Look for channels your audience notices- it doesn’t always have to be digital. It can be a mural on a busy street or a billboard at the bus station. Audience knowledge is the key, and customer engagement boils down to how well you know them.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article!
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