What is a Customer Engagement Strategy?
A customer engagement strategy is the product of the steps your company takes to communicate with its target audience. Think of a customer engagement strategy as a roadmap for your company to follow any time it interacts with a potential customer. This includes advertisements and promotions, social media outreach, and even website surveys. Your customer engagement strategy should include any information a representative of your company would need when engaging with the public. This might include specific talking points they should include, certain language to avoid, and what tone they should use. Whether your company deals in technology or logistics and shipping services, you’ll need an effective customer engagement strategy. So, let’s take a look at some benefits of implementing a solid customer engagement strategy before jumping into some tactics you can implement to improve your customer engagement.
Benefits of Implementing a Customer Engagement Strategy
- Increased Customer Loyalty
The first major benefit of a good customer engagement strategy is a higher level of customer loyalty. In the age of social media, customers show favor towards companies that consistently engage with the public. If a company goes silent for too long, they fall out of the public eye. By providing your target audience with a steady stream of interesting content to interact with, you’ll encourage the public to continuously engage with your brand. Improved customer loyalty also increases the chance that individuals will recommend your company to their friends and loved ones. In this way, customer loyalty can actually help you grow your business’s core audience.
- Improved Public Perception
A great customer engagement strategy also improves how the public perceives your company. This benefit tends to go hand in hand with increased customer loyalty. The more positive interactions your brand has with the public, the more likely customers are to remain loyal and hold a positive view of your brand. When a company is held in high regard by the public, they have a much easier time marketing its products and business. Think of it like this: you might be willing to view an ad for a company that you support, but nobody enjoys seeing advertisements from brands that they dislike.
- Increased Brand Recognition
Great customer engagement can also increase your company’s level of brand recognition. This essentially means that your business will be able to reach a wider audience. More consumers will recognize your brand based on limited information. In fact, brand recognition can be so powerful that many companies’ products can be identified even if their logo is removed. For example, even if the logo were scraped on an iMac, chances are that most people would still recognize it as a product of Apple.
Examples of Some Strategies
- Create a Relatable Personality For Your Brand
One of the most effective ways to improve the quality of engagements you have with your target audience is to create a relatable personality for your brand. It is important for brands to have a personality because it makes them more memorable. Additionally, brands that focus on creating a personality for themselves receive more engagement and tend to have more loyal customers. The best way to begin building a personality for your brand is to consistently create content that shares the same tone. This will allow your customers to relate to the company on a deeper level and encourage them to share the company name.
- Push Notifications
Push notifications are incredibly effective for driving engagement because they are one of the most attention-grabbing forms of digital marketing. They go beyond traditional advertisements by directly grabbing the attention of an individual and encouraging them to complete a specific action. This makes push notifications powerful tools for altering consumer behavior. Push notifications are also useful for incentivizing certain actions. For example, coupon codes for free shipping can be included alongside a push notification to increase the likelihood that a consumer completes a purchase.
- Customer Service
Many companies do not heavily invest in their customer service department because they see calls to customer service as missed opportunities. But in reality, a call to customer relations management is an opportunity to engage with a customer and help them out of a bad situation. Providing excellent customer service is an easy way to improve customer loyalty. A company that supports its customers even when its products fail has a much higher chance of encouraging its audience to engage with them again.