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As the company owner, you must be thinking a lot about getting more sales conversions. But how much time do you spend thinking about your existing customers, how you can make them happier, and make their lives better? Confused? This blog will talk about the best customer engagement ideas for your consideration.
As per different research surveys, it is 6 times more expensive to get new customers rather than to retain your existing ones. It will be also easier for you to sell your products or services to your existing customers than to new consumers.
With great customer engagement ideas, you can develop a long-term relationship with your customers and gradually make them loyal to your brand. Chances are that they will be your brand ambassadors and refer you to their friends and families.
Not only that, great customer engagement helps you to get more sales conversions, happy customers, less churn, and some great referrals.
In short, you can build a great company that your competitors rave about.
Here, is one thing you need to understand, the basic difference between an engaged customer and the average one. The engaged customer will not only buy products from you but also will interact with your brand through emails, social media channels and other ways to get updated all the time.
Whereas, the average customer will buy some products and then forget about your brand. Apart from that, the engaged customer will also refer you to others. I bet such customers are much better to nurture rather than the average ones.
Here, in this blog, I shall discuss some great customer engagement ideas that will help you develop a tribe of happy and loyal customers. I will also share some great examples where brands have wooed their customers with some great and memorable experiences.
So, let’s get started!
What is Customer Engagement?
Let me try to provide here a basic definition. Customer engagement is the bouquet of different ways, tools, and resources companies use to build long-term positive customer relationships.
Customer engagement refers to the different ways that customers use to get in touch and interact with your brand. To stay ahead of your competitors, you have no choice but to build different useful strategies for providing effective customer engagement.
If you don’t, chances are that gradually you are going to lose the race, turning your happy customers into unhappy ones, even worse you can say the dissatisfied ones.
Here you have a great chance to win as the customer expectation is set quite low now.
As most companies are mainly interested in sales conversions and finding out different ways to earn more, customers get neglected. So, here you get a chance to woo them by offering beautiful and memorable experiences with your brand that your customers will cherish.
The process of customer engagement is basically built on an emotional attachment that starts when a user gets in touch with you for the very first time, it gradually develops to be stronger and extends for a lifetime.
Once you can establish that beautiful relationship with your customers, it’s going to reflect on your overall sales conversions-definitely it will be increased.
If you don’t trust me, trust the numbers. Nearly 84% of the companies who invest in providing a better experience to customers always get an increased revenue of 4-8% more than other competitors.
Here, the point is to provide customers with more rather than just selling your products or services. But how to understand if you are on the right path? Check the points below.
- Customers are liking and commenting on your social media channels
- Your initiatives like quizzes, promotions, or campaigns are getting viral
- Customers are enjoying your loyalty programs
- People are posting positive reviews about your brand on other sites
- You are getting recommendations from the customers
- People are reading your blogs, and different content, watching and loving your videos
What Does a Good Customer Engagement Strategy Look Like?
It’s a valid thought that may come to your mind. These customer engagement programs may differ based on what kind of business you have or how you interact with your consumers.
For example, a normal brick-and-mortar store will have different strategies to engage with its customers whereas if you have an online business, your strategies will be different.
However, there are the main 4 key points to keep in mind for turning a basic customer engagement strategy into the best one.
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Different Touchpoints for Customer Engagement
Let the customers get in touch with you via different channels. When the customer engages with your brand on the website, gives a call to your support center, or even interacts with your support team member through a live chat or chatbot, this can be called brand engagement.
All these channels are basically methods that the customers use to directly engage with you, your team members, and most importantly your brand.
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Product Engagement
Your customer support department is the main face of your brand because they directly handle the customers. To get any kind of information or assistance, they always contact your customer support team. So, you have to select the right team members for this department.
The interaction between the customers and the support agents may close many deals or even harm your brand image making customers unhappy and dissatisfied. So, select your team wisely.
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Your Customer Support Team
Your customer support department is the main face of your brand because they directly handle the customers. To get any kind of information or assistance, they always contact your customer support team. So, you have to select the right team members for this department.
The interaction between the customers and the support agents may close many deals or even harm your brand image making customers unhappy and dissatisfied. So, select your team wisely.
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Brand Engagement
Brand engagement can be called an important process rather than just an interaction. It helps you to develop a positive long-term relationship with the customers. If you can truly engage with them, eventually you will get some happy customers who will definitely refer your brand to others.
Some Great Ideas for Better Customer Engagement
Great customer engagement ideas will always inspire you to opt for the newest ways for catering to the customers’ requirements. To give you a bird’s eye view, here I have included the best 12 customer engagement ideas that you would like to consider for your business.
1. Welcome Messages
Studies show that, after subscribing to your services, 74% of customers expect welcome mail from your side and you have to meet their expectations to make them happy about you. A short and simple welcome mail can do wonders.
These welcome emails have an open rate of 50%, which is much more effective than sending periodic newsletters. Well-written messages always help you to engage with your customers, offer them assistance, and inform them about your latest product updates, or other offers and discounts.
There are several ways to say ‘Hi’ to your customers but the best would be to make it unique and memorable for them. Yes, it’s hard to develop innovative words to make it more engaging but it’s not impossible.
2. Conduct Contests and Quizzes
You can definitely be innovative here to make interesting contests and quizzes in order to engage with the customers in a better way. Let’s face the fact that customers want to feel special. If you want to be noticed amongst your competitors, you need to think of unique ways to design interactive contests for them to stand out from the lot.
The product knowledge-related contests not only excite the customers but also will enhance their knowledge about your products and services. You can definitely offer special prizes and certifications for their active participation.
3. Giveaways
Every company needs some strategies to reach its target audience. This is the reason why a new promotional activity is getting popular nowadays known as ‘Giveaway.’
Here, some free gifts have been offered to a certain number of chosen winners out of a large group of people through different types of competitions. The objective here is to get engaged with a large number of people at a time and let them know about the brand, its products, and services.
It’s a great way to boost customer engagement for your company. We all love free gifts, and so do your customers. Running some friendly competitions to win prizes is a great initiative for engaging with them.
4. Create Unique Experiences for Customers
To develop a good customer engagement strategy, you need to be more innovative rather than just being on phone calls or arranging occasional quiz contests. You should have a big picture in your mind.
It’s not only about providing some unique experiences to them, rather it’s about beautifying your customer’s whole journey with your brand, and how you both interact with each other.
So, instead, of developing a single marketing strategy to communicate with every customer, create different strategies for those various stages of a customer’s journey. It’s not only about sending emails to them, it should include much more like
- Making videos and podcasts
- Content marketing
- Developing social media content
- Online ads for different customer segments
- PR, and other media activities
The objective of creating such different types of content should not be selling your products or services, but rather providing valuable content to your customers and standing up for them.
Such an approach will definitely make them comfortable with your company and you can gain their trust in your company. Your motto will be to create a long-lasting positive impression.
5. Use Live Chat to Engage Proactively with Customers
To engage with customers in the most effective way, there are some tools available in the market. Live chat is definitely one of the best options amongst the lot.
Live chat software integrated into your website, lets your support team monitor the website visitors in real-time, and provide information like their geographic locations, past visits, total time spent on your site, chat history, etc. Rather than just waiting for the customers to poke your team, the support agent himself can proactively engage with the website visitors to offer instant assistance.
Apart from that, live chat makes it very easy for customers to get in touch with you. Through live chat, they can initiate a conversation, voice or video calls to your support team in no time.
In short, it is a great option to opt for providing excellent personalized experiences to your customers.
6. Deploy Chatbots
Many companies do not have the resource to offer 24/7 customer support, and your team can not be available all the time. But if you have an online business, you must be having customers all around the world with different geographic locations and time zones.
So, customers may visit your website at any time and there has to be someone to take care of them. Chatbots here come into the picture to save you. It is capable of responding to customer queries just like a real human agent without even letting them understand that they are talking to a machine.
Not only that, chatbots can automate many of your operations, leading to reducing your overall company expenses. Many times, the support team gets busy handling a lot of customers at a time, and being capable of handling multiple customers at a time, a chatbot can save them there too.
Customers don’t like to wait, always prefer immediate responses, and the chatbot caters to their requirements. It provides them prompt replies, FAQs, different informative articles for self-help and also automatically transfers the chat sessions to real human agents if required.
7. Develop Personalized Content
The easiest way to understand the importance of personalized content is by placing yourself in the shoes of a customer. Suppose you are visiting a website or an application. What do you expect? Some personalized content as per your requirements. Trust me, you are not exceptional.
As per a study, nearly 91% of people prefer to buy from brands that give them personalized deals, offers, and other recommendations.
Customers develop some expectations from different brands, so you have to meet those criteria to get their preferences. You have several ways to do this. One would be making the feedback collection an integral part of your complete product design.
Let me give one example here. Duolingo, a language learning application has been providing great personalized content. When you sign up there, Duolingo starts asking you different relevant questions at every stage. Your answers help the app provide you with personalized experiences catering to your requirements.
8. Design Different Loyalty Programs
Getting some new customers on board is costlier than retaining your existing ones. This is the reason why companies always need to walk some extra miles to make their existing customers happy and satisfied. Well planned loyalty programs can help you out here. It’s a great way to engage with your customers and appreciate them for their loyalty to your brand.
As a part of a loyalty program, you can offer them free gifts, discounts, interesting deals, and even a free upgradation of your services.
The American footwear, apparel, and accessories manufacturing brand Nike can be a great example here. As a part of the loyalty programs, it has launched a new membership program for the existing customers offering lots of benefits like:
- Prizes for successful workout sessions
- Personalized promotional activities like deals and discounts
The more customers come near to their goals, the more they push themselves to achieve them. It’s a great way to engage customers and do some more for them apart from just selling your products or services.
9. Add Some Gamification
You don’t need to be always serious with your customers. Sometimes you can add some fun elements to your customer engagement techniques to provide them enjoyable experiences. I am sure your customers will love it.
All these come under gamification that is all about making the engagement strategies fun fulfilled and more exciting. Here are some great tricks for you:
- Organize Contests on Different Social Media Channels: For example, you can ask customers to make a short video about how they like your products or services, and what they like the most. Later you will announce the winner and offer attractive prizes.
- Exciting Games: You can come up with different innovative games to let customers engage with you and build memorable experiences.
10. Encourage Testimonials from Customers
Reviews and testimonials are important for developing creative customer engagement ideas. There are many ways to collect the testimonials such as:
- Feedback forms
- Review sites
- Surveys
- Questionnaires
A simple request to customers for providing their thoughts on your products or services will help you to collect lots of testimonials. Amazon has developed a large platform of customer reviews simply by requesting us to review their products within the site itself or through the mail.
11. Offer Omnichannel Customer Service
This is one such an idea for customer engagement where most of the businesses give less importance. Very few companies are the exceptions and really work hard to provide effective omnichannel customer support.
It is one of the most useful customer engagement ideas that can be very much beneficial for your company. Below mentioned are the different channels to consider:
- Chatbots
- Live chat
- Social media channels
- Phone
- Call back services
- Video and voice calls
- Text messages
- Product demos
- Email support
- Call back service
Each of your customers are different facing different issues. You need to provide omni-channel support to customers whenever they need.
Sometimes, they want to contact you via email, sometimes they may call you. Many times, they don’t have the time to talk so prefer a call-back service. Your job will be to cater to their needs as per the situation.
Offer omni-channel services to your customers and let them choose the suitable ones.
12. Collect Valuable Customer Feedback
Collecting customer feedback on a regular basis is a great practise to improve the effectiveness of customer engagement. It not only lets you engage with them but also valuable feedback always pinpoints the drawbacks that your products may have for further improvements.
Always understand the requirements of your customers. If some are new on board, try to get an idea of their first impression of your brand. All these together make a path of direct interaction between both of you, which is the main purpose of customer engagement.
But collecting feedback is not enough. You have to listen to them and work hard to rectify the drawbacks that the customers mentioned.
Some Great Examples for Customer Engagement
Studying some of the best customer engagement ideas and strategies is a great way for working hard to get happy and loyal customers. Here, let me discuss some of the best examples of how companies walked the extra mile to make the customer experience unique and memorable.
Sephora
Sephora is a French company dealing with personal and beauty products. It has come up with a great reward program for its customers named ‘Beauty Insider Rewards Program.’
It provides its customers with a beautiful eCommerce experience. They can tap on the ‘beauty bag’ inside the application to enter Sephora’s online store and handle all the social posts from a single app.
Customers can shop from Sephora’s eCommerce store, see other details like past orders, favorites, details of their reward points, watch tutorial videos, find the nearest Sephora store, and many more things from a single application.
Sephora’s omnichannel marketing strategy helped them to get about 11 million online members which helped the brand to make 15 times more sales on their eCommerce store.
Netfilx
I have listed the tech giant Netflix here is because of its great capability to evolve. Tech giant Netflix has earned their spot on our list of customer engagement examples due to their ability to evolve.
Shifting from just selling DVDs to rentals and later rentals to live streaming, this company always think of customer needs and manage itself to pivot as per the requirements.
I can praise more about Netflix here because of their recent initiative-that is coming up with the newest role of a producer.
With the help of frequent A/B testing and customer analysis, Netflix always comes up with different entertainment segments as per the preferences of the different groups of customers.
You must be thinking about how Netflix has been so popular. Well, it’s just because they provide personalized customer experiences.
Apple
My list here will be incomplete if I don’t mention Apple Inc. It has inspired most of us and working hard even today to make customers happy. Here I would like to say mad for the brand.
It has completely changed the way we look and understand about the latest technologies. Apple first developed some unique and user-friendly products. While developing these master pieces, the brand always kept the customer preferences and requirements in mind. Instead of working hard on marketing campaigns, Apple always is more focused on product benefits.
Apple has always positioned its products as unique and different from its competitors and makes its customers significant too. Yes, this popularity is tough to achieve but highly effective in turning customers into fans.
The Final Words!
So, the above-mentioned examples show you how to make the communication between the customers and your brand more motivating and exciting. Its’ proven that to get the best results, you have to provide the best product experience that can easily beat your competitors.
But Apart from all the useful customer engagement ideas, you also need an effective platform to engage with your customers proactively rather than just waiting for them to come to you.
How can you expect to get the maximum result, if you don’t deploy the right technologies and tools to get there? Well, REVE Chat can help you out here.
REVE Chat is an omnichannel customer engagement software . You can engage with customers on the web as well as the mobile app through its live chat, voice and video chat, and AI-based chatbot technologies.
You can Sign Up for a FREE TRIAL today and see how REVE Chat can help you to elevate customer engagement and a positive brand image.
