Ten DIY Customer Engagement Strategies To Turn Your Customers Into Loyal Fans

To convert, retain and turn your audience into brand advocates, you need to apply the concept of customer engagement in your marketing efforts. The digital industry is evolving; businesses compete to attract a particular audience, which means that you can no longer rely on fancy graphics and catchy slogans.

This article will explain what customer engagement is, how it is measured, and strategies you can apply to build a better relationship with customers and retain them.

Table of contents

1. What is Customer Engagement?
2. Why is Customer Engagement Important?
3. Customer Engagement vs Customer Satisfaction vs Customer Experience
4. How to Measure Customer Engagement
5. Ten Customer Engagement Strategies to Turn Your Customers Into Loyal Fans
6. How to Improve Your Customer Engagement Efforts For Better Results

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is building a relationship with your customers using varied marketing channels such as emails, text messaging, social media and live chats. It's an intentional approach to provide valuable interaction and messaging to your customers. As a result, it creates the opportunity for customers to trust your company and become loyal customers.

For example, a customer receives an email from your company teaching them how to use your product. Customer engagement goes beyond applying a series of sales-oriented tactics to interact with customers. Instead, it involves understanding your customers better, knowing their preferred marketing channel and delivering personalized experiences.

Why is Customer Engagement Important?

While every company's goal is to increase sales and revenue, customer engagement can provide more benefits beyond that. It can set up your business for long-term growth and help meet current customer expectations. You can keep customers engaged throughout their buying experience to foster customer loyalty and gather valuable customer data.

Besides, studies have revealed that 78% of customers admitted that they would forgive a business for a mistake if they received remarkable customer service, proving that customer engagement is crucial to retain loyal customers even when your company makes a mistake.

Here are additional reasons why customer engagement is essential for your business:

• Improves customer relationship: a solid relationship with customers is crucial for the growth of your business. However, it can be challenging to maintain a great relationship with customers in the current digital age across various marketing channels. You can offer help to customers that encounter problems during the buying journey. A great customer engagement strategy can help improve connecting with customers more profoundly.
• Boost customer loyalty and retention: when you show your customers that you appreciate them, they'll be more likely to buy from you again. Customers want to feel heard and understood; rather than forcing them to buy your product, show them that you care by answering their questions, providing valuable resources to guide them through their buying journey.
• Provides valuable customer feedback: customers will always have something to say about your brand. Whether, it's about their recent buying experience or the conversation they had with the support staff. Customer feedback can help you identify areas of improvement needed to provide a better customer experience.
• Shortens sales cycles: an effective customer engagement strategy helps you to improve your lead generation efforts. Some engagement tools leverage artificial intelligence and customer data to create a personalized experience to engage customers at every stage of the buying journey. When you gain insights into your sales activity, you can pinpoint areas that affect customer purchase, retarget potential customers and shorten sales cycles.

Customer engagement vs. Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Experience

Some people confuse customer engagement with customer satisfaction and experience. The truth is that they are interconnected, but each term is distinct.

Customer experience: also known as CX, involves how your customers perceive your brand or business. It is defined by customers' interactions and experiences with your business throughout their buying journey. The goal is to see your customers from their perspective and create a valuable experience that incentivizes them to purchase.

Customer engagement: as we mentioned earlier, customer engagement is building a relationship with customers interested in your product and brand. It represents the various channels you use to communicate with your customers, such as emails, social media and conversations.

Customer satisfaction measures how happy customers are with your brand's products, services, and communication. In other words, it measures how well your company meets customer expectations.

How to Measure Customer Engagement

It'll be challenging to adjust your customer engagement strategy if you don't measure customer engagement. When we talk about customer engagement measurement, metrics such as time spent on site and visited pages per session may come to your mind. However, other metrics provide more information on your brand's engagement with customers.

Here are some customer engagement metrics to track:

• Purchase frequency:  measures how often customers purchase on your website. It is calculated by dividing the number of orders within the last 365days by the number of unique customers within the same time frame. This metric provides insight into how to tailor your marketing strategy to suit your customers' buying behavior.
• Repeat purchase rate: this metric measures the percentage of customers who return for another purchase within a particular period. This is also known as the customer retention rate. The percentage range is 0-100; the higher the number, the better your customer retention rate.
  
  It can be calculated by dividing the number of customers that made a return purchase by the total number of customers. This metric is valuable because it helps you understand how many customers are engaged enough to come back and make another purchase. This way, you can identify ways to improve your customer engagement strategy.
• Net promoter score: this metric is all about customer loyalty. It measures how likely customers would spread the word about your brand. This customer data is normally obtained through in-app surveys or email campaigns. A positive net promoter score or above 0 is good, above 50 is excellent.
• Customer lifetime value: measures how much revenue a business can expect from customers during their relationship. This means that the longer a customer purchases from a brand, the higher their lifetime value will be.

Ten Customer Engagement Strategies to Turn Your Customers Into Loyal Fans

Now that you've learned the basics of customer engagement. How do you develop an effective strategy that will help you retain loyal customers and build better rapport with your customers? In this section, you'll learn 1o effective customer engagement strategies.

Here are some of the best customer engagement strategies you can apply to boost your relationship with customers:

1. Identify your ideal customers: To build an effective customer engagement strategy, you need to understand your best customers. This involves knowing your customer's lifecycle, including their buying history, behavior and needs. You need to understand what motivates your customers to interact with your brand.

This type of customer information will help you deliver valuable and specific messages to your target audience. Use your customer analytics data to understand your customer better. With Engage, you can track your customer data along their lifecycle and use that data to send them personalized messages via email, SMS, and push notifications.

2. Develop a customer-centric approach: A customer-centric approach is driven by the need to deliver valuable experiences to your customers. The best way to apply this approach is by listening to your customers. What are the difficulties they experience when using your product or service? It would be best to put yourself in their shoes to understand better how your customers view your brand. For example, you can host an event that educates your customers on using the latest upgrades to your products. This will help create a memorable customer experience and retain loyal customers.

3. Gather customer feedback: Customer feedback is an essential part of your customer engagement efforts. You can gather customer feedback from social media, forums, and focus groups, and you can also request customer feedback from your customer support team. The more knowledgeable you are about your customers' experience with your brand, the better it would be to deliver valuable messages to them.

For example, Expedia leverages automation to obtain customer feedback after their trip.

4. Use push notifications: Some businesses may not realize the importance of using push notifications, but the truth is that push notifications can be helpful to drive better engagements with your customers. Push notifications are short messages that pop up on a user's mobile or desktop screen. You can use push notifications to remind customers of your offering or invite them to participate in online events.

However, customers must opt-in to receive push notifications from your company. A challenge encountered with push notification is that your push messages must be compelling enough to motivate your customers to click through and engage with your brand. Also, you need to send push notifications when your customers are most likely to read them. Wrong timing can ultimately lead to low engagement rates, and customers may even opt-out if they receive too many messages at a time that's not convenient for them.

5. Use real-time data to influence your marketing efforts: Like we mentioned earlier, you need to gather customer data to influence your marketing efforts. But how do you leverage your custom data to enhance customer engagement positively? By understanding your customer's needs, challenges and buying behavior, you can leverage the information to build a cross-channel content strategy that delivers practitioner and educational content across various marketing channels, from social media to email and blog content.

6. Engage customers on social media: Social media is no new marketing challenge; most businesses today use social media to drive their marketing efforts. But the problem involved in using social media is identifying the best ways to engage with customers. Customers' attention span is relatively short. Not only that, various companies are competing to gain customers' attention, so poor social media tactics are less effective.

For example, coca-cola uses creative social media content to engage its audience. So, your social media marketing efforts must be customer-centric.

Here are some ways you can engage with customers on social media:

• Respond to your customers' comments: this includes both positive and negative comments. Negative feedback can provide insight into the negative experiences customers may have had with your brand. It offers an opportunity to address these issues carefully and adequately. As a result, a painful experience could turn into a good one.
• Share valuable content on social media: this is another way you can build a solid engagement with your audience. Customers are usually interested in valuable content that can help them with their challenges and needs. Develop a schedule where you regularly share content with your audience, addressing their needs and pain points.

7. Introduce a loyalty program to support your marketing efforts: When customers enjoy your brand's experience, they become loyal customers. With good reason. When your customers gain value from every interaction with your audience, they become emotionally attached to your brand.

They become most likely to continue buying from you and less likely to buy from your competitors. You can build this kind of relationship by introducing a loyalty program. Here are some ways you can get started:

• Encourage your customers to share your content on social media: it doesn't just have to be your customers that consume your content on social media. There are still other potential customers that can benefit from your content on social media. You can encourage your customers to share your store and content with friends. This can help keep them engaged over time.
• Award points when a customer makes a purchase: you can show your customers that you value their interest in your brand by giving them a point each time they purchase. The customer can then use the points to get discount offers. For example, Starbucks offers a reward each time a customer makes a purchase.

8. Make your brand meaningful and relatable: The way you present your brand makes a big difference in how your customers perceive your brand. Part of a successful customer engagement strategy involves building a brand personality that your customers would appreciate and engage with, which means that you need to develop a solid connection with your customers to gain their attention. As a result, you can create opportunities for engagement.

9. Incorporate conversational marketing in your customer engagement strategy: The digital marketing game is evolving. In some cases, customers encounter challenges when making a purchase. Rather than making customers go through lead capture forms or waiting endlessly for a response from customer support, you can apply conversational marketing to facilitate engagement with your customers.

Conversational marketing focuses on interaction with customers across multiple channels such as LiveChat, chatbots, and voice assistants. It enables you to build an interactive experience with customers, creating value at every stage in their buying journey. For example, if a customer purchases a product late at night but needs help to solve a problem with the payment process.

A conversational marketing tool like a chatbot can be helpful. Chatbots operate based on artificial intelligence and create interactions almost like human conversations. However, they don't fully replace real human interaction, and what matters is whether the customer was attended to or not.

10. Apply personalization in your marketing efforts: Personalization involves more than using your customer's first name. It provides the opportunity to include relevant customer data in your messaging, which means you need to understand your customers' buying behavior, purchase history, needs and challenges. Marketing automation tools can help you identify each customers' buying behavior and create a personalized approach that suits their preferences.

With Engage, you can track and identify your customers' buying behaviors and use that data to send them personalized messages via email, SMS, and push notification.

How to Improve Your Customer Engagement Efforts For Better Results

To improve your customer engagement, you must communicate and connect with your customers at every opportunity you get. There are many ways to engage with customers; no matter the approach you apply, remember to be consistent. Deliver messages that address your customers' needs and create a positive customer experience throughout the brand journey.

As long as you build a solid relationship with customers that continues after their first purchase, customers will feel connected with your company. In turn, engaged customers make repeat purchases, refer your brand to friends and remain loyal customers.

Engage is a powerful marketing automation solution that you can use to implement your customer engagement strategies. With Engage, you can:

1. Track your customer data
2. Create unique customer groups or segments based on these data,
3. Send personalized messages to customers via email, SMS, push notifications and in-app messages, and
4. Launch marketing campaigns with automated messaging workflows.

Get started on Engage for FREE.