7 Effective Customer Engagement Strategies You Can Use for Building a Strong Brand

To have an effective customer engagement strategy, the best thing to do is to encourage your customers to automatically be engaged with your product or service. However, how can you cause this flow to happen and effectively increase customer attention?

Around 70% of marketers claim that the maximum engagement level of customers will usually be at the end of the marketing funnel. Overall, it’s the approach you take for building relationships with your customers.

Moreover, in this article, we will dive deeper into learning more about the effective customer engagement strategies you should use this year.

Why is customer engagement important?

Your customers want to feel valued at the workplace and the only way to do this is to engage with them. Engaged customers are five times more likely to purchase from a chosen brand and 60% more likely to spend more money on a brand they trust.
Customer engagement needs commitment and time but should be an essential part of your business. There are numerous ways you can create a customer-centric approach and decide which strategies work the best. After that, track your customer engagement metrics and identify what works best.

Measuring customer engagement

Measuring customer engagement in other words means to make your customers prioritize your brand. The entire aim of customer engagement is to think of it more than just sales. The best way to know more about it is to measure it. How can we do so? Here are ten indicators you can use to measure customer engagement:

• Conversion rates
• Net Promoter Score
• Average session duration
• Return users frequency
• Customer retention rate (CRR)
• Customer churn rate
• Social media engagement
• Customer satisfaction
• Ticket volume by support channels
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Engage your customer via email

Engaging your customers through email is an effective option and usually done when creating email marketing campaigns. Some email service providers might be a better option for entrepreneurs and small businesses, but others are used for governmental purposes.

Nearly 80% of B2B companies use an email marketing newsletter as an essential part of their marketing strategy. Email marketing newsletters are an important part of your business when you are dealing with an online business and are important for directly engaging with your customers.

Nevertheless, if you want to be successful in your online business, you need to use the right email marketing software. Therefore, we are recommending you the top email marketing software for ecommerce that you should consider using:

• Klaviyo
• Mailchimp
• Omnisend
• Constant Contact
• ActiveCampaign

7 Customer engagement strategies you should follow this year

Use brand perception software

Brand perception software can help you with your market analysis and let’s be honest, it’s way easier to conduct market research when you use brand perception software.

After you conduct this type of research, it helps you adjust your strategies for measuring customer engagement. For instance, brand perception software gives you an idea on how to adjust personalization with customers and the downside is that only 60% of customers actually agree that brands provide them with the experiences they are looking for.

Market research companies and agencies can help you make much better decisions for growing your business. If you are tired of researching for the right company. Nevertheless, here are a few recommendations from our side to help you find the right US market research company:

• Attest is a market research company that collects data from more than 125 million people in more than 58 countries. Every customer that uses Attest has access to free advice from the Customer Research Team and allows you to find out whether you need guidance or not.

• Bixa is a market research studio that offers help to companies that are trying to gather more product feedback, or those trying to better understand their target audience. Report delivery time span is from three to four weeks and the best part about Bixa is that it offers market research consulting for companies that are jumpstarting their market and product research.

• Suzy is a qualitative market research software that has advanced research capabilities. You can get real-time data from the software’s broad audience of one million customers. Suzy is excellent at providing you with qualitative research solutions in marketing advertisement, product development, consumer behavior, and more.

Start an online community

Online communities, especially on social media are highly valuable and have a strong influence on how customers interact with your brand. Starting one gives your community a better chance of developing deeper connections with your target audience and building a nice area for communication.

They act as a home for both customers and are a way for potential customers to discover more about you. Moreover, building customer relationships makes everything easier and gives you the chance to know more about your customers on an individual level.

You can start your online community anywhere you see best. Maybe it might be on Facebook groups, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, or any other platform you use. It’ll all depend on where your target audience is most active and go forward from there.

Use your data for building customer loyalty

Whenever your customer needs something to be solved, the last thing you want for them is to try and find it on Amazon or Google. Data builds customer loyalty by personalizing their services for customers.

For example, Coca-Cola started writing the names of their consumers on their drinks, and Starbucks started doing the same thing. These are all personalization strategies used by high-performing companies.

Personalization is conducted by collecting the right amount of data and using it for building customer loyalty. 67% of customers claimed that they appreciate personalization and it highly influences their decision in purchasing a product.

Host virtual events

Virtual events are an excellent way of improving customer engagement and building relationships with your clients is easier to do through them. They are an excellent way to connect with people from all around the world.

Consider which types of virtual events would be most appropriate for your brand, taking into account your focus and the intended audience. To host new customers, you can set up a welcome party for virtual happy hours and some lunch or webinars for helping brand advocates learn more about your product launch.

These events became even more popular after the COVID-19 pandemic because of the increase in remote interactions. Nevertheless, they are just as fun as the ones you host in real life and they are an excellent way for increasing customer engagement either during or after the event.

Add chatbots to your site

You can’t always be active when hosting virtual events, so it’s a good idea to add chatbots to your site.

Chatbots might be undervalued for some business owners because their reputation isn’t the best and might not offer the same interactions as human beings do, but they are continuously evolving and changing.

Overall, it’s not all that challenging to build a chatbot and you can use them as an advantage to answer people’s more simple questions, create the right content and incorporate automatic replies.

Hiring more people for your answering additional questions might only end up in additional costs and have a significant impact on your long-term finances. In short, try to make your chatbots as natural, human and easy to interact with as possible. By doing this, it’ll highly encourage users to have positive interactions with customers.

Create a reward program

An excellent way for increasing customer engagement is to give people a strong reason why they should interact with you. Incentive and loyalty programs are created for rewarding your customers based on certain actions they take, which you can use to further build your relationships with them.

Allow loyal customers to earn points, discounts and exclusives with your customer loyalty program. Create a sales program that rewards interactions and actions that matter the most to you, regardless if it’s sending out referrals, being active in an online community and more.

By participating in a loyalty program, you’ll easily be creating more engaged customers and maintaining these relationships with them. Look at this as a way for rewarding your engaged customers who want to stay with you.

Strengthen your customer support team

Your customer support team is the backbone of creating engaging experiences with your customers. It only takes one small move to make things go wrong and this can negatively impact your interactions with customers.

Ask your team members to carefully listen to customer feedback and prioritize customer satisfaction. Don’t allow your customers to focus on one solution, but listen to their initiatives on solving problems for the customer as well. Their personal interactions help build loyalty and trust, supporting customer retention since they’ll feel appreciated and valued enough.

The final breakdown

Customer engagement is important if you want to be successful in the business world, but what is more important is to contribute to customer retention and to ensure your customers are contributing to your services in the long term. After all, you want to create long-term relationships with your customers and not only keep them for a one-time buy.

Moreover, don’t forget about incorporating the help of AI. Humans aren’t machines and with the help of AI, you can offer users 24/7 support. Chatbots have evolved to a point where they can answer more than simple questions and this is a big win for technology.