An effective customer engagement strategy is table stakes to compete in both the B2C and B2B markets today. Top brands commit to being customer-centric in everything they do and create.
Is yours one of them?
Personalized content, delivered to the right person at the right time, is the key to organizational success. When done right, customer engagement will lead to healthy customer relationships, strong brand equity, and lasting loyalty.
Improve your brand’s customer interactions and ultimately increase ROI with the following five customer engagement strategies.
For everything you need to know about customer engagement and why it’s important, click here.
1. Map your customer’s lifecycle.
Before you engage with your customers, define and understand the six stages of the customer lifecycle—then cater your brand messages and conversations to each step of the journey.
Awareness
In the awareness stage of the shopper journey, a customer may not know that they’re looking for anything specific, and can be made aware of a brand without the desire to purchase. Any communication at this stage should be strictly informational.
Consideration
Consideration is one the most important parts of a customer’s journey toward a purchase. At this stage, customers are weighing their options. Your brand messages to customers should include objective information like reviews and educational content.
Evaluation
At the evaluation stage, the customer has identified a want or need for a product or service, and is beginning to conduct more in-depth research on potential solutions. During this stage, answer product- or service-specific customer questions in a helpful and efficient way.
Purchase
To ensure a smooth purchase for customers, your conversion process must be easy and seamless—with ample information and resources to guide them along the way.
Re-Engagement
Your customer’s lifecycle doesn’t end with a sale. Instead, your brand should work during the re-engagement stage to collect and respond to feedback from the customer. Fix and learn from negative responses; share and promote positive ones.
Referral
All of your hard customer engagement work should come to fruition in the referral stage of the customer lifecycle. Ideally, satisfied customers will share their experience through written testimonials or word-of-mouth.
2. Seek cohesive customer engagement tools.
Oftentimes, organizations are left with fragmented tools and technologies that don’t have a clear purpose in the overall business strategy. To avoid this, carefully research and adopt only the customer engagement platforms and tools that align with your predetermined customer engagement strategy.
One way to ensure that much of your customer engagement initiatives remain organized is by implementing a customer data platform. This software hosts all customer information, tracks your company’s customer engagement, and allows your team to identify meaningful patterns from the data it compiles.
3. Curate customer-focused content.
Rather than selling your products and services to the masses, your content should clearly align with your customers’ interests and needs. Consider the questions your customers are asking at the different stages of the buyer’s journey and answer them through optimized content. Use tools that reach your customers best, like social media platforms, email marketing, and online chat, to effectively spread your content.
4. Collect and analyze data properly.
Aggregated data from customer engagement platforms and tools is only beneficial to your organization if it is modeled appropriately, analyzed, and compared against your overall business goals.
Pay attention to engagement levels on social media (shares, comments), email campaigns (open rates, click-through rates), and your website (content downloads, chat interaction) to clearly draw conclusions about your overall customer engagement performance. Then, use these findings to improve the customer experience even further.
5. Listen to customer feedback.
When done correctly, customer engagement is a two-way, open line of communication between your brand and your customers. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring your most important content contributors.
As you publish content and send messages, collect, listen, and respond to your customers’ feedback. Incorporate customer surveys throughout your marketing materials to truly show that your organization cares about your audience’s opinions. When necessary, adjust your strategy to better align with the needs of your customers.
As customers’ desires and expectations evolve, so should your customer engagement strategy. Take advantage of these tips to boost your customer engagement, but keep in mind that a fluid strategy will ultimately yield the greatest success.
Develop a Profitable Customer Engagement Strategy
At Earley Information Science, we work with brands to build and improve customer engagement strategies that best suit their customers’ needs. Ready to get started on, or fine-tune, your own customer engagement processes?
Lay the foundation for effective customer interactions with our Digital Transformation Roadmap. In this whitepaper, you’ll have access to four critical tracks that pave the way for a sustainable customer engagement strategy.
