In the ever-evolving landscape of businesses, customer satisfaction is one of the constants that drive profits. Customer satisfaction starts with effective customer engagement and at the root of this, lies strategic marketing.
Every business expects a rush of traffic to their websites and spiked conversion rates. However, until the time these expectations are met, trickling customer count and a reduced amount of social sharing can turn out to be quite demotivating.
Therefore, it is crucial to take the right measures in order to ensure that your customer engagement methods are foolproof and generate the results you expect. Following are some effective steps that can lead you to the right direction.
Sell Experiences
Irresistible customer experience has a direct impact on engagement. It has been found that 86% of consumers are willing to pay extra for a better customer experience. However, only 1% of customers feel that their expectations are met.
According to Paul Greenberg, author and entrepreneur, “If a customer likes you and continues to like you, they will do business with you. If they don’t, they won’t”. The idea is, if people are buying what you are saying, they are quite likely to buy what you are selling.
With the age of the customer on the rise, people are more interested in superior experiences. How will the products and services your business sell improve their lives? That’s what matters. For example, Apple has capitalized on customer experience to become one of the giants in their industry.
Think Outside the Box With Technology
Advances in consumer technology have reshaped customer demands over the years. Therefore, businesses are required to perform at a level that meets these demands adequately. Utilizing technology intelligently can open up a number of avenues to interest and engage customers with your brand.
The beacon technology has created quite a breakthrough in this arena with its ability to push discounts and other offers to the smartphones of customers inside the store via Bluetooth. Additionally, this inexpensive hardware can gather data regarding the shopping habits of customers and send customized, location-based messages to them.
In a recent study it was found that, with the Customer Packaged Goods (CPG) market expecting to total over $407 billion by the end of this year, beacons can prove to be overwhelmingly effective to target the increased customer base.
Apart from that, 3D interactive presentation also holds immense promise in terms of customer engagement. For example, Oreo has already used an experimental 3D printing technology that allows customers to make a cookie just the way they want it. Such a level of hyper-personalization is quite effective for customer engagement.
David Shing, AOL’s digital prophet commented on this: “People could customise their own Oreo message, which I thought was pretty remarkable. What the company is trying to do is move people enough to go into a store and buy more packets of Oreos. And if you’ve been into a store recently, merchandising when it comes to biscuits is still pretty bloody radical.”
Provide a Mobile Experience
Mobile devices have given rise to a connected era. As a result, customer expectations have soared to greater heights. Therefore, businesses are increasingly looking for ways to meet and exceed these expectations in more creative ways by facilitating a mobile experience for their customers.
One of the ways to keep your customers engaged is by meeting them where, when and how they want. Nowadays customers want immediate access to information. Thanks to mobile apps, this has been made easier than ever.
In a study, it was found that 42% of all mobile sales for leading 500 merchants were generated from mobile apps. Therefore, app store optimization has the potential to reach a large customer base and keep them engaged.
Devise Smart Social Media Strategies
Social media is much more than a platform to amplify your business’s products and services. With the number of social media users estimated to rise to 2.55 billion by 2018, making the most of this platform is your chance to acquire and engage customers.
You can strategize content for social media in ways that can answer customers’ queries. Also, posting links to relevant articles, providing prompt answers to customers’ doubts, conducting quizzes and so on can not only engage your customers but can also help build healthy relationships with them.
Additionally, social media can also provide valuable insights regarding customer behavior and preferences. Based on this, brands can include the ideas gathered to make the products aligned with the customer requirements. For example, Lenovo has been leveraging this by discovering customer trends and preferences regarding color, specifications etc. and consequently, taking the guesswork out of the development process of products.
Post Relevant Content on blogs
Your customers are going to have a lot of queries. To keep them in your business’s website for long, you need to create relevant content. However, with customers being exposed to increasing pools of data and information, it becomes quite difficult to find the answers they are looking for.
Lists, appealing infographics, guides and so on can generate quite a lot of visitors and engage them. Apart from text, visual content can be quite effective too. In fact, human brains process visual content 60,000 times faster than text.
With content being one of the major drivers of traffic, 76% of B2B marketers have said that they would produce more content this year.
Be Quick to Respond
Customer engagement is a two-way street.
While creative automated responses can generate customer engagement, there’s hardly anything personal in it. A more humanized approach would be to communicate with your customers to answer their questions.
The trick is to keep the channels of communication open. You can ask your customers for feedback, reviews and comments on a product, service or even an article that you published in your blog. When customers are vocal about their experiences with you, you will know what exactly appealed to them and what didn’t. The next step is to respond to their feedback, especially the negative ones.
Sometimes a ‘Thank you’ can go a long way in building trust with your customers.
Customer engagement can nurture the prospects for your business. If done right, these strategies can be highly effective in generating massive engagement in no time.
Images: ”Customer Engagement on tablet with graphs. Business concept. /Shutterstock.com“
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