6 Ways to Boost Customer Engagement

Excellent customer engagement is one of the most important foundations a business can have. However, simply having satisfied customers is not necessarily the same thing as customer engagement. Just because a customer has bought something from you does not mean that they are engaged with your brand. But how do you deepen your relationship with customers? There are plenty of different techniques to consider, and not all will be appropriate for every type of company, but one of the most important first steps is to truly understand your customers. Here are some of the most popular ways brands are boosting customer engagement.

• Understand your customers

To understand your customer, you need to put yourself in their shoes and look at your brand and their needs from their perspective. How are your competitors failing to meet their needs, and how can you fill the gap? You may run a business, but you’re essentially humans trying to help other humans, and to do so you need to communicate as such.

• Personalize communication whenever you can

Your customers need to feel understood and valued as individuals without encroaching on their privacy, so consider creating a quiz or questionnaire which identifies their preferences or shopping and lifestyle habits. This information can then be used to ensure your customers receive personalized content.

• Stay in touch with regular email marketing

While email marketing has been in use for a while as a marketing strategy, it still proves to be one of the most effective in cultivating customer engagement. The key is often to find the right balance. Sending too few emails will have little impact while sending too many, which may irritate customers and cause them to unsubscribe. A regular newsletter with industry insights, special offers, and company updates could be a good place to start. To ensure you’re sending emails at the optimum times you may want to use an email marketing campaign management platform to maximize its impact.

• Provide them with useful content

The content you share with your customers – whether it is by email, on your blog or social media – should be useful and informative and entertaining when possible. This could be how-to guides or tutorials in written form or videos, but the key is to help customers make more of your product. You can also create content which is not directly related to your product but will encourage customers to trust in your expertise.

• Show your brand’s personality on social media

Social media is where people go to connect with friends and family, stay up to date with current events, and to find entertainment, so try not to be too serious. While it is important to maintain a professional image, there’s no harm in being relatable and lighthearted from time to time. When customers comment on your content, try to interact with them where you can to show that there are real people behind the logo.

• Use live chat on your website

A live chat feature on your website can help customers feel like they are getting a more personal and immediate service. When they have a quick question, it can be really frustrating to have to sift through pages of FAQs or Terms and Conditions and even more annoying to sit on hold to speak to a call center. When they can get a friendly and helpful response in seconds, you’re likely to have happier customers.