Understanding the Importance of Creating a Customer Engagement Strategy
A successful business needs satisfied customers, preferably ones who stick around for a long time. Customer retention isn’t easy in the digital age, though. Your clients and customers search for solutions online, and your business needs to grab their attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
If you want to earn a customer’s interest (and their business), you need a customer engagement strategy. This involves using digital communication tools, like email marketing and social media, to deliver timely and relevant content to your audience.
It’s not all digital, though — there are also many ways you can deliver a warm and personalized experience to your valued customers, without busting budgets or resorting to impersonal call centers.
The best part is that you can easily create a scalable, affordable, and efficient client engagement process for your business. Just follow the advice in this guide.
What is customer engagement?
The concept of client engagement has close ties to content marketing because the goal is to strengthen the relationship you have with clients and customers by providing value.
Hubspot has a great definition of client engagement:
“Customer engagement is the process of interacting with customers through a variety of channels and strengthening your relationship with them. For many businesses, this process begins with the first interaction and extends beyond the point of purchase. Companies can engage with customers via social media, email, websites, community forums, or any other space where they're communicating or consuming content.”
Let’s take a look at what that might look like in your small business.
Customer engagement ideas to try with your business
If you want to create a client engagement strategy that improves your overall customer retention rate and boosts your bottom line, you need to think about the customer’s entire experience with your business. You need to earn their trust by showing them that you understand their most pressing needs and concerns.
If you aren’t quite sure what that process might look like in your company, here are some ideas to consider. As you read, think about how you could potentially utilize the following suggestions:
- Add a live chat feature to your website and engage with customers and potential customers in real-time.
- Deploy chatbots on your website and/or social media channels.
- Engage with customers on social media.
- Respond to every online review.
- Ask customers and clients for feedback via an online survey. Send the survey to your email list.
- Hire a virtual assistant to handle all incoming calls. These professionals get to know your business so they can provide personalized support, answer questions from existing and potential customers, and a whole lot more.
- Communicate with customers regularly via an email newsletter or blog. Here are some suggestions for things to write about to help you get started.
- Create a customer loyalty program.
There are countless ways to engage with your current and future customers, so don’t hesitate to get creative.
Why your business needs a customer engagement strategy
There are three big benefits to thoughtful customer engagement strategy:
- It improves customer loyalty in a repeatable way. Earning loyalty requires personalization, and the right strategy can guide that process in a scalable way. As your business grows, the customer experience will never suffer.
- It boosts revenue because satisfied customers return again and again (and keeping an existing customer is far less expensive than attracting new business).
- It differentiates your business from the competition. It’s not uncommon for people to have a frustrating experience with a business. That’s why they appreciate brands that are available when they have a question or need support. People are more likely to recommend those businesses to friends and family, which is great news for companies that pay attention to customer engagement.
With that in mind, I want to encourage you to think about how your business can develop its own customer engagement strategy. And if there’s any way the Intelligent Office team can support your goals, don’t hesitate to get in touch to learn more about our virtual business services.
