Customer Engagement Guide
What is customer engagement? Learn the definition, why it’s important, and the benefits of increasing your customer engagement initiatives.
Customer engagement marketing combines your customer engagement strategy with marketing tactics to transform leads into buyers and retain existing customers. It harnesses the power of marketing to achieve key customer engagement goals, such as product adoption, client retention, and brand loyalty. You can use customer engagement marketing to connect with prospects and customers at any point along their lifecycle, both before and after purchase. Combining this strategy with a customer engagement platform can automate the process of turning leads into loyal customers and brand advocates. Here we’ll show you how to incorporate this powerful approach into your customer engagement strategy. First, we’ll define just what customer engagement marketing is and how customer engagement differs from customer experience. Then we’ll look at how customer engagement marketing works in conjunction with your customer journey map. Finally, we’ll walk you through implementing this strategy using your customer engagement platform.
Customer engagement marketing promotes personalized experiences throughout the client lifecycle to transform leads into prospects and nurture existing customers. In other words, your entire customer journey becomes an opportunity for marketing to prospective and current customers by delivering satisfying engagements. Customer engagement marketing examples include:
Pre-purchase engagements, such as social media posts Engagements during the purchasing process, such as email prompts reminding customers to complete their checkout Post-purchase engagements, such as welcome emails, subscription renewal reminders, and upsell offers A customer engagement marketing strategy aims to increase product adoption, user retention, and brand loyalty. This overlaps with the goals of your client engagement strategy, effectively using marketing to achieve engagement objectives.
Many brand engagement marketing strategies incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence. These tools let you analyze customers’ behavior patterns and use this information to predict and promote future behavior. For example, you can identify which engagement experiences correlate with customer satisfaction and use this information to facilitate experiences that nurture retention while reducing churn.
Customer engagement marketing benefits customers when they receive product recommendations, promotions, and experiences that cater to their wants and pain points. This delivers an improved customer experience that is mutually beneficial for your clients and your business.
Now that we have a customer engagement marketing definition, we can contrast customer engagement with the similar-sounding phrase customer experience. There may be a little confusion between the two terms since they sound similar. But the differences are enormous:
Customer engagement is when a customer interacts with your brand. (Examples of customer engagement: opening an email, launching the app, paying a subscription, conversing with a chatbot, etc.)
A customer experience is a unified series of smaller engagements that a consumer has with your brand, all tied to the customer life cycle. Thus a new user will typically go through the onboarding experience. A regular user may be given multiple push notification promotions, or a long-term user will go through a loyalty program. These are all customer experiences: onboarding, installing, purchasing, loyalty programs, etc.
It’s critical to note that how the customer perceives your brand will depend on how well they are treated in every engagement and at every experience. The objective here is to delight customers.
Customer engagement marketing requires you to understand your customer’s typical experience throughout the customer lifecycle. You then can perform customer segmentation and identify groups of customers with common wants and pain points. This allows you to focus on crucial touchpoints along the customer journey where interaction can have a substantial impact.
You can analyze your client lifecycle using a customer journey map to identify critical touchpoints. A customer journey map is a tool for visualizing the stages of your customer lifecycle, what your customer should be experiencing at each stage to enjoy a satisfying engagement, and what steps you can take to bring about desired outcomes. A customer journey map template can help you chart the touchpoints along your customer journey.
Once your customer segments and their touchpoints are identified, you can use a customer engagement platform to plan personalized messages through their preferred channels to create an omnichannel experience. Some examples of customer engagement marketing touchpoints include:
These are just a few examples. Engagements may occur through any channel your customers use to interact with you, so you need an omnichannel marketing approach to engagement. Building an omnichannel presence lets you connect with customers no matter what means they’re using to interact with you.
Planning and executing an effective customer engagement marketing strategy is nearly impossible without the help of automation. To analyze customer touchpoints and apply segmentation, you need marketing intelligence for customer engagement. You also need automated communications tools to engage customers at the appropriate touchpoints.
This is where a customer engagement platform comes in. An engagement platform can let you automate marketing analytics and customer engagement by combining tools for analyzing and segmenting customer behavior with omnichannel communications tools for interacting with customers wherever they are. This can include push notifications, email notifications, in-app messages, SMS messages, etc. You can segment communications based on where customers are in their lifecycle and their behavior patterns. You can even use A/B split-testing to optimize your communications for more significant impact.
Using a customer engagement platform to collect data and optimize communications helps you personalize your engagements to create better customer experiences. This increases customer satisfaction, nurturing long-term loyalty and brand advocacy. In this way, an engagement platform serves as a foundation for successfully implementing your customer engagement strategy.
Customer engagement marketing delivers personalized experiences throughout a client’s life cycle to cultivate leads and nurture existing customers. This is achieved by using a customer journey map to analyze customer experience and plan segmented communications which address clients’ needs, pain points, and goals.
A customer engagement platform helps you automate this process by providing the analytics and communications tools you need to deliver personalized communications to customers throughout their journey.
To see how this works, take a moment to schedule a live product demo with our team..
Book a DemoIn our next chapter, we’ll detail what you can do with your customer engagement platform and why you need one.
