Customer Engagement Guide
What is customer engagement? Learn the definition, why it’s important, and the benefits of increasing your customer engagement initiatives.
A customer engagement platform provides the most efficient way to implement the customer engagement strategies we’ve been discussing in previous chapters. A customer engagement app lets you optimize your clients’ journey by automating the delivery of personalized communications across multiple channels. This goes beyond the conventional customer Relationship Management (CRM) app by allowing you to actively manage your audience’s engagement with your software, not just passively track contacts with your sales team. An omnichannel customer engagement platform can let you communicate with customers across all channels, analyze client behavior, and segment message recipients for personalized communications.
In this final chapter of our guide, we’ll cover what you need to know about customer engagement platforms to put them to practical use. First, we’ll look at what a customer engagement solution is and how it differs from a CRM app. Then we’ll examine what customer engagement tools can do for your business. Finally, we’ll walk you through what to look for when choosing a customer engagement solution.
A customer engagement platform (CEP) is a digital app designed to help you optimize your client interactions by automating the delivery of personalized messages across all channels. This lets you customize messages based on variables such as where your client is in their customer journey, their purchase history, what they’re doing, what type of device they’re on, and what communication channel they’re using.
A digital engagement platform collects data about your customers from multiple channels into a single database to afford you a comprehensive analysis of client behavior at different points in their customer journey. You then can segment clients based on specific criteria to deliver more customized messages. An omnichannel customer engagement platform lets you personalize messages delivered across any channel, including:
Tailoring your messages to customers’ channel preferences, behaviors, and other characteristics helps you deliver more relevant communication that better addresses customer needs. This produces better experiences and higher satisfaction, helping convert leads into customers, nurturing long-term customer loyalty, and promoting brand advocacy. In this way, a CEP serves as a powerful tool to automate your customer engagement marketing strategy.
While customer engagement platforms may sound reminiscent of customer relationship management apps in that both utilize client data, CRMs and CEPs serve significantly different functions. Essentially, CRMs track customer data involving customer interactions with sales and marketing teams, while CEPs both track and optimize data on customer engagements with your software products. To clarify this distinction, compare the characteristics of a CRM with those of a CEP:
A CRM is a database of contacts that enables companies to collect information from interactions with leads, prospects, and customers. For example, a CRM may store contact information such as name and job title, data about contacts between leads and your company, and customer purchase history. Sales and marketing teams may use this information to schedule sales appointments, optimize presentations, and manage sales teams.
A CEP uses artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology to map out touchpoints throughout the customer journey and design personalized experiences that increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy. With the customer data analytics from a CEP, you can continuously improve customer experiences and engage your customers across all channels.
So a CRM stores and deploys contact information about interactions between customers and your sales team, whereas a CEP uses information about customer interactions with your product to track and optimize engagements. This makes CRM and CEP tools support each other rather than compete. For example, data from the lead management tools in your CRM can be used in your CEP to nurture leads that didn’t convert right away and turn them into conversions.
So what can you do with a customer engagement platform? A full-featured engagement app such as CleverTap can perform several important functions to support your customer engagement marketing strategy. These fall into two major categories:
Omnichannel engagement: Engage users across messaging touchpoints from all channels throughout your customer’s journey to reach them in the right place at the right time. Analytics and segmentation: Utilize real-time user data to create personalized experiences at precisely the right time in the customer’s journey. A best-in-class customer engagement platform such as CleverTap supports all these functions. Not all apps will deliver this full range of functionality. Perform due diligence in reviewing features when selecting a platform to meet your needs.
What can a customer engagement platform do for you? An omnichannel customer engagement app can help you automate your customer engagement strategy to achieve your engagement goals more efficiently. These include:
Revenue growth: By optimizing engagements with your customers, an engagement platform ultimately helps you better acquire and retain customers for higher revenue Increased user retention and customer lifetime value (CLM): By delivering clients better experiences, a customer engagement platform can help you retain customers, translating into more dollars spent per customer over a more extended period of time Reduced customer acquisition costs: By helping you retain more clients, a customer engagement platform also helps you reduce the amount you need to spend acquiring new customers. Increased user engagement and better customer experiences: The benefits described above stem from the optimized communications, better engagement, and better experience a customer engagement platform enables.The combined effect of these benefits makes a customer engagement platform invaluable for any company which engages customers digitally.
When selecting a customer engagement SaaS provider, a few features are especially important to consider. Concerning omnichannel communication capability, look for a platform that supports all the important channels you and your customers use. These include:
To reach users not currently in your app with pop-up messages that reach them where they’re at
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To reach customers by email with personalized messages tailored to every stage of the buyer’s journey
Learn moreConcerning analytics and segmentation, a couple of features stand out as especially important:
Using analytics to personalize your emails and segment them by user behavior multiplies the impact of your messages
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Split testing lets you optimize your user interface and user experience based on hard data, not guesswork
Learn moreWhen reviewing SaaS providers and apps, you may also wish to review case studies to see how the platform you’re considering works in action.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ve walked you through what customer engagement is, how to develop your engagement strategy, how to integrate your strategy with engagement marketing, and how a customer engagement platform can help you automate your strategy. Now it’s time to put what you’ve learned into practice.
If you’re looking for a customer engagement platform, you’re already in the right place. CleverTap offers a one-of-a-kind automated, scalable, and secure ecosystem which encompasses all the communication channels you need for effective customer engagement. CleverTap helps companies understand, segment, and engage users in real-time using context and powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning models.
Get a live demo to discover how CleverTap’s integrated analytics and engagement platform can fuel your company’s growth by driving customer retention.
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