Customer Engagement Guide
What is customer engagement? Learn the definition, why it’s important, and the benefits of increasing your customer engagement initiatives.
A good customer engagement strategy can improve the frequency and quality of your client interactions to promote greater satisfaction. This enables higher customer retention, long-term loyalty, and brand promotion, increasing your sales and revenue. A winning engagement strategy needs to be measurable so you can track your results and make effective adjustments. You can achieve this by using client data to understand your customers, segment them by intent, and engage in omnichannel interactions which reach your clients where they’re at. Doing this successfully requires a balance of technological efficiency and human empathy so that your digital engagements with customers feel relevant.
Here we’ll show you the keys to building an effective customer engagement strategy. First, we’ll clarify just what a customer engagement strategy is. Then we’ll cover what the goals of a customer engagement program are and how you measure success. Next, we’ll cover three keys to designing a winning engagement strategy. Finally, we’ll look at the critical role of empathy in promoting customer engagement.
A customer engagement strategy is a plan for optimizing client interactions to deliver satisfying experiences. This promotes customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, and brand advocacy, increasing customer lifetime value and raising revenue. 
A customer engagement strategy can encompass all customer interactions, including before, during, and after purchase. Depending on the business model involved, these engagements can be digital or in-person. For companies with a business model which emphasizes ecommerce, customer engagement strategy revolves around digital engagement strategies to optimize engagements through communication channels such as in-app messages, social media, live chat, and email.
Engagement strategy examples can be found across a wide range of industries. For example, a software app provider may send a welcome email to new customers as a user engagement strategy. Another familiar engagement strategy example is a credit card, hotel, and travel reward program. Customer feedback surveys are a third common method of soliciting improved customer engagement.
Customer engagement strategies promote several important business goals. Some of the most significant benefits of improved customer engagement include:
Customers who enjoy more satisfying engagement experiences are more likely to remain long-term clients and less likely to switch to competitors.
Satisfying engagements make customers more likely to spread positive word-of-mouth reviews, build brand reputation, and attract new customers.
Better customer engagement promotes higher sales revenue by increasing customer retention and attracting new customers.
These goals support critical business objectives, making an effective customer engagement strategy a high priority for success-minded companies.
To ensure that you meet your customer engagement goals, it is best to quantify them using customer engagement metrics. You can define engagement key performance indicators for any customer experience you wish to track. For example, you can monitor:
How many of your app’s users actually use your product (product stickiness) How often do users log into your app, and how long do they stay Which features do they use most often when they log in (feature stickiness)Tracking these types of metrics allows you to identify customer behavior patterns you can use to manage and monetize engagement. You can use a customer engagement platform with built-in behavior analytics tools to track engagement and identify user trends.
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty now. Below are actual implementation tactics for getting customers to engage with your brand.
You can’t begin to build relationships with customers unless you know them. And in digital marketing, this “knowing” entails using the data from their preferences and their in-app behavior to gain insight into their wants and needs.
A customer engagement platform can help you track behavior and glean insight into how each customer wants to be marketed. If the platform has artificial intelligence tools, these can further aid you in choosing the right content to serve up to each customer so that it matches the data in the system. Result: relevant communication that matches a customer’s preferences.
For example, your engagement platform data may indicate that customers frequently use a particular feature when they log in. This may suggest that a link to a blog post with more information on this product feature would be relevant to that customer, or it could be used to offer a relevant upsell.
If you annoy your customers with offers that they neither like nor need, you’re sending them irrelevant content that will lead them to uninstall your app. Guaranteed.
This is why segmentation is key to providing a better customer experience and increasing engagement. When you slice your audience into more granular segments, you can target them with messages that match their behavior within your app, their personal preferences, and even their purchase intent.
With the right retention tool, this can be done automatically using RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis to release your marketers from the grunt work of segmentation. RFM allows you to group customers by those most likely to purchase, those most likely to churn, and many more immediately actionable groupings. This way, you know exactly what the next campaign for each segment should be. For example, customers who exhibit a risk of churning are probably not a good market for an upsell but are more likely to need special attention to salvage their accounts. On the other hand, a highly active user with high engagement may be a prime candidate for an upsell offer.
If there’s one thing that’s true about consumers today, they aren’t stuck to just one device or channel. They’re on it all. If your brand wants to engage them, you’ve got to have an omnichannel approach to your campaigns.
Because it’s not just content that you need to personalize for your audience, it’s communication channels as well. Do they want to connect on Whatsapp, or do they prefer emails? Do they respond to your in-app notifications, or do they prefer SMS updates?
Omnichannel strategies allow you to deliver a seamless brand experience with messaging campaigns that connect across mobile, web, and within your app.
Use the behavior analytics tools on your customer engagement platform to identify which channels your customers favor. Tailor your engagement channels accordingly.
Companies that excel at customer engagement attain higher CLV and lower acquisition costs, resulting in long-term, capital-efficient business growth.
But what’s the secret to truly effective engagement? And how do all the successful brands do it? The secret boils down to two things: having empathy and building relationships.
It is not about annoying them with irrelevant marketing messages but sending them notifications or emails that align with their values, personality, and psychographics.
It is not about randomly “spamming” them with offers but carefully sending customers the discounts on products and services they actually want.
Engagement, after all, is persuading customers to take action on your content. And they won’t engage unless they find your experiences worthwhile.
Your customer engagement strategy is your plan for optimizing client interactions throughout your customer lifecycle and across all communication channels. A well-designed plan can help you increase customer loyalty, improve your brand reputation, and grow your sales revenue. An effective strategy should use measurable key performance indicators to quantify your goals and track progress. Keys to an effective plan include using data to understand your customers, segmenting customers by their intent, and using an omnichannel approach to engage your customers everywhere. These strategies help cultivate empathy by showing customers that you’re sensitive to their needs and making an effort to deliver what they want.
The CleverTap customer engagement platform can help you automate your engagement strategy by making it easy for you to collect and analyze customer data and follow up with appropriate engagements.
Schedule a live product demo with our team if you want to see how it works.
Book a DemoTo optimize your customer engagement strategy, you should integrate it with your marketing strategy. We’ll cover customer engagement marketing in our next chapter.
