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 revolves around the activities you use to build relationships, which lay the groundwork for client retention and repeat business revenue. It can encompass loyalty programs, feedback surveys, social media, and many other channels where you interact with customers. You can cultivate engagement strategically by taking steps to improve the quality of your customer relationships, the relevance of your communications, and the diversity of your omnichannel outreach. Cultivating engagement is not only critical to keeping customers active on your app, but also benefits your business by promoting customer loyalty, retention, and upsells. In this guide, we’ll cover the essentials of what you need to know for effective customer engagement. First, we’ll look at what customer engagement is and why it’s so important. Then we’ll show you how to build an effective engagement strategy. Next, we’ll highlight how your engagement strategy fits your marketing strategy. Finally, we’ll cover how you can use a customer engagement platform to optimize your engagement strategy.
Customer engagement, in simplest terms, is every activity and tactic your brand uses to build relationships with customers. Every touchpoint in the customer journey is where your brand communicates or impacts the customer — from onboarding email to customer support interaction, from each push notification to every promotional SMS alert. When a customer interacts with your brand, it comes in the form of an action or engagement. This can be anything from launching the app, making in-app purchases, booking flights, signing up for a monthly subscription, or other interactions between the user and your company.
The art of persuading a customer to engage with your brand or app? That’s marketing. And investing so much effort into getting the customer to engage with your app or website is vital because engagement impacts how many customers you retain and impacts growth and your bottom line. Customer engagement can be divided into offline and online customer engagement strategies. Effective digital customer engagement for online brands such as ecommerce providers depends on fast and reliable cross-channel delivery, in-stock product availability, reasonable return policies, and easily navigable websites. This differs from offline brands that emphasize customers’ ability to physically touch products, navigate stores, shop safely, and select from a wide product range. Being aware of these differences can help you develop engagement strategies appropriate for your brand and market.
Now that we have a customer engagement definition, let’s flesh it out with a few illustrations. Here are some customer engagement examples:
Brands such as credit card companies routinely reward users for purchases with discounts, bonuses, perks, and other incentives. This keeps customers engaged by rewarding engagement with tangible benefits.
Feedback surveys are invitations to engage with your product. By asking them to share their opinions, you’re involving customers and telling them that you value both their business and their input.
Social media lets you share content with customers, get their reactions, and carry on conversations. The personal quality of social media can make it a particularly engaging way to connect with customers.
A welcome message engages new customers from the start of your relationship. This encourages future engagement by starting your relationship off on the right foot.
Personalized message templates let you combine automated efficiency with individualized customization. This allows you to engage customers at scale without sacrificing a personal touch.
These are just a few ways you can engage customers digitally. Customer engagement examples can be found throughout the customer lifecycle, which you can review systematically to plan engagement opportunities. And because engagement encompasses every channel you use to interact with customers, advances in digital technology are constantly creating new opportunities for the future of customer engagement.
What can you do to increase customer engagement? A winning customer engagement strategy includes using data to understand your clients, segmenting your customers based on their intent, and taking an omnichannel approach to reach customers everywhere. These tactics should coordinate with your marketing strategy for best results, transforming it into a customer engagement marketing strategy that leverages technology to create omnichannel marketing experiences. A key piece of technology for implementing this approach is a customer engagement platform, a software app that automates your interactions with customers during crucial touchpoints in their customer journey. We’ll cover all these topics in more detail in the following chapters of this guide, where we’ll provide specific tips on how to increase customer engagement.
All the top apps in a vertical have one thing in common: a legion of fans who keep coming back to engage. Take your pick of the most heavily used apps on your mobile device, and you’ll realize how often you keep returning to Facebook or Instagram or Spotify, or Amazon. And by constantly using these apps, you’re increasing the chances of purchasing from them or continuing using their services and being monetized by them. Every engagement is an opportunity to build and strengthen your brand’s relationship with its customers.
And engaging customers is at the core of every marketing strategy. Without customer engagement, there is no delivery system for bringing your users the experiences they expect to receive from your company. No chance to delight your customers means no opportunity to retain them in the long run. Engagement equals interest. The level of engagement that a user shows in your app indicates their level of interest in your product or brand. This also increases the likelihood of monetization and higher customer lifetime value for every user who becomes a loyal fan. It’s about building a connection with your users. And positive engagement shows that they are investing time and emotion into your brand — which impacts the bottom line.
Just as you can engage customers at any point in their journey, the benefits of a good customer engagement strategy can permeate your customer relationships and your business. Some of the key benefits include:
Better customer relationships, with better engagements cultivating more loyal customers who are more likely to become brand advocates Higher customer retention and reduced churn rate, resulting from customers experiencing satisfying engagements with your product and brand Increased opportunities for cross-selling and upsell offers, created by customer satisfaction with their initial purchase and resulting engagementsThese benefits translate directly into higher revenue for your company. In a nutshell, better engagement yields higher customer lifetime value.
Customer engagement consists of your tactics to create touchpoints with customers and optimize your interactions. You can generate engagement through means such as loyalty programs, customer feedback surveys, and social media posts, to name just a few. Strategies for optimizing these engagements include analyzing client data, segmenting your customers by intent, and extending your outreach across all channels your customers are using. Integrating these strategies with your marketing and with a customer engagement platform can optimize your results.
Schedule a live product demo with our team today if you’re ready to see how a customer engagement platform looks.
Book a DemoIf you want to see what you can do with an engagement platform, our next chapter will show you the keys to building your customer engagement strategy.
