Are you running a business? Do you engage well with your current and prospective customers’? How often? Customer engagement is the key in order to grow your business successfully. It can make or break your business.
What is Customer Engagement?
It is a process of encouraging your customers’ to interact with your business, and having them share their experiences (this might be good or bad) that you had with, what they associate with your brand or a business.
While in the process of customer engagement, businesses should provide its customers’ with end-to-end customer experiences, valuable and personalized marketing content, and real-time interactive customer support services.
Have you ever devised any kind of plans for customer engagement, to foster the long-term and profitable customer relationships? No? Then, it’s time to maximize your business potential and drive customer engagement strategically.
Here are the three steps in the process to drive customer engagement and increase the customer lifetime value (CLV)
1. Create ‘WOW’ Experiences
In order to convert your prospects into buyers and to engage your customers’ positively with your brand, you need to deliver exceptional customer service. This can be providing quality products at reasonable costs, offering superior customer services, anticipating the needs of your customers’ and tailoring the marketing content to their interests, rewarding your most profitable customers’, and congratulating your customers’ on their birthdays and on other important occasions.
However, in today’s competitive business environment, it is not easy to win new customers’. Businesses should work hard in order to gain new customers’ as well as retain them within your brand. Looking beyond sales, businesses need to develop long-lasting customer relationships.
They need to be continuously kept in touch with your current and potential customers’, provide value to your customers’, and tailor the products and/or services according to your existing customers’ tastes, interests, and preferences. This makes them happy and satisfied, creates positive customer engagement, and builds healthy customer relationships.
2. Make Communication Easy With Your Customers
During the sales process or after post-purchase, customers’ will contact businesses for various reasons such as clearing of their doubts regarding the usage of a particular product, filing a complaint, enquiring about the latest products and/or services, checking on the product delivery status, and so on.
Additionally, businesses also need to regularly keep in touch with its customers’ for a positive customer engagement and to foster profitable customer relationships.
For an effective inflow and outflow of communications, businesses should create easy and simple communication channels. This ensures your customers’ connect with your brand during or after the sale, as well as allowing them to share their experiences.
A smooth communication channel will help businesses to keep in touch with its customers’ on a regular basis, cross-sell and up-sell the business opportunities, keep customer experiences alive and fresh, as well as ensuring the company name is remembered by customers’ for a lifetime.
3. Drive Customer Engagement Effectively
Use CRM solutions in your business to gain a complete 360-degree customer view. The CRM system provides you with a detailed overview of your existing customers’ current tastes, interests, preferences, needs, past purchases, browsing history, age, income, profession, spending habits, demographics, and so on.
You can use this information to deliver interesting, personalized, relevant, and targeted content that can inspire your audience, followers, potential and new customers’, clients, fans, blog readers, email subscribers, and social media followers. This will ignite the spark that will make them contact your business and buy your company’s products and/or services.
You can even post relevant content to your audience on social media channels. This will create a buzz around your business and with the number of likes, shares, and comments; the content will be visible to new audience groups. This will help your business grow as well as foster a better customer engagement.
Does your business end the bonding process once your prospect becomes a buyer? No? The real story begins here. Try to create memorable customer experiences as well as engage positively with your customers’. This should go beyond the sales journey.
For a positive customer engagement, implement the three-step process above to delight your customers’ with exceptional customer service and create a bridge that will connect deeper customer relationships.
This article was contributed by Emma James.
