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Back in 2020, I wrote an article titled Customer Engagement or Customer Entrapment? In it, I questioned if brands are truly engaging with customers, or if they are “simply” entrapping them. Seems like a weird way to think of what some brands are doing, but check out the article, and you’ll have a better sense of my thought process.
Today, though, I’d like to explore customer engagement a bit more. What is it? Why is it important? What are some ways that brands can engage customers? And what foundational elements must be in place before developing and executing your customer engagement strategy?
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is all about the ongoing interactions between a customer and a brand – across a variety of channels and media – that build and strengthen the relationship over time. It involves creating meaningful experiences that keep customers interested, involved, and connected to the brand. Effective customer engagement leads to increased customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy.
To add a bit more detail and call out specifics in that definition, customer engagement includes:
- Interaction: The various touchpoints and channels through which customers interact with the brand.
- Experience: The overall perception and emotional connection a customer has with the brand, influenced by the quality of products or services, customer service, and brand values.
- Participation: Encouraging customers to actively participate in the brand community.
- Value: Providing valuable content, products, services, and experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations and help them solve problems.
- Loyalty and Advocacy: Cultivating a strong, positive relationship that encourages customers to return, make repeat purchases, and recommend the brand to others.
Why Is It Important?
It may seem obvious, given the details behind the definition, but customer engagement is important for brands for a variety of reasons: increased customer loyalty, higher customer lifetime value, positive word of mouth, brand differentiation and competitive advantage, better customer insights from customer feedback, greater ability to innovate, reduced churn, and sustainable growth.
For customers, more and better engagement with brands leads to greater satisfaction, an emotional connection that fosters a sense of community and belonging, better service and support, value received, consistency and reliability, access to innovative solutions, ability to provide feedback and influence product development, and access to information that allows them to make more-informed decisions.
How Can Brands Engage Customers?
Some simple strategies that aid brands in building strong relationships and fostering loyalty include:
- Personalize communications and tailor messages and offers to the individual.
- Engage with customers on social media; respond to messages and comments promptly.
- Create valuable and informative content that addresses customer needs and interests.
- Implement loyalty programs that reward repeat customers.
- Ask for feedback through surveys and online forms.
- Act on feedback customers provide.
- Provide timely and helpful support.
- Send newsletters with updates, offers, and useful information.
- Create forums or groups where customers can share their experiences and interact with or help other customers.
- Host webinars or live sessions where you can provide value to customers.
Those seem pretty straightforward, like the basics. Every brand, at a minimum, should be doing these things.
What if you want to put forth a bit more effort? What does a heavier lift look like?
Are There More-ADVANCED Engagement Strategies?
There are more-detailed and comprehensive strategies for engaging customers that go beyond the simpler tactics mentioned above. These “heavier-lifting” strategies often require more resources and planning but can lead to deeper, more meaningful engagement. Here are a few examples.
- Use customer data to personal the experience across all channels, ensuring a seamless and consistent experience across all touchpoints.
- Map the customer journey from end to end, and identify key moments of truth that must be optimized for better engagement and satisfaction.
- Use AI to predict and prescribe a highly-personalized experience that ensures customers achieve value and solve the problems they are trying to solve.
- Use predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and behaviors, allowing for proactive engagement.
- Use big data and analytics to understand customer behaviors and preferences, and make data-driven decisions to optimize the experience.
- Develop customer success teams to proactively ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes with your products and services.
- Implement a comprehensive voice of the customer program to continuously gather feedback and make improvements.
- Collaborate with influencers to reach new audiences and build credibility.
These strategies drive deeper customer engagement than the simple strategies outlined in the previous section. But they cannot happen without some critical basics in place.
What Foundational Elements Are Required?
Before developing or executing your customer engagement strategy, it’s essential to have several critical foundational elements in place. These elements ensure that your strategy is built on a solid foundation, allowing for effective and sustainable engagement efforts. The key foundational elements include:
- Design and foster a customer-centric culture that puts customers’ best interests at the heart of all it does. Train employees on what that means and empower them to live it.
- Define the goals and objectives for your customer engagement strategy, and align the goals with your business objectives.
- Outline your success metrics that will be used to understand if/when your strategy has succeeded.
- Understand your customers and develop personas: who are your customers? what are their preferences and behaviors? what jobs are they trying to do?
- Ensure you have the right systems in place to collect, store, and analyze customer data. Update and maintain your customer profiles.
- Map the end-to-end customer journey to identify key touchpoints and moments of truth. Understand the different stages of the customer lifecycle and how customers interact with brands at each stage.
- Establish tools and mechanisms for collecting and analyzing customer feedback via a variety of listening posts.
- Define your brand’s mission, values, identity, voice, and unique selling proposition. Ensure that your messaging is in line with each of those, that it is consistent across channels, and that it resonates with each persona.
- Know your customers’ preferred channels of communication and engagement. Make sure that these channels are integrated and that you provide a seamless experience.
- Ensure you have the right data, integrated technology, and infrastructure to support your engagement strategies.
- Develop a content strategy that provides valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain customers and that aligns with their needs at various stages of their journeys.
- Allocate sufficient resources to plan, implement, and maintain your customer engagement strategies. Train employees to execute the strategy effectively.
By ensuring these foundational elements are in place first, you create a strong base upon which to build and execute successful customer engagement strategies, ensuring that they are effective, scalable, and aligned with your business goals.
In Closing
In today’s competitive market, effective customer engagement is more than a mere tactic — it’s a fundamental business strategy that drives loyalty, satisfaction, and growth. By establishing a solid foundation through understanding your customer base, setting clear objectives, and leveraging the right tools and technologies, businesses can create meaningful interactions that resonate with their audience.
Advanced strategies such as robust data management, omnichannel engagement, and personalized experience can take your efforts to the next level, ensuring that your brand remains relevant and compelling. Remember, the key to successful customer engagement lies in continuous improvement, active listening, and genuine commitment to your customers’ needs.
As you implement these strategies, you’ll not only enhance your customer relationships but also pave the way for long-term success and sustainable growth.
Every contact we have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. We have to be great every time or we’ll lose them. ~ Kevin Stirtz