Every online business claims to love its customers.
Or their only goal is to lure them and get their money?
The ecommerce landscape has dramatically changed in the last few decades. Unlike in the past when customers were more inclined towards physical and brick-and-mortar stores, today, they want to shop everything from the comfort of their homes.
The concept of building an online presence is not a choice but a necessity these days.
Now, the issue is what you offer to your customers has already been offered by hundreds of other brands. So how can you grow your business and make it stand apart from the competition?
The answer to this question is pretty simple - by better engaging with your target customers.
We have outlined this post to help you understand the basics of customer engagement marketing and how you can create customer engagement strategies to grow your business in 2023 and beyond.
What Is Customer Engagement?
Simply put, customer engagement is the process of interacting and engaging with customers using varying channels, including social media, community platforms, email, and other spaces where they're spending time and consuming content.
The idea is to provide your users with something of greater value beyond your products and services.
There are many real-life customer engagement examples. But the bottom line is, if you want to improve customer engagement, you have to focus more on strengthening your bond with your buyers instead of revenue extraction.
Customer engagement marketing is primarily a strategy that delivers relevant, tailored, and timely messages to customers.
Why is it essential to have a robust customer engagement marketing strategy in place? Because it helps you interact with your buyers at a more personal level, making them feel they're part of your brand.
Customer Engagement Statistics 2021
We have mentioned several times in our previous articles that businesses that focus on providing the best user experience tend to enjoy better retention rates and ROI.
Did you know more than 86% of customers are willing to pay more if they get a better user experience?
More than 52% of buyers abandon a website because of the poor mobile experience.
According to research, 61% of customers think the brand should offer more deals and surprise offers to improve engagement.
Over 64% of users expect a personalized engagement experience from a brand.
So you see, the way you treat your buyers matters a lot - especially when your goal is to grow your business and build long-lasting relationships.
Why Care About Customer Engagement Marketing?
The biggest benefit of customer engagement marketing is that it benefits both buyers and the brand. By keeping your customers engaged throughout their journey, you can build a loyal customer base that stays true to your brand no matter what.
Apart from that, you can also gain customer insights and valuable data through your customer engagement strategies. With this information at hand, you can make better and more informed business decisions.
Here are some other benefits of creating and implementing a customer engagement strategy for your business.
Improves Brand Experience
As discussed above, customer engagement strategies help you gain valuable customer insights and feedback. This information is critical for your business's growth and long-term success.
Builds Credibility And Trust
Another benefit of implementing a customer engagement strategy is that it helps you build a loyal customer base.
Happy customers aren't just valuable for repeat business, but they also turn into brand advocates who promote your brand and spread positivity about it wherever they go.
Improves User Experience
Being always there for your buyers at each step of their buying journey will help you establish a strong bond with them. It reduces distraction and ensures your customers have a personalized user experience tailored to their needs.
Repeat Business
Customer engagement helps to cultivate and nurture customer-brand relationships. When you provide your customers with the best user experience, they're less likely to explore products from your competitors.
Reduced Sales Cycles
More engagement means reduced sales cycles. The biggest advantage of investing in customer engagement marketing is that it ignites buyers' interest and triggers fast sales.
That goes without saying that reduced sales cycles lead to lower customer acquisition costs. And lower customer acquisition costs mean you can invest more in your current marketing activities.
Calculating Customer Engagement
In a nutshell, customer engagement is crucial for your success. But without knowing where your business stands at the moment, it wouldn't be possible for your brand to create and adjust your customer marketing strategies.
Fortunately, there are several ways you can measure customer engagement. In this section, we're going to highlight a few of them.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the most important customer engagement metric that measures the percentage of people who complete your desired action on your website.
Here, it is critical to understand that conversions on your website don't necessarily need to be in the form of revenue or sales.
Downloading an ebook, subscribing to your email list, and even clicking on your paid ads are all examples of conversions. To calculate conversions, you have to divide the total number of conversions by the total number of website visitors.
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score, also known as NPS, is another customer engagement metric that enables you to measure how likely your current customers will recommend your brand to others.
NPS is evaluated on a scale of 1-10, and brands usually conduct surveys to get those ratings.
AOV
The average amount your customer spends on your website is called AOV. You can calculate this customer engagement metric by dividing the total annual revenue by the total number of orders placed in a year.
RPR
The Repeat Purchase Rate represents the ratio of buyers who have made repeat purchases from your store within a stated period. You can easily calculate this metric by dividing the number of customers who made repeat purchases by the total number of customers.
Eight Essential Customer Engagement Strategies To Fuel Your Brand’s Growth
1. Offer Personalized User Experience
According to research, more than 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers personalized user experiences.
Whether it's about content marketing or customer service, you must ensure you provide your customers with tailored solutions.
A good way to start is to map out your buyer's journey. Carefully examine their needs and desires and the challenges they might meet.
The next step is to create buyer personas based on the information you collected in the first step.
It's also critical to keep an eye on your customer's purchase history and buying behavior before you think about making changes to your website structure or any other digital marketing strategy.
Many businesses are also leveraging automated personalization strategies. So you can also do the same to better engage with your customers.
2. Retain Your VIP Customers
Instead of spending thousands of dollars on acquiring new customers, it is better to work on customer engagement marketing to retain those buyers who actually add value to your conversion funnel.
Your current customers spend more often on your offers and recommend your brand within their social circles and family.
Come up with special deals and discounts for those VIP customers who have been associated with your brand for a long time.
Since these customers are not one-time customers, you should invest your time and other marketing resources to keep them engaged.
Types Of VIP Customers
- Liberal VIP customers: They are your most loyal customers and often shop from your brand
- Community VIP customers: While these customers do not purchase too often, they still add value to your funnel by referring your brand to other qualified leads
- Advocates: This group of customers makes an impact on your brand. They not only will spend a lot on your products but also refer your brand to others.
While you must treat all your customers with royalty, an extra effort to engage your loyal customers can go a long way.
3. Use Visual Engagement Tools
User engagement tools, such as co-browsing and annotations can be used to connect with customers and provide better customer service.
A Forbes research reveals that interactions involving co-browsing show a whopping 89.3% customer satisfaction rate.
With co-browsing, your support agents can view and connect with a user's browser. That means you can offer immediate support when you have integrated this feature into your customer support system.
Moreover, you can also assist customers in filling out an order form with the help of co-browsing, which also reduces the cart abandonment ratio on your site.
Co-browsing allows you to teach your buyers how they can do things more efficiently.
4. Encourage Your Customers To Connect With Your Brand On Social Media Channels
All of your customer engagement efforts will go down the drain if you fail to sharpen your SMM skills.
But is having a social media presence enough to drive the desired customer engagement rate? Certainly not.
Social media is already an overly saturated place. There are thousands of brands competing against each other to win customer attention. That is why it is more essential than ever to create SMM strategies that are more targeted and focused towards your target audience.
To improve customer engagement, it is critical to respond to each customer query and comment in time. Even if they complain, make sure you resolve their concerns in time to turn their bad experience into a positive one.
Apart from that, it is also important to post highly engaging and relevant content so that your customers stay engaged with your brand consistently.
5. Offer Excellent Customer Service
Having a powerful customer support system is one of the ways you can amplify your customer engagement marketing efforts.
Instead of having an automated system, it is better to have a trained live chat support team to assist your customers at each step of their journey.
Remember, every customer is different. While you cannot make all of them happy, it is essential to support your buyers and be with them whenever they need you.
When a customer gets in touch with your brand to ask a question or to complain about anything, it gives you a chance to engage with them. You can resolve their issues, offer support, suggest options, and even collect data to further engage with them.
6. Create Personalized Content
Customers prefer to engage with brands that are willing to spend their resources in offering a personalized experience.
Especially when it comes to content, customers only like to engage with websites that offer value to them.
Instead of creating generic, run-of-the-mill content, invest your time in creating content that resonates well with your target audience.
7. Introduce A Customer Loyalty Program
Do you want to make your customers feel valuable? Then consider launching a customer loyalty program.
After all, nothing is more valuable than rewarding those loyal customers who are going the extra mile to promote your products and services.
A personalized customer loyalty program will help your buyers feel they're part of your brand. It helps build an emotional connection and increases the likelihood that your customers will only consider your brand for future purchases.
While creating and launching an all-inclusive loyalty program is a painstaking task, the program itself is enough to help you track everything you may want for your future decisions.
8. Leverage Influencer Marketing
We all have our likes and dislikes. It's a human psyche that we want to follow people who we admire and love.
Collaborating with influencers and celebrities will give your brand a chance to engage with your customers regularly.
People will listen to them and follow their advice, making it easier for you to get your message across. Read our Ecommerce Influencer Marketing Guide to learn more.
Trisha Ballesteros