Eighty-six percent of customers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. Customers want to feel valued. They also want timely and relevant messages delivered to them. This means that customer engagement should be at the top of your priority list for your business.
Before the rise of digital marketing, brands prioritized engaging customers. That looks different now with the prominence of online audiences. This has brought its own challenges and opportunities that companies need to consider.
Instead of bombarding audiences with ads, brands have had to learn how to nurture relationships. Brands have also had to figure out how to grab their customer’s attention in an increasingly crowded market. Luckily, even though there are challenges, finding ways to engage your customers is still possible. Let’s explore some strategies and tactics you can try out.
Consider Your Customer Habits
Engaging your customers comes down to how well you know them. That means understanding their needs, obstacles, preferences, and beliefs. But it’s also about knowing how your customers go through their days and what their habits look like. If you run social media communities or paid ads, the time of day that you post can make a difference.
For instance, if you’re on Instagram, you should figure out the best time to post on Instagram. That way, you can maximize the reach of your posts and ensure that your effort in preparing quality content doesn’t go to waste.
Extensive studies have shown that the best time to post on Instagram is between 4-6 p.m. That time will look different for each platform, though.
If you want to consistently engage a large part of your following, guessing or using the data of others won’t cut it. You’ll need to track your progress and figure out how your audience responds to different times, tweaking your approach accordingly.
Start a Loyalty Program
Rewarding your best customers, those that repeatedly choose your brand over the competition. Show your appreciation so that you don’t lose them. One way to do this is through a loyalty program.
Another benefit of having a loyalty program is that it can help attract customers that are on the fence about whether to choose you or the competition. If they know they will reap rewards in the future, it can help tip the scales in your favor.
Rewarding customers also encourages them to spend more and buy more often. If you set up a system where customers can collect points, you can incentivize making more purchases. This means more sales for you with minimal extra cost.
A loyalty program can also be a great way to engage your customers. Showcasing the different ways your loyalty program rewards customers will always make a great social media post, newsletter email, or even a news announcement on your site.
You can also encourage people to become your brand ambassadors, rewarding them for every new customer they bring in. Using referral programs, Dropbox was able to become a $9 billion-dollar company, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t try to emulate the same success for your brand for customer engagement.
Gamify Interactions
Using gamification has many benefits for brands of all sizes. Using games to interact and communicate with your audience is not only great for your conversion rate but also for customer satisfaction, as people will be much more likely to respond to your offers if they feel like the offer itself is entertaining.
But how can you gamify your offers? Well, one good option is to create a coupon wheel campaign. This allows users to try their luck in getting an amazing prize or deal. Even if it’s as simple as spinning a wheel, you’d be surprised how many people will happily participate just so they can have a chance to win a better prize.
Games and contests play into people’s desires for entertainment and winning prizes, and that’s just one example of how you could use them. But the bottom line is that while your offer might be genuinely good on its own, adding a bit of excitement to the equation can provide a massive boost to your success rate.
Listen to Feedback
As we mentioned in the beginning, customer engagement is not a one-way street. Sure, you could simply bombard them with ads, and you might even achieve some results, but the truly exceptional brands understand that customer engagement is more of a conversation than an announcement.
To keep your audience interested and entertained, you must have a clear understanding of their wants and needs. The only way to gain that knowledge is by listening to what they have to say. By running surveys, conducting interviews, or even adding polls to your site, you can gain valuable and measurable insights about your audience. This will give you an idea of how to communicate with them better in the future.
If you have physical store locations, you can use secure kiosk mode to collect in-person customer surveys. What is kiosk mode you ask? Kiosk mode allows you to collect public surveys without needing to be connected to wifi, so you don’t have to worry about tech glitches. It’s a quick and easy way to gather your survey results.
At the core of engaging your customers is meeting them where they are at. You should ask questions about their challenges, concerns, and goals. Their answers will allow you to become more helpful. This will allow you to be more engaging on your online posts.
Nurture Your Community
Communication between brands and their audiences is essential for customer engagement. If you want to create a vibrant environment for people to engage online, building a community can have more powerful implications. By getting people to share opinions and discuss issues that are important to them, you will start conversations. These will be helpful to everyone while simultaneously putting your products in the spotlight.
For instance, you could ask your audience’s opinions about their favorite ways to use your products, the biggest obstacles they helped to overcome, or what they’ve recently discovered.
These types of questions can nurture valuable conversations. It creates a sense of community that shares ideas and can help each other find the best solution to their situation.
Over time, people will start coming back to your online hubs not just because of the products you sell but also because of the people they can share experiences with, and that’s a great position for a brand to be in.
Final Words
Engaging customers is an essential part of running a business. Having good customer engagement in a crowded digital world isn’t easy. But with the strategies listed above, you will have multiple ways to keep your customers interested, which can help make more sales and build lasting relationships in the process.
