What does “customer engagement” mean?
Customer engagement refers to how a company interacts with its customers to build a relationship and foster loyalty. It encompasses a variety of activities and strategies for attracting and retaining customers, improving the customer experience, and encouraging ongoing interaction and communication with the brand.
Some important parts of engaging customers are:
Talking to customers directly through different platforms, such as social media, email, customer service, and in person
Giving a good, smooth, and unique experience at all points of contact, like in-store, online, and through mobile apps
Asking customers for feedback and changing goods, services, or rules based on what they say
Putting in place loyalty programs that offer rewards and benefits for repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising
Getting people to interact with the business through events, forums, or social media groups
Getting happy customers to spread the word about your brand by telling others about their good experiences
Using technology like CRM systems, AI, and data analytics to learn more about how customers act and what they like and to make conversations more personal
Engaging your customers in a meaningful way makes them happier and more loyal to your brand. It also increases sales, improves the image of the brand, and gives it an edge over its competitors. This process is always going on and changes as technology and customer needs change.
Like words
- Customer involvement
- Customer participation
- Customer interaction
The Steps to Getting Customers Want to Buy
The five stages of the customer journey are a lot like the five stages of customer interaction.
Find Out
In this stage, potential customers find out about your business, products, and services through adverts, word of mouth, social media, and other channels. You may have caught their attention or they may be looking for a way to solve a problem. They don’t know much about your business or what you have to offer.
Sales and marketing tactics for the discovery stage include:
- Do things that create demand
- Getting people to know about your business through digital ads, influencer marketing, or SEO
- Getting your website ready for SEO keywords, lead gathering, and sales
- Putting together educational material that meets the needs or addresses the pain points of customers
- Putting together material at the top of the funnel that interests your ideal customers
Right now might not be the best time to sell. You have one chance to make a good first impression that makes them want to learn more about your offering.
Think about it
In this stage, your prospects are looking into both your product and similar ones that are on the market. To keep their attention at this point, you need to:
Make sure your value offer is clear (and show how it applies to them).
Make your goods stand out from others on the market.
Give buyers knowledge that is clear and compelling, and that solves their problems or answers the questions they have.
Your information should be more specific for buyers who are still thinking about buying. Content that helps buyers in the middle and bottom of the path works best at this stage. Product demos and informational material like white papers, product brochures, pricing documents, or case studies are great examples.
Shopping for
Your customers are in the buying stage when they are looking at a few options and have made up their minds. To keep their attention at this point, you need to:
- Make it simple for people to buy your products (no hidden fees or difficult checkout steps).
- Allow buyers to talk to a real person if they want to.
- Get rid of anything that is stopping people from making a buy.
Suggest products that go well with or are linked to
To get people to buy, your sales team will have to deal with objections, explain why your product is good, and quote or discuss prices and terms. To keep deals moving, you need to keep people interested with useful content and make sure your sales and onboarding processes work well.
Being loyal
Being there for your customers whenever they need you is the best way to keep them as customers. During the buying process, they should have had unique experiences that should continue while they are customers.
Here are some ways to get people to stick with you:
- Have programs that reward customers for buying from you again or subscribing for a long time.
- Excellent customer service means responding quickly to complaints and giving returns or replacements when needed.
- Ask for comments and ideas to show that you care about what they think.
- Email campaigns are a great way to let customers know about new goods, services, and deals.
- Respond to clients on review and social media sites
- Send out a newsletter just for new buyers.
Get your customers to do different things depending on the goods you sell. DTC brands need to have a strong social media plan and be ready to interact with customers in groups and in comments. For business-to-business (B2B) companies, engaging with customers will be more like a relationship, with business reviews every three months or so, as well as occasional check-ins and email marketing.
Campaigning for change
People who have reached this level of loyalty love your business, not just like it. They become brand champions, which means they tell other people about their good experiences with the brand.
To get people to speak out:
- Keep giving great customer service and one-on-one conversations.
- Use user-generated content (UGC) to your advantage by asking customers to write reviews, recommendations, or social media posts about their experiences.
- Set up a program where customers can get awards for bringing your brand to the attention of new people.
- Listen to what your customers have to say and make changes based on what they say.
- Recognize your supporters on social media or in your marketing efforts to show how much you value them.
One of the hardest skills to get good at is advocacy because you can’t really do much about it. People will not be excited about your brand on their own, but you can give them a great experience that makes them want to spread the word about your brand.
How Engaging Customers Can Help Your Business Grow
What It Means for Marketing
Marketers keep customers interested by making ads that are specific to their wants and needs. This makes people more aware of the brand, makes customers happier, and eventually brings in more money.
This is very important for several reasons:
- Do the caring.During the whole process of buying, marketing materials teach and guide potential buyers. They get closer to making the final purchase choice with every article, landing page, white paper, email, etc.
- Marketing through word of mouth.Customers who are happy with your brand are more likely to tell others about it, which can help you get new customers. People who use recommendations, user-generated content, and customer success stories in their marketing and on their website tend to get 29% more sales.
- Customer trust and keeping them.As a customer is being trained and onboarded, they read helpful material that helps them get value faster. Email campaigns with product tips, updates, and personalized notes sent after a purchase keep customers interested in your business for a long time.
What It Means for Sales
In sales, replies in the first five minutes lead to eight times more sales. But being quick to customers isn’t the only important part of engaging them. From the first meeting with the company to the end of the onboarding process, it is the sales rep’s job to give prospects and customers all the information they need to make smart buying choices.
During the Awareness stage, sales reps use an evaluation framework such as SPICED or MEDDIC to learn about their prospect’s problems, what drives them, when they want to make a decision, and how they make decisions. This makes it possible for them to have a more personalized buying experience further down the list.
As the prospect thinks about the product, social proof like case studies and customer reviews help them feel better about it. They also give sales demos, answer questions, and deal with complaints from people who are part of the decision-making process.
In the Decision stage, buyers are ready to get a price, talk about terms, and make a choice. To keep a customer interested in your product, you need to quote them quickly and correctly, get their approval, and get the contract signed quickly.
In the Post-Purchase stage, sales reps work with customer success teams to make sure that new customers are properly trained and can use the product. This builds a base for happy, loyal customers who stick with the business in part because they liked their sales person.
Why customer service is important
Long-term customer engagement is helped by the customer service team. People will leave your business in droves if your customer service team doesn’t quickly and correctly answer their questions and solve their problems.
A lot of your customers would leave if they had one bad experience with help. In fact, 73% of them say they’d leave after more than one. This is a little less strict when it comes to business-to-business software, since moving could be hard and cost millions of dollars. But it will still make them more willing to listen the next time a sales team from another company calls.
Everyone on your help team should have these three main traits:
- Be patient
- Being friendly
- Knowing about the product and what it does
When it comes to customer involvement at the support level, you need to respond and solve problems quickly, as well as actively listen and focus on finding solutions.
Plans for Getting Customers Involved
1.Using social media to connect
There are 4.95 billion social media users in the world. Over a thousand of them are almost certainly in your target group (and ICP).
One of the best ways to get customers to interact with your business is through social media marketing, which…
- asks your current and potential customers for comments.
- positively affects how people see your brand,
- and keeps the people who already use your product interested in it.
- …while also being a cheap way to get your business in front of new people.
- You can talk to people on social media by:
- Answer comments and direct messages
- Use and share user-generated material again and again
- Run polls and surveys to find out what people think.
- Q&As or live chats should be held.
You can use pay-per-click (PPC) ads to reach specific groups of people with new goods, white papers, or anything else you can think of.
2.Campaigns for email marketing
For the same reason, email marketing is another great way to connect with customers; it can be used at almost any point in the customer journey. Targeted ads can help you get new customers, keep old ones, help them after they buy, and keep them for a long time.
Campaigns for email marketing can include:
- New and updated products
- How to use your product: tips and tricks
- Informational information about your business
- Personalized deals and offers
For your prospects, they should also have content that is tailored to what they’ve been looking at and doing.
3.Programs for loyalty
A good way to keep customers coming back is to have a customer reward program. You can turn your customers into brand supporters by keeping them interested in your product and giving them rewards and praise for believing in it.
These are some ideas for things you could include in a reward program:
- Reward points for buying things or speaking out
- Special savings on future orders
- Getting new goods or features early
- News about customers and PR
- Bonuses for referring people (like a percentage fee)
For loyalty program members, you could also have their own email list where you send secret news and special content or deals. This will make them feel like they’re part of a special club.
4.Content and suggestions that are tailored to you
71% of customers want unique experiences, according to a study by McKinsey. In fact, it’s most likely 100%. Give customers what they want before they even ask for it. This is the best way to meet their needs.
But at each stage of the customer journey, personalization means a different thing.
- During discovery, content is made to fit the job, problem, or desire of each prospect.
- During consideration, you show or tell prospects about specific features that solve their problems.
- Quotes or customized contracts for different company partners are what come up during the decision.
- In the post-purchase phase, there is personalized onboarding, product usage tips, and email interaction.
- During advocacy, there are deals for loyalty program members, referral programs, and prizes for advocacy activities like testimonials and taking part in prospect reference calls
5.Polls, surveys, and other forms of customer feedback
By continuing to give customers and prospects more value where it means most to them, feedback helps you keep customers and prospects from leaving. You can also use a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey to find customers who are at risk and get a sense of how engaged your customers are generally.
Here are some ideas for questions or topics that you could ask customers in surveys:
Overall happiness with the service or product
- Easy to use and get around
- Things that could be better or extra features that they’d like to see added
- How good the customer service is
- Likelihood of telling others about the goods or service
- How they’d like to get in touch with your business (email, phone, social media, etc.)
- Demographic data to help with personalization and further grouping
6.Help with live chat
One way to start live chat help on your website is with a chatbot. Chatbots can answer and do simple jobs, giving your support team more time to work on bigger problems. There are, however, personalized conversation starters and suggestions that chatbots can use to get people more involved, such as “Hey there! Are you looking for help with X feature?”
But you should have live chat workers. When a support team meets in person, they can solve tough problems much faster than if they sent emails. Chat workers can also keep track of questions or problems that are asked for a lot of times, which they can then share with the product and marketing teams to help them make things better in the future.
7.Building a community
There are a lot of different ways to make a group. In the end, it will depend on how well you can connect with and meet the wants and interests of your customers. Setting up ways for customers to talk to each other and your business is what’s important.
Here are some ideas:
- Set up a forum or other online group site.
- – Hold events in person or online
- Set up a board of customers to give you advice.
- Get your fans to connect with each other on social media and interact with each other’s posts.
- Give your buyers a way to talk about their experiences and successes with your product.
A good community not only helps customers get along with each other, but it also lets you get useful feedback and ideas from people who actually use your product or service.
8.Things and events that happen in person
Dreamforce and INBOUND are two big shows that bring in a lot of customers and potential customers every year. But even small, local events can be great ways to meet your target crowd in real life. You could also set up a booth at bigger events in your niche or business.
Webinars are also in this group, even though they don’t happen in person. 55% of people who use them end up buying something, which makes them one of the best ways to engage customers in the consideration and buying stages (though present customers can also benefit).
9.Partnerships with influencers
- Influencer relationships could mean very different things depending on the business you’re in.
- Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands often get a star or small-influencer to promote their products.
- Scaled B2B companies pay more attention to channel sales, like resellers, system developers, and training partners, than to individual influencers.
- Executive-level partnerships are common in business-to-business startups. This is when the C-suite of one company joins the advisory board of another (or the other way around).
The most important thing about any partnership is that both people get something out of it. For instance, an influencer might tell their followers about your product in return for free use of it or a cut of the sales they bring in, plus the extra exposure.
10.Programs that teach customers
Usually, educational contacts with customers happen after the sale, but consultative selling can also be part of this group. You could teach people how to use important parts of your product or service through onboarding lessons, PDFs, webinars, or virtual trainings, for instance.
This kind of interaction not only helps people get the most out of your product or service, but it also makes your business look like an expert in its field and a useful resource for others. As customers learn more about your product or service, it can also lead to opportunities to sell them more of it.
- Advantages of Strategies That Engage Customers Well
- When customer engagement strategies work, both the company and the customers gain in many ways.
- Better customer happiness and trust
- Less employee turnover and more money from growth
- Better company recognition and reputation
- A better chance of meeting customer standards
- Better knowledge and communication between the business and its clients
- More positive customer feedback and word-of-mouth suggestions
- Customers’ opinions are very important for making products better and developing new ones.
Better separating of products
- Higher prices from buyers
- How To Tell If A Customer Is Engaged
Score of how happy the customer is
The customer happiness (CSAT) score is a common way to find out how happy your customers are. It is usually found through surveys or feedback forms. It gives customers 5 options to choose from to show how happy they are with the product or service overall. The options go from most satisfied to least satisfied.
Your CSAT score is the percentage out of 100 that you get when you add up all the yes answers and divide them by the total number of answers. You can look at this score to see how your customers are doing right now and then start asking for more comments on how to make things better.
Value for Money (NPS)
The NPS finds out how likely people are to tell others about the product or service. A poll also asks customers to rate on a scale from 0 to 10 how likely they are to tell others about the product or service.
Customers who rate a business 9 or 10 are called promoters, and customers who rate it 0–6 are called critics. To find your NPS, take the percentage of critics and subtract it from the percentage of promoters.
Actions During the Whole Customer Lifecycle
There are several ways to keep track of how customers behave over time:
- Email comes up
- Web usage (how long someone stays on the site, which pages they look at, etc.)
- History of purchases
Comments and suggestions
Use of the product (for example, clickstream statistics for SaaS companies)
If you keep track of these metrics and compare them to benchmarks or industry standards, you can see how interested your customers are at different points in their trip. You can also find people who are likely to leave and work with them to keep them from doing so.
Rate of Churn
Your loss rate shows how engaged (or not engaged) your customers are.Some turnover is normal, especially if you’ve just changed how you place yourself in the market. Over time, though, too much loss could mean that your customers aren’t interested in your product or service and are looking for something else.
Keep an eye on both the gross and net churn rates. The net churn rate takes into account downgrades, upsells, and cross-sells. Also, keep an eye on sales and customer turnover. It doesn’t matter how few people leave if they are your best-paying ones. It can still have a huge effect on your bottom line.
Rate of Retention
Churn is the opposite of retention. To go one step further, you can track net revenue retention, which is a way to see how much money you keep from current customers over time. If a lot of your customers buy more goods or services or increase how often they use your business, your revenue retention should be higher than 100%. This is the real sign of a healthy customer base.
You’d use these customer engagement measures for different things, even though retention is the opposite of churn. But retention will give you a more accurate picture of how well your customer engagement methods are working. Churn may be a sign of a problem with engagement.
What Customers Say
You can’t be sure of what buyers say, but they can tell you how they feel about your product or service and how involved they are with it.
This could be feedback:
Surveys or feedback forms are good ways to get direct feedback.
Public review sites like G2Crowd, TrustRadius, and Capterra
Posts and comments on social media
It’s just as important to get good feedback as it is to get a lot of it, so think carefully about how to create the survey and what questions to ask as follow-ups. Also, make sure you have a way to look at feedback and respond to it. This will show customers that you value their views.
Putting in place tools to engage customers
Customer interaction tools are things like customer relationship management (CRM) software, customer data platforms (CDPs), and customer success management tools. These tools help businesses keep track of and examine information about their customers, get feedback, and interact with them in a number of different ways.
Some well-known tools for keeping customers interested are
- Salesforce Customer 360
- HubSpot CRM
- SurveyMonkey
- Gainsight
- Totango
