Create a Winning Customer Engagement Strategy
Last updated on January 5, 2024
A customer engagement strategy is vital to increasing customer loyalty and driving revenue. It will help you build relationships with existing customers. You’ll also attract new ones and create more opportunities for repeat purchases. Ultimately, it raises customer satisfaction with your brand.
But it’s not something you create on a whim. You must plan, think creatively, and understand your customers to build your strategy.
In this article, we’ll share five components of a customer engagement strategy. First, let’s talk about what a customer engagement strategy is and how it benefits your company.
In This Article:
What Is a Customer Engagement Strategy?
A customer engagement strategy outlines how a business creates relationships with customers and increases loyalty. The goal of this strategy is simple. You want to produce enjoyable experiences when interacting with your company and its products or services.
A successful customer engagement strategy fosters increased satisfaction, better retention rates, and more referrals, amplifying word-of-mouth marketing for the business.
You can use customer engagement strategies to increase your company’s value. This isn’t strictly in a monetary sense. You increase value by building relationships with customers. When a customer is engaged, they become a loyal customer. This engagement doesn’t happen at a single moment or just once. It occurs throughout the customer journey.
What Are the Benefits of Customer Engagement?
There are many benefits to a customer engagement strategy. We’ll touch on three big-picture benefits.
A solid customer engagement strategy produces:
- Meaningful connections with customers
- Customer feedback
- Increased loyalty over time
These benefits build upon each other. You won’t have customer loyalty without meaningful connections. And without feedback, you won’t be able to improve, which stunts growth and customer loyalty.
In the end, the benefit of loyalty is your highest goal. Why? Loyalty’s main benefit is the opportunity to upsell. It’s much easier to sell extra features, products, or services to a customer who’s already familiar with your business. Selling to someone who has never done business with you takes more time, money, and effort.
Adding upsells to your business’s offerings can significantly increase revenue by 10-30%. On average, upselling generates 70-95% of a company’s revenue.
Upselling reduces costs and saves time, helping you to make a profit quicker. You can use consumer data and trends to test product efficiency and find great upsell opportunities. For example, you might suggest products that are usually bought together or purchased by similar customers at a higher price.
5 Components of an Effective Customer Engagement Strategy
1. Personalization
Personalization is a powerful customer engagement strategy. It allows businesses to create tailored experiences for their customers.
You can use personalization in various ways, such as providing segmented product recommendations, customized website designs, creating a personalized quote, or offering personalized discounts and promotions. By using personalization, you’ll increase customer engagement and loyalty, as well as improve user experience.
Amazon Prime does an excellent job of personalizing the user experience with its “matching” feature. They capture customer intent which helps them recommend what a user would probably watch based on prior viewing.
Personalization is becoming more popular among businesses of all sizes due to its ability to drive sales and boost customer retention rates. If you aren’t already, start exploring how you can use personalization to stay competitive in today’s market.
2. Omnichannel Commnication
An omnichannel customer engagement strategy gives customers a unified and consistent experience as they move from one channel to another. By blending the channels and managing them from a single platform, businesses can provide an uninterrupted transition for their customers.
This approach allows customers to easily navigate their journey and receive a seamless experience across all communication platforms. This helps ensure customers aren’t receiving mixed messages, leading to confusion.
Barnes and Noble’s omnichannel strategy allows customers to access products through their Nook app, mobile or desktop website, or in their brick-and-mortar stores. Wherever you are, you get the same experience.
3. Value-based Messaging
Value-based messaging helps to communicate the benefits of the business to customers. It focuses on why the product or service matters rather than the features it offers.
Value-based messaging differentiates your brand from competitors to create an emotional connection with your customers. Your customers will understand why they should choose you over other options.
Take HelloFresh, for example. HelloFresh prepares pre-portioned ingredients and recipes that get delivered to your door. They do a fantastic job of value-based, benefit-centered messaging. They don’t just have great ingredients for a healthy lifestyle. They “save you time and money.” Bingo. That benefit gets people to shop there rather than in grocery stores.
Value-based messaging also helps companies build trust with their customers by providing them with honest information about what they can expect from the product or service. This makes it easier for customers to make informed decisions and increases customer loyalty in the long run.
4. Customer Service and Support
Custom Image; Source of Statistic
If you want to build and maintain quality relationships with customers, you need to invest in customer service and support. Customers crave top-notch service. And you should want to give it. If you do, it fuels customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention.
In a competitive marketplace, customer service and support have become more significant, not less. Apple’s customer service is world-renown. Yes, customers enjoy the stellar products that Apple makes. But what keeps customers loyal year after year is that Apple goes above and beyond to make customers happy.
Another consideration is how to leverage technology for customer service and support. AI-powered chatbots, automated responses, and virtual assistants offer solutions for low-level and immediate customer needs. It’ll save you time and money in the customer service department.
5. Gather and Analyze Feedback
The final component of a winning customer engagement strategy is an important but often overlooked one. Regularly gather and analyze customer feedback to improve and adjust your engagement plan. If you do this, you’ll understand your customers better, identify areas for improvement, and develop strategies to increase customer satisfaction.
You can take the information from the feedback to develop strategies tailored to the individual customer’s needs (see #1 in this list). Analyzing customer feedback also helps you identify patterns and trends that could show common pain points.
Gathering feedback doesn’t have to be complicated. Gather feedback in email or app surveys or listen to customer voicemails. It can also be as simple as a post-purchase star-rating request, like on Amazon.
Another great example is Hootsuite, a social media management company. Hootsuite initially packed their landing pages with images and text that highlighted a lot of their main functions. However, when the team at Hootsuite took a look at their homepage and their overall conversion rate, they knew something was not right.
They used a feedback tool to gather data from customers posing one simple question: Do you think there is enough information on the page to understand our product?
When the data came in, it was evident that customers were not understanding the product well enough which is what led the team to completely change their landing page copy. This eventually led to an increase in their conversion rate.
The key is to make sure that once you have gathered your feedback, it does not just sit there on your laptop. Using a customer feedback software to gather and analyze feedback for you could be a good way to make sure your customers are actually being heard.
The right insights for your product could be what makes a massive change in the way things are run and potentially increase profits for you as well.
Lumoa’s customer feedback software gathers and analyzes feedback for you. Lumoa’s Insights product allows you to see exactly what customers say affects their experience. Get started with our Insights tool today.
The key is to make sure that once you have gathered your feedback, it does not just sit there on your laptop. Using a customer feedback software to gather and analyze feedback for you could be a good way to make sure your customers are actually being heard.
The right insights for your product could be what makes a massive change in the way things are run and potentially increase profits for your company as well.
Wrapping Up
Building a winning customer engagement plan is the difference between a growing company and (eventually) going out of business. Use these five components to be well on your way to seeing increased loyalty and revenue.
Lumoa can help you manage every aspect of your customer experience strategy. We’ll help you get an overview of how your customers experience their journey and receive actionable insights so you can take the critical next steps. Sign up for your free trial today.
