Customer Engagement: Definition, Initiation and Improvement

Nowadays, brands are tend to offer more customized and value based ways of interactions more than ever. Audiences are the subject of thousands of messages which underline the keen interest of companies on them and carry the sense of care. The product on its own become to stay in the background and values come to the forefront. Why did brands change their course of interaction into a more personal and value-based way rather than presenting certain benefits of their products? Actually, the answer is quite simple. Brands have been recognizing that customer loyalty brings consistent conversions. Highly engaged customers bring 23% more revenue than new customers to the company. Thus, the emotional connection between brands and customers matters.

This arises new questions as well. Brands are trying to find out how to turn their new customers into loyal customers who will their advocates in future or which steps they should follow when they build their customer engagement strategy and what works best for their unique brand identity. Hereby, we intend to discuss the concept of customer engagement up to some extend which can provide a meaningful understanding for marketing professionals and business owners. Let’s go through the many definitions you may have already seen on internet to create a clear and solid understanding.

What Is Customer Engagement?

The concept of customer engagement is defined by marketing professionals and teams in many different ways which brings some common aspects eventually. For instance, Paul Greenberg defines customer engagement with the following sentence: “Customer engagement is the ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.”; while Eric Peterson says: “Customer engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.” Lastly there is another description made by The Smile Team which can provide further clarification: “Customer engagement is the degree and depth of brand-focused interactions a customer chooses to perform.” So, what do we have here? Firstly, customer engagement is based on interaction which qualifies and meets the set of goals of the company. As we can understand from the descriptions above, customer engagement interactions are brand-focused and they are only valid when customers prefer to perform. To create a successful customer engagement strategy, we should have a clear understanding on what makes this interactions enriched customer experience and why customers prefer to take action on some of them while ignoring others. In this context, let’s go through the steps which can help you to build a solid customer engagement strategy and how to increase it.

Building and Enriching A Customer Engagement Strategy

As mentioned above, the final goal of customer engagement strategy is creating advocates by involving your customers in real time. It could be tricky to measure it though; due to the fact that it is a qualitative data which requires time and an eye for detail to understand. Nonetheless, it is a business metric which shouldn’t be ignored at all.

To identify your customer engagement strategy and measure it, here are 6 easy steps to start with:

Create a frame for the customer journey: It all starts with knowing your customers. Firstly, where do they come from? Do they use mobile devices or desktop? Do you have more qualified customers who come from referral sites? Does the paid channels bring the customers you wish for? By finding the channels where your engaged customers come from, you can define the point of your focus or by understanding the common characteristics of these group of people, you can apply the same strategy to the other channels.

Know where your customers interact with you: Your customers already interact with you in some ways. You can identify the strength and weaknesses of your platforms by evaluating your existing foundation. This way, you can enrich the customers experience in existing channels and create new ones by seeing business opportunities.

Keep an eye on behavioral analytics: When it comes to customer engagement strategy, there is nothing more insightful than real-time behavior data. Which pages do your customers specifically visit? How much time do they spend in this pages? Are they stuck in somewhere and does it affect customer journey in a bad way? Is there any pattern they follow while they are exploring your platform? Behavioral analytics gives all these insights to you in a visualized, connected way and it is pretty cool! This way, you can understand needs of your customers better and improve your platform in accordance to this. This is one of the most important things that leads your customer engagement strategy to loyalty and advocacy.

Personalized services: Make your customers feel special by offering customized services in accordance to their very specific demands. The quality of your customer support service plays a big role here. Customers needs to be acknowledged, assured and lastly feel the person they walk with is capable to relate with them. Generic messages do not work anymore and beyond that, they cause several disputes due to the fact that no one believes that they can get help from someone who does not relate with them. Thus, personalized service based on care and solution will certainly help you to create loyal and engaged audiences.

Observe whether your customer takes action on your offers: Create customized offers when your customers take certain actions like adding to the basket. Encourage them to take their chance. In this time, observe whether your offers are actionable or not and create even more customized offers for your specific target audiences.

Take feedback: Customer feedback is the treasure of your engagement strategy. When your company provides such unique experiences, customers are more likely to evaluate your business for helping you to improve further. So go along with your customer and in return, they will appreciate your efforts by joining your surveys. You can also use reward method to encourage your customers to join your evaluations. By giving, small gifts like discount cards or loyalty points, you can reach huge data set of customer feedbacks.

Increase Your Customer Engagement Even Further

As mentioned above, knowing your customers is key to initiate your engagement strategy. However, it is not something that you can cover at once, it is a journey as long as your business runs. Before applying following following enriching experiences, keep in mind that you should always create more niche audiences to execute your strategy at its best.

Firstly, the first impression matters; thus, the way you go live is important. Don’t make a site for yourself, but customers. Think about easing their navigation and appealing to their taste. Be proactive and eager to find out where you can improve. Then practice behavior-based messaging. Support feedback is important; however you can also use your in-app and website data to create relevant content to specific target groups. Lastly, learn from your mistakes. Disputes are as valuable as positive feedbacks; maybe even more valuable! Use honest critics to prevents similar scenarios.

All in all, a good customer engagement strategy which matches with your brand identity leads you to create long-term advocates. By defining your audiences, following the steps mentioned and by always looking forward to improve, you can gain emotionally connected and loyal customers whose actions qualify set of goals of your brand.

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