Today, most consumers don’t buy a product or service at first glance. They take time to consider the product features and even make cross-comparisons with other brands.
However, each day, consumers are bombarded with promotional emails, ads, and sales calls from companies that all promise to fix their problems. Your customers’ consideration stage gets disrupted by all this noise, affecting your genuine communication efforts.
Building an effective customer engagement strategy is what you need to cut through all the noise and close that sale. This article will explain why is customer engagement important and how to harness its benefits for your company.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is the process of interacting with customers and building a relationship with them. This can be accomplished through multiple platforms via marketing campaigns, new content posted on websites, and social media outreach, among other methods.
Why is Customer Engagement Important?
Fostering a positive relationship with your customers helps promote your brand, generate more sales, and provide a memorable experience for your customer on a more personal level.
While the primary incentive of building a relationship with your customers will be to make money initially, having customers who trust your business will keep them around for the long term, making them repeat customers.
Another great outcome is that loyal customers spread the word to other people. When customers feel that they are treated positively, it makes it much more likely they will go out of their way to help promote your business socially through word-of-mouth or on third-party websites and forums.
Your sales team can also reap benefits from proactive customer engagement because more customer interactions mean more opportunities to develop and refine customer insights. Those customer insights can inform marketing decisions and sales processes.
How to Improve Customer Engagement
There are several different ways to create customer engagement. These are some of the common areas that companies invest their efforts into:
- Customer services
- Buying experience (online and offline)
- Website navigation
- Social media outreach
Nurture Your Customers At Every Step
When it comes to improving your communications with your customers, your customer engagement strategy should heavily consider what existing and potential customers need throughout their purchase journey.
Clearly define your target audience’s purchase journey and add relevant touchpoints for customer engagement. Each touchpoint should provide helpful, personalized information that supports customers’ evolving needs throughout the funnel.
Maintain Customer Interest
While you should know your own company’s brand, mission, and values, you must also be aware of the overall goals and motivating factors of your customer base. By always keeping your customer’s needs and priorities in mind, you can ensure that your engagement strategy does not go astray.
Create content that is relevant, as well as resourceful, by gathering data and qualitative customer feedback. You’ll be able to more accurately understand the customer’s perspective and curate personalized customer experiences that keep them coming back for more.
Get Creative with Customer Engagement
Think carefully and strategically about the marketing content and the outreach channels you’ll use because it may affect how your customer interactions are perceived. You need to create a positive brand perception and boost engagement across all channels.
Nowadays, almost everybody has access to some kind of social media platform to interact with the world. Consider expanding your outreach and marketing campaigns to newer platforms, especially if you’re trying to appeal to a younger demographic.
However, be mindful of the type of messages you write on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook because this can make or break customer loyalty and trust fast.
Build Customer Trust
Arguably, the greatest challenge of customer engagement is continuously providing and maintaining a high level of expertise, transparency, quality, and customer satisfaction. Customers who connect with your brand will treat each product or service advertisement as a promise.
Your customer’s trust must be earned, so helping to solve their complaints and issues is the fastest way to instill confidence that your company has their best interests in mind. This makes it much easier to sell to them in the future.
Your engagement strategy may include collecting regular feedback from customers on their experience with your products and services. When receiving such feedback, respond thoughtfully, publicly post that feedback, and offer resources for support.
Boost Sales Success with Customer Engagement
Building trust between your sales team and customers is also important. As you strive to improve connections, customer engagement must always remain an essential component when moving through the sales funnel.
Remember that sales interactions shouldn’t feel forced. No matter which outreach channel your team chooses, you should maintain a friendly and helpful persona when interacting with customers.
More and more marketers are seeing better results from delivering timely, personalized content that creates qualified leads. The sales team should also aim to continue to nurture and engage buyers to establish long-term business relationships and increase close rates.
With insights gathered from customer interactions, your sales teams should develop thoughtful messaging and choose content that supports customers in narrowing down their options.
Conclusion
Don’t underestimate the power of good customer engagement! By regularly engaging with and nurturing your customers, your brand will remain top-of-mind and further strengthen the customers’ connection to your company.
Benefits of creating and improving customer engagement:
- Boosts brand experience
- Increases customer loyalty and trust
- Provides valuable customer feedback and insight
- Improves customer experience
- Increases sales funnel velocity
Get in touch with our experts at elfo. Offering versatile tools like elfoMAP, we aim to simplify marketing challenges and improve the overall customer experience for our clients.
