It’s almost impossible to discuss how businesses can connect with their customers without mentioning customer engagement. To keep your business up and running and profitable, you need to build a community of loyal customers — those that will stick with your brand through thick and thin.

Defining customer engagement

You can think of customer engagement as maintaining a healthy or close relationship with your customers.

Customer engagement can be measured through regular interactions with customers via emails, reaction on social media channels, testimonials and customer feedback, click-through-rate, and re-purchasing.

Think about it. What better way for customers to show loyalty than re-purchasing?

All forms of customer engagement are intended to increase brand awareness and exposure, build customers’ trust and confidence in your brand and assess your level of customer satisfaction — with a view of enhancing customer experience.

Building a customer engagement strategy?

While reaching out and connecting with new customers is an essential aspect of doing business, another aspect of business that is equally important is holding on to the ones you already have. Think customer retention.

As we mentioned earlier, customer engagement hinges on building a relationship or connecting with people who patronize your business. It comprises every means of communication between you and your customers that you can think of — phone calls, social media conversations, emails. You name them.

Having mentioned that, you need a strategy to determine effectively communicate with both existing and prospective customers. The idea is to keep them happy and satisfied at all times.

What is a customer engagement strategy?

With all we have shared so far, you should already have an idea of what a customer engagement strategy is.

Any ideas? If you say, it is a plan that is developed to increase customer satisfaction. You are right.

But that’s is not all.

Customer engagement strategy also involves building a profitable relationship and having positive communication with customers — either online or offline. An effective strategy demonstrates proactive methods of customer engagement.

It should cover how your customer service team interacts with customers when customers get in touch with you and how your company can actively engage your customer base.

We are moving on.

Why do you need a customer engagement strategy?

It was forecasted that customer experience would be the leading reason why customers will patronize businesses by the end of 2020. And that forecast is already coming to fruition.

Still on customer satisfaction, if you can deliver a spectacular customer experience and get your customers to feel good about your business, the chances are that price will no longer be an issue.

A happy customer will spread the word

The extent you will go to ensure that your customers get maximum satisfaction can also lead them to recommend you to other people — their friends and family. And that is organic campaigns that will impact your business significantly.

Think of what referrals by a satisfied customer will do for your brand. The result is priceless.

Considering how customer engagement can impact your business, you may want to have a rethink and start paying more attention to your customer engagement strategy.

How do you track customer engagement?

If you already have a strategy going on for your business, you should track the performance of your customer engagement strategy. The easiest way of telling whether your strategy is yielding results is by checking the metrics.

1. Social media interactions

One of the quickest means of telling if your customer engagement strategy is working is a spike in your social media interactions. You may begin to notice more likes and comments on your social media channels and pages.

2. Positive reviews

Suppose customers are impressed by your customer services (which is key to customer engagement). In that case, they will shower you with praises and won’t hesitate to drop a fantastic review of Google, Yelp, Facebook, and other popular platforms where people go to check reviews.

3. Increasing number of happy customers

Another quick means of assessing your customer engagement is an increase in the number of happy customers.

You can measure this via surveys. Your survey question should revolve around satisfaction levels and if they will recommend you. While you are at it, remember to keep an eye on the response rate from your survey. Higher response rates equal high engagement and vice versa.

Customer engagement strategies you should consider

You can never run out of ideas for engaging your customers. All you need to do is be creative and think outside the box.

One popular trend in customer engagement is the “tag a friend” campaign you see on social media these days. You may have participated in one of those without noticing.

How to do it.

It is pretty simple. If you deal on products, you can take a picture of the product and post it on your social media channels.

Then ask your followers to tag their friends to win the prize. Remember to communicate the start and finish date of the campaign and how the winner will be selected.

You could end the challenge when you hit a certain number of followers, and the winner will be the person with the most number of tags.

Post shout outs across your social media channels

You will be amazed at how much engagement you will get from taking a screenshot of a review or referral message and posting it on social media.

Tag the writer and thank them for the kind word and cleverly encourage others to do the same. Now, that is customer engagement at its best.

Can I use direct mail postcards?

We did say think outside the box. So, Yep! You can use direct mail postcards for customer engagement. Sending postcards to your customers is another excellent customer engagement strategy you should add to your strategy.

Postcards show that you have your customers at heart, and you value their relationship with your brand or company. You can send a postcard mailer, say once every month.

Other great customer engagement ideas for your business include starting a fan club, rewarding engagements by sending gifts to active customers or long-term, saying thank you to those who referred you and checking up on customers you haven’t heard from in a while.

We are rounding off!

There you have it. Great ideas for customer engagement and how to get your customers to keep your business on top of mind. Regarding direct mail for keeping in touch with your customers, we have all the resources and expertise to help you run a successful customer engagement campaign. Do get in touch with us soon.

Zairmail (www.zairmail.com) is the fastest and easiest way to send (real) postal mail. Give us a call anytime at 888.898.0066, we would be happy to help with your direct mail needs.