Knowing how to engage your customers effectively is vital to your company’s success. Engaged customers spend more money, are more loyal, and are more likely to become advocates for your brand. To engage customers, it’s important to take a multichannel approach, since buyers have so many ways to interact with brands and prefer different channels. It’s also key to build a strategy that encompasses many engagement tactics, such as collecting and acting on feedback, prioritizing great customer service, and creating a loyalty or advocacy program.
Customer engagement refers to how businesses communicate and interact with their target market using various channels. Companies that do this effectively experience a host of benefits, including increased sales, better retention rates, and greater customer loyalty. It can also result in better brand recognition, thanks to more referrals and recommendations. Some suggestions for growing customer engagement include:
It’s becoming increasingly clear that harnessing the power of social media can help grow businesses’ success. Social media offers many opportunities for interaction between brands and customers. Companies can use these platforms to promote deals and sales, showcase products, interact with customers, and more.
In addition, more customers are using social media channels to ask questions or raise issues with brands. When you incorporate these channels into your customer service options, you meet these users where they are to broaden your engagement.
Soliciting and sharing online reviews is not only a great engagement activity for your existing customers, it also helps with your lead generation and sales among new customers. According to Statista, online shoppers in the U.S. expect a product to have at least 112 reviews before they would trust it. Younger consumers want even more: Ages 18-24 expect 203 reviews, ages 25-34 expect 159, and ages 35-44 expect 141.
Every brand wants its customers to renew their contract or make repeat purchases, and loyalty or rewards programs are an effective strategy to get them to do just that. By offering rewards, you show customers that you appreciate their business and give them something of value to continue buying from you. PwC research shows that 30% of consumers cite loyalty program benefits as a top reason that they patronize a business regularly.
Loyalty programs can also help generate customer advocacy by rewarding actions such as submitting referrals, leaving online reviews, sharing social media posts, and participating in case studies.
When setting up a loyalty program to engage customers, one of the first decisions is what kind of rewards you will offer. One thing is clear: Flexibility is key. Forty-three percent of consumers want to join a program that offers flexible rewards, according to PwC, while BHN research shows that 85% of consumers prefer a gift card over a specific gift. Digital gift cards and prepaid cards make an even more attractive option, since they can be delivered instantly, anywhere in the world, for free.
But even managing a loyalty program that offers digital gift cards can be a time-consuming ordeal, and you don’t want it to detract from other business-critical tasks. That’s why it’s also important to choose flexible, streamlined tools to help you. In particular, look for a digital rewards management platform that can work directly with the customer engagement software you already use. BHN Rewards, for example, offers out-of-the-box integrations with more than 25 marketing, community, and research tools, including Marketo, HubSpot, Krealinks, and Talkable. Those integrations allow you to set up specific triggers and criteria within your loyalty program so reward delivery happens automatically.
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Give Your Loyalty Reward Program a Digital Makeover
7 Essential Features to Look for in a Customer Rewards Platform
