Customer engagement is top of mind for good reason. Marketers know that the more you interact with your customers, the more opportunities you have to build your relationship. And strong relationships lead to higher retention rates, repeat business, and, ultimately, higher profits. To increase customer engagement, you must look for ways to interact with your customers across all possible touchpoints and then optimize those interactions.
When deciding to purchase your product or service, the journey that customers go through is typically split into five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, Advocacy. Savvy organizations optimize their engagement with customers at every one of these stages, which make up what’s called the customer lifecycle.
READ MORE: 15 Ideas for Using Rewards to Optimize the Entire Customer Journey
Making sure your communications are written in your brand’s voice from the get-go will help you keep your customers engaged throughout the customer lifecycle. In fact, a consistent, authentic brand voice ensures your customer engagement efforts are more memorable, which leads to more engagement.
Anytime you need to communicate with customers, think about customer engagement. Taking a customer-centric approach in your communications is key. Making your customers feel seen and heard is what ultimately leads to high levels of customer satisfaction — and repeat engagement.
Here are some channels you can use for customer engagement:
The answer to this depends on your audience, goals, and budget for each channel. In your email program, for example, you can ask your customers how often they like to receive messages from you. For social media, it’s a good idea to follow the best practices for each channel.
For feedback surveys and reviews, be sure to respond to comments as quickly as possible. Whenever you ask for customer feedback, no response at all can hurt future engagement and purchases, especially for those customers who report having bad experiences.
As you experiment, you’ll discover on which channels your customers prefer to engage with you. In general, older customers prefer phone and email, while younger ones prefer text and social media.
Building a customer rewards program that will improve your engagement and advocacy can be a large undertaking, but with the right tools, you can succeed and streamline, all at the same time. Many engagement programs can be initiated through the technology you already use, including your CRM or marketing automation systems like Marketo and HubSpot. A community platform such as Krealinks or Verint may also be useful. Then, by incorporating rewards directly into these initiatives, you can ramp up quickly and encourage ongoing participation.
The BHN Rewards platform can help with out-of-the-box integrations with more than 25 marketing, survey, and community platforms. This allows you to easily manage campaigns, automate reward delivery, and track the success of your customer engagement programs.
Related Topics:
7 Essential Features to Look for in a Customer Rewards Platform
Customer Communities: The Loyalty Rewards Card of the B2B World
