Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement Benefits and Strategies

Customer engagement has been a marketing buzzword for years. Customer engagement can help achieve higher customer lifetime value, loyalty, and revenue.

Recognizing the benefits of effective customer engagement, many brands have begun experimenting with engagement strategies. However, only a few of them are doing it right. Want to join the ranks of those who succeed?

In this article:

• What is Customer Engagement?
• How to Implement Customer Engagement
• Essential Customer Engagement Tools
• How to Measure Customer Engagement

Let's continue and further explain how you can build a customer engagement strategy the right way.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is a brand's communication with customers through various channels. But can you call any communication customer engagement?

Does sending marketing campaigns qualify as a customer engagement tactic?

While you can count any interaction with a customer as a customer engagement activity, not all actions would meet their goal — engage customers.

Look at it this way — it’s all about offering unique experiences tailored to each customer’s needs and preferences. You can think — creating such experiences requires looking at each customer individually, and it takes significant time.

Creating tailored experiences for all your customers shouldn’t be time-consuming. But don't you worry! We will show you how it works.

How to Implement Customer Engagement

A few techniques will help you create an effective customer engagement strategy quickly. First, use data to build customer engagement strategies.

For example, you can analyze your customers’ purchase history and interactions with your page. Next, consider how to segment your customer list based on those criteria.

When you have identified patterns in your customers' behavior, it’s time to turn them into communication triggers. In practice, this can involve sending an email after a specific action or displaying an ad to those who meet specific criteria.

Let’s have a look at an example. Imagine these two customer types — the first buys your products at least once per month, and the other is just an occasional buyer.

You can’t treat both types the same — send them the same emails, show the same ads, or send in-app messages.

To get both to buy more from you and increase their brand loyalty, you must develop distinct communication strategies to address their differences.

Once you have figured out what way you want to communicate with different customer groups, it’s time to think of how you can speak to all of them as human to human. That’s the element brands often overlook, resulting in poor personalization, boring content, and zero engagement.

You can start implementing human-to-human communication by understanding what matters to different customer groups and delivering it.

For example, customers who make repeat purchases will appreciate you introducing an exclusive club for loyal customers and offering a small discount on future purchases.

Getting your employees on the same page regarding this strategy is vital. You need to establish clear communication standards and ensure everyone adheres to them, using mentoring software to streamline knowledge transfer and skill development.

Share the knowledge on these standards with new hires by launching a mentorship program and enhancing peer-to-peer learning.

Essential Customer Engagement Tools

When implementing your customer engagement strategy, certain collaboration tools can be helpful. Let’s have a quick overview of some productivity tips along with these tools that you can use immediately.

• Live chat — by setting up trigger criteria, you can display different messages to people visiting your website. You can drive the desired action by including call-to-action links or buttons—e.g., by visiting a specific offer page.
• Social media — understand which customer segments engage with your channels and tailor your communication to reflect their demographics and interests.
• Chatbots — you can automate your communication with customers using chatbots. For example, you can help them find the correct answers to questions without waiting hours for a customer support department to respond. You can do it by introducing canned responses in chatbots.
• Email — send different emails to different customer segments. Don’t launch campaigns to the entire customer list; let specific events trigger them— for example, a customer abandoning their cart or revisiting your website. Email is also the best way to send automated payment reminders for overdue invoices.
• VoIP — use VoIP to easily connect with customers who prefer traditional communication with the customer support department. VoIP is a cost-effective tool that can help minimize your virtual communication expenses, but it requires initial employee training to be effective.
• Client Portals — streamline customer interactions by providing a self-service platform for accessing account details, support tickets, and resources in one place. A well-designed customer portal enhances user experience, reduces support workload, and improves overall customer satisfaction.
• Social media inbox — customers often ask questions on Facebook or Instagram. Timely responses on those channels help build positive customer relationships and drive repeat purchases. A unified social media inbox is a powerful tool for managing customer inquiries across all social media accounts.

How to Measure Customer Engagement

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why you have to choose the right success metrics to measure the effectiveness of your customer engagement strategy.

Here is a list of metrics with short descriptions you can use for your analysis.

• Email open rate — an important metric to check if you are working on email subject line personalization. It will show you whether customers find your subject lines engaging and whether you are sending your emails to the right customer segments at the right time.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) — this metric helps understand how likely customers are to recommend your brand to their friends. It prompts customers to rate their experience with your company on a scale of 0 to 10. (Learn more: https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/customer/net-promoter-score/)
• Page visit frequency — to check this metric, access your analytics data to learn if customers have started visiting your page more frequently due to your customer engagement activities.
• Session time — helps assess whether your page content is engaging enough to keep users on your website longer. If you are experimenting with a new chatbot or live chat, session time can be a good indicator of success.
• Specific actions taken — you can drive your users to explore more options on your page and find the right one for them. When implementing different tactics and tools to achieve it, measure whether people click the button, leading to a purchase or a contact form submission.
• Customer lifetime value — helps measure whether your customers spend more with you over the course of their relationship with your brand.
• Customer satisfaction — ask customers to rate a specific interaction with your brand (e.g., their most recent contact with customer support or their recent purchase). By evaluating the overall grade and reading their additional comments, you can identify areas for improvement.
• Reviews — this is a proven way to collect qualitative customer feedback. You can also use it to build social proof of your brand online. Check out how PolicyMe uses reviews to analyze customer feedback and help future customers make informed decisions about choosing an insurance company.

Wrapping Up

Creating a successful customer engagement strategy for your small business is not a piece of cake — it doesn’t equal sending a bulk email marketing campaign to the whole list.

To build genuine customer engagement and drive positive results, personalize your communication and make it sound more human.

Stop treating customers as digits — treat them as individuals with unique preferences and needs. Communicating with your customers as you would with a friend will foster more engaged online communities and translate into more sales.

FAQ: Customer Engagement