Table of Contents
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is the process of developing connections and consistently interacting with customers. When you interact and engage with customers, then it would build loyalty among them, and they would promote and buy your product. Most importantly, you should provide a unique customer experience to your customers.
Technology has made it easier to start your e-commerce business. Since starting an online business is easier; therefore, it has become crowded. All of these factors have contributed to the importance of customers’ engagement. The primary purpose of any business is to acquire and convert into a loyal customer, but it wouldn’t be possible without customer engagement.
Customer Engagement Model
Customer engagement is a step by step process, and it works at different levels, the purpose is to find out the reasons behind the customer’s decision-making process. What motives them and how many people are involved in the process. Answers to these questions would help businesses and companies to understand customers’ journey. Here are some of the steps involved in the customer engagement model that you can use for your business.
- Reach. Reaching out to your target audience means knowing them and finding out their needs and wants. You employ different techniques like surveys, interviews, webinars, etc. to know your target customers’ desires.
- Acquire. Acquiring your customers means that you find out why they would interest in your product/service. You send out material in the form of audio/video messages as an ice breaker to overcome this issue.
- Engage. As the word implies, you communicate with customers at this stage, answer their questions, try to convert them into becoming actual customers.
- Retain. Once you have closed the deal, your job isn’t over yet. Now, you have to maintain customers interest and keep them interested in your product/service. For this purpose, you should allocate a separate person that deals with customer relationship issues.
Things to remember. It would help if you made the customer engagement model flexible and straightforward so that you could fit this model in the customer’s journey of different businesses. Your primary focus should be on increasing the customers’ experience by adding some value. Your system should be able to support the customer engagement model, and it shouldn’t disregard its interaction process.
Customer Engagement Vs Customer Experience (CX)
Customer experience, whatever step a company takes like advertisements, billboards, and other techniques, it’s for the customers. The point is to put yourself into the customers’ shoes and to understand how it feels for the customers.
Customer engagement is the process where they have a customer, and the company sees them as active participants rather than non-respondents. The purpose of customer engagement is to notice customer’s reactions when they come across the company’s marketing content, and whether they promote and refer the company’s product or not.
Customer Engagement Vs Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction and customer engagement may seem similar and complementary to each other, but they have some differences. For instance, it’s highly probable that satisfied customers won’t interact and communicate, and they also won’t participate in the company’s loyalty programs.
Customer engagement, on the other hand, is when a customer engages in conversation before actually purchasing the product. Customer satisfaction is the outcome of customer engagement, and CS comes after experiencing and using the product.
Why is Customer Engagement Important?
According to a study conducted by Gallup, it showed that the revenue of the business increases by 23% when you engage with customers. If a business doesn’t follow any customers’ engagement strategy, then the company is losing the opportunity of building and developing a relationship with customers. Since all the businesses activities are different, therefore, they follow different strategies to increase engagement with customers.
Benefits of Customer Engagement
Some of the benefits of customer engagement are as follows;
Customer Retention
When you provide a better experience to your customer, then you’ll have an opportunity to connect with your audience. It’s because you’re providing the features and functions that customers want, and they’ll keep using your product.
For instance, many people complain about Facebook’s data privacy and other settings, but they keep on using Facebook. It’s because the features Facebook offers, no other platform provides.
Sales Cycle
One of the crucial benefits of customer engagement is that it makes the sales cycle of the product shorter. When your customer relations department is active, then the customer would receive the information instantly, rather than waiting for it. When customers have sufficient information about what they need, then they’ll make the purchase decision quickly.
Marketing Efficiency
When you study and analyze the modern marketing strategies, then you’d realize that they all have the same purpose, and that’s to increase customer engagement. Some conventional marketing strategies fail to understand the customer’s interests. When your marketing strategy is in the right direction of customer engagement, then it would give you better results.
Referrals
When customers have a better experience, then they would refer your product to their social circle. An accurate and honest recommendation is far more effective than the company’s paid advertisements. If you attach some reward to the referral program, then it would increase at a higher rate.
Differentiation
In the business world, all the companies and brands are in the race of trying to bring something unique for customers. They engage with the customer to get a better insight into this purpose. The end goal is to achieve the maximum market share.
Types of Customer Engagement
Some of the different types of customer engagement are as follow;
Contextual Engagement
Marketers are usually more interested in contextual engagement because it helps them to understand the behavior of target customers. When they do, they can use such information for their brand in terms of location, age, history, and profiling. The customers have a better experience as a result.
Engagement of Convenience
The Dash Button of Amazon is an excellent example of the engagement of convenience. The purpose of this button is to attach the necessary household items. For instance, if you’re running low on certain household products, press the dash button, and the Amazon would deliver you the products. Customers like this button, because it’s facilitating them by making the shopping easier.
Emotional Engagement
According to a study, 99% of the purchase decisions of the customers are based on the emotional engagement of customers. It could be in the form of favorite colors, sentence, messaging style, or design when customers could relate to the product, and they may buy it.
Social Engagement
If your context is useful and it’s engaging the audience by facilitating them with easiness, and it has an emotional side to it as well. If a product performs better on social media, then it will succeed.
Customer Engagement Examples
Some of the prominent examples of customer engagement are as follow;
Coca Cola
In 2014, Coca-Cola Company started a campaign with the hashtag phrase #ShareACoke plus the name of the person; it became so successful that it started trending on social media.
Starbucks
Starbucks launched a scheme of providing a free tour of product development to its loyal customer, that how they prepare the final product for the customers. The purpose was to make loyal customers feel special.
Netflix
Netflix uses a special algorithm that relies on the engagement and interaction with customers; it stores your comments, likes, and shares, and predicts your future behaviors based on the previous choices you make.
Conclusion
After studying different types and benefits of customer engagement, we have concluded that it’s a very successful strategy for your business. If you’re able to increase customer engagement, then it would predict your products’ success.
