You know you must step up your game to increase business. You know you should continue to reach out to your current customers. You know what you must do to reach potential customers. Through business experience or education, you know what you must do. You have the who, what, when, where and why.
Now you need the how and the effect!
How do you engage your customers? What effect does your customer engagement have on your business? The days of depending on yellow page ads, installing a great sign over your business and putting a smile on your face – are still essential.
We typically think about service and support rather than customer engagement. It may feel overwhelming to attract new customers and convince existing customers to spend more money. Messaging can become transactional and quickly be ignored or deleted. Building your ‘How’ and monitoring your ‘Effect’ starts with demonstrating a commitment to your customers by using engagement strategies to:
• Build your brand awareness.
• Create content based on customer history.
• Meet customers where they are in a digital world.
• Build relationships with incentives.
Engage the customer wherever they are.
If the customer finds your business in the yellow pages – that’s good. If the customer is in front of your store and they see your sign – even better. If the customer is in your store and sees your beaming smile – you are on the right path to good customer engagement.
Managing customer relationships becomes complex in the digital world. Digital engagement is vast and time-consuming. How can you communicate with multiple customers, over numerous touchpoints, using personal messages with enduring product and service recommendations?
DIY, Agency or Platform?
Marketing is all about being personal and omnipresent! When your customers are thinking about the products and services your business offers, you need to be first in their minds and make it easy to engage. Sending personalized messages is not just adding their name to the message. It’s about consistently building messages related to their personal lives relative to your products and services. You and your customer experience teams need to consistently communicate with your market.
You will need to learn the fundamentals of marketing. Select and learn to use several marketing tools. Tools will be complex and challenging to set up and use productively. You have a steep learning curve ahead if you are a do-it-yourself type.
Consider a marketing agency and harness their resources to do it for you. Agencies have experienced people and applications in place. With your input, an agency can help you through the tedious multitude of steps required to communicate with your customers.
Also, consider a customer engagement platform. Highly automated platforms tirelessly churn away day and night, weekdays and weekends communicating with customers and potential customers. Using the right toolset could be a time saver and a moneymaker.
Customer Engagement Platforms work for you.
Customer engagement platforms automate the work it takes to engage customers personally. Personalization sets customer engagement apart from other marketing tactics. Consistent personal attention can help you earn trust, loyalty and sales by delivering fast, personalized service to reach customers where their attention is. In short, a customer engagement platform will make it possible to:
• Manage, analyze and optimize your customer’s journey with your business.
• Collect customer data from multiple endpoints like POS, Facebook and your website.
• Deliver highly personalized experiences to wherever your customers hang out online.
• Gain real-time insights into how the platform is performing.
Are you ready?
Customer engagement strategy creates an offer of value beyond your products and services. Outstanding products and services attract customers; relevant content keeps them around. You can assess yourself to determine if you need a customer engagement platform by asking these six questions:
- Do you have detailed insights into your customers?
- Do you use insights to create personas that enable you to reach out to prospects?
- Do you reach out to prospects and customers using multiple touchpoints?
- Do you consistently deliver personalized messages to all your customers?
- Do you measure your efforts?
- Do you see a return on investment?
strategies focused on delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time. Customer engagement is the process of consistently interacting with customers through various touchpoints to strengthen your relationships. Develop great strategies and deliver the best tactics to optimize your return on the time and money you invest in marketing.
Strive to save time and money while increasing sales by building stronger customer relationships. Building relationships with a customer engagement platform can make a big difference with your business.
