Proven Customer Engagement Tactics You Should Be Using

Taking your business online is not all about building a website, running a blog, sending emails, and managing a few social media profiles.

You need to use these channels wisely to create a consistent and customer-oriented digital marketing strategy.

Your goal is to provide exciting, valuable, and personalized experiences at every stage of a buyer journey. You want to turn your leads into engaged customers – those that are loyal to your brand, that spread the word about it, and that can’t get enough of it.

Here are a few powerful customer engagement tactics you should be using.

Collect Customer Feedback

To engage your target audience and build stronger relationships with them, you first need to understand their needs, expectations, and preferences. And, one of the best ways to do so is to collect customer feedback across multiple channels such as softgoza:

- Ask for post-purchase feedback. This is especially important for ecommerce businesses. Once they finalize a purchase, customers will be glad to inform you about their buying experience.

- Perform a customer satisfaction survey. For example, SMS is one of the most powerful channels for collecting customer feedback.  Given that SMS have a greater open rate than email, you can use them to ask your customers to score your business or provide more specific feedback.

- Use apps like Google Alerts to monitor your brand mentions across the web. This way, you will stay on top of your customers’ discussions across different forums, Q&A sites, local business directories, etc.

- Listen to your customers on social networks. With the help of social media monitoring tools, you can track both your direct and indirect brand mentions and answer them in real time.

- Conduct customer interviews. This is a great way to build closer relationships with your customers and humanize your brand.

- Review your chatbot transcripts and recorded sales calls to identify the most common problems your customers face.

Once you collect customer feedback, don’t let it sit on your laptop and gather dust. Instead, use it to personalize user experiences and adapt your marketing efforts to their needs.

Build an Engaged Online Community

There is a notable difference between your target audience and online community. Your target audience is simply a group of people that show interest for brands and products similar to yours.

An online community is where people with similar passions, interests, and professions connect, share resources, and get relevant advice. As such, the community you build will boost user engagement on so many levels.

For starters, it will soon become an invaluable online resource, where members ask questions and get awesome answers fast. This is a place where they will come back to again and again.

Online community adds a sense of exclusivity to its members, inspiring their retention and turning them into your brand ambassadors.

For your brand, your online community is also a massive focus group. It provides you with lots of qualitative data about your customers – their true needs, roles, problems, etc.

Now, you can create an online community around any topic that makes sense for your brand and your target audience. You just need to know where to build it.

For example, LinkedIn is perfect for growing professional connections with people from similar industries. The only problem with LinkedIn is that there is they limited membership to 20,000 people.

Facebook provides multiple benefits for brands. They don’t limit the number of members, notify your members when you post something new and, above all, have the awesome “Watch Party” feature that lets your members watch videos together, in real time.

Slack is also where many brands choose to grow their vibrant online communities. It lets you create different channels your customers can join based on their preferences. Plus, it somehow makes the interactions between your members and your brand more natural and smoother.

Gamify User Experiences

Today, to keep your customers engaged, you need to make their experiences with your brand exciting, unique, and memorable. This is where gamification steps in. It can be applied to every critical customer touchpoint, making their communication with your brand simpler and more enjoyable.

Produce interactive content

Content marketing lets you bring value to your customers, position yourself as an authoritative online resource, and evoke emotions. Precisely because of that, you should create interactive content that engages your target audience. By answering questions and exploring different scenarios, your target audience will need to think actively instead of just reading a lengthy textual blog post.

So, what are the most powerful interactive content forms?

- Quizzes

- Assessments

- Polls

- Contests

- Infographics

- Interactive whitepapers and eBooks

- Interactive emails

- Live videos on social networks

Create personalized quizzes

Product exploration can be a tedious task for any online customer, especially if they’re not sure what they’re looking for. So, why not create a product recommendation quiz for them by using a solution like this? This is an amazing opportunity to find out more about your customer and, at the same time, provide them with relevant and personalized product recommendations.

Integrate AI chatbots with your website or social networks

Chatbots can also contribute a lot to the gamification of user experiences. Make your chatbot scripts natural and use plain, everyday language to keep your customers focused. Give them the opportunity to choose different answers and directly impact the flow of the story. Impeccable storytelling + real-time interactions = greater customer satisfaction.

Make customer signups interactive

You can also use gamification during the onboarding phase of a customer journey, where you want to find out how your users feel about your business. For example, simplify the customer signup process and add a progress bar during the signup to keep them focused.

Gamify your customer loyalty programs

Instead of giving out your products randomly, why not host a massive social media contest. Inspire your customers to take action in exchange for the reward. For example, this could be submitting an essay, taking a creative photo of your product or selfie, drawing something on your product packaging, answering your answer fast, asking a question – anything that makes sense for your brand.

Over to You

Only an engaged user can become your loyal customer and, ultimately, brand advocate. Precisely because of that, your customer support and digital marketing efforts need to be customer-centric.

Now, these are just some of the numerous examples of engagement tactics you can implement into every stage of a buyer journey.

 

How do you engage your customers? Add your ideas in the comments section below!