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Customer Engagement Online Strategies for Your Business
As a business selling products or services, your aim is to make your endeavors profitable. If only customers knew about your business the second you establish it and would immediately know the value you are giving. Alright, so you set up your website and offer quality. Still, the occasional customer purchasing one item and that too by accident will not do. There has to be a more conscious way of letting yourself be known to gradually more and more people. The good news is there certainly is. It is called customer engagement strategy, which is your strategic driver to business success. So, how does this work exactly:
Science Behind Customer Engagement
Research on customer engagement describes the multiple ways that customers can influence a business and its offering. Its objective is to enhance both business performance and customer value. You can even measure customer engagement. This can be done by tracking such customer engagement activities as purchases, recommendations, and online reviews. Just make sure you use analytics to their fullest. Based on the emotional bond customers establish with sellers, four types of relationships emerge. This so-called customer engagement cycle comprises transactional, delighted, and loyal customers as well as fans. It is important to understand that most customers go through all four stages. Depending on the specific strategies you employ, you can help people transition from one stage to the next.
Four Types of Customers
Transactional customers are sensitive to price and thus prone to deals. Any product for them is simply a commodity, which they want to purchase at the lowest price. This may result in easily switching from one company to another. It is crucial that you ensure overall satisfaction for such customers to help them move to the next stage. The delighted customer is highly satisfied with their purchase, which triggers positive emotions. However, their transactions are relatively infrequent. With that said, delighted customers tend to use word-of-mouth advertising addressing the people in their social network. A loyal customer’s loyalty to a company is for rational reasons instead of emotional ones. Therefore, while they tend to purchase from you, they are unlikely to recommend your products to others. Once your brand has fans, you have true customer engagement, where your customers trust you and are passionate about what you are selling.
Role of Social Media
The opportunities social media holds in building a close relationship with your customers are vast. Just think about the interactiveness that it makes possible. Conversations happen between the business and the customer or the potential customer and another potential customer. By involving people outside your business in content generation and value creation, you have called in the big guns. Through social media, organizations can form customer communities that interactively collaborate to share, spread, inform, advertise, promote, and praise. How does it sound if it is not your website selling your product directly, but an ardent delighted customer of yours in a Facebook comment?
Concrete Steps
So far so good, but what can you do right now to boost customer engagement? Firstly, make sure you have omnichannel engagement strategies in place and you have a clear plan on how you wish to keep in touch with people over mobile apps and social media platforms. Ask yourself what you can do to create the greatest customer experience that could lead to customer engagement. Listen to both praises and criticisms. Have some incentives, gifts, and rewards prepared that you can bust out from time to time. Pay attention to such things as preparing your fedex shipping label right. This may sound trivial, but the package delivered in a timely fashion to the correct address does make a positive impression. Gamification is a creative visual tool to foster participation in an online campaign, for example. Finally, the more personalized a service, the more your customers will feel that you care about them and their specific needs.
Overall, a successful customer engagement strategy draws on the very idea of customer-centeredness. Offering quality, your expectation to attract more and more customers to your brand is reasonable. Understanding the science behind customer engagement and the types of relationships it comprises may help in laying down a specific strategy. This is necessary if you plan to take full advantage of all social media platforms. The concrete steps to take are many, and you better have a clear plan on how to implement them.
Meet The Author:
Nick Andrew Rojas is a business consultant turned journalist who loves working with small and medium-sized companies. He has contributed to many publications such as Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, and Yahoo. In his spare time, he hangs out at the beach with his dog Presto.
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