In the era of the Internet and social media, consumers have the ability to gather information, compare, and question their peers before deciding to make a purchase. To stand out, brands must do everything possible to create a relationship that is mutually beneficial with their audience through the implementation of a customer engagement strategy! Trustt explains everything you need to know about customer engagement and provides you with 3 foolproof techniques to boost their engagement.
Customer Engagement: Definition
Customer engagement refers to the ability of customers to be involved in their relationship with your brand.
This engagement can take several forms:
- Regular purchase of your products or services,
- Word-of-mouth and recommendations of your offer to their circle,
- Relaying your brand and sharing your publications on various digital channels, especially on social media,
- Detailed positive reviews on your website’s product pages,
- Positive feedback to your surveys and satisfaction questionnaires,
- Participation in your events whether online such as masterclasses or contests, or in-person such as pop-up stores, inaugurations, etc.
Why is Implementing a Customer Engagement Strategy Essential to Boost Your Brand?
An engaged customer doesn’t hesitate to share their satisfaction and give their opinion online! They feel like they belong to a group and share your brand’s values.
The more your customers interact with your brand, like and comment on your publications and communications, the more they are considered active, and thus engaged with your brand. These customers become actors in the relationship with your brand.
They are satisfied, loyal, and have no intention of switching to competing brands.
The feedback from these engaged customers is qualitative and has a direct influence on your prospects, their purchasing decisions, and ultimately on your sales and revenue.
They transition from simple consumers to brand ambassadors on the web and among their circles.
As a brand, you have everything to gain by implementing a customer engagement strategy to obtain an engaged community!
The implementation of a customer engagement strategy translates into planning a set of marketing strategies and actions aimed at increasing interactions with customers and prospects in order to build personalized and lasting relationships.
In a customer engagement strategy, the key performance indicator to monitor is the engagement rate that measures the intensity and frequency of exchanges shared with your customers.
CRM is the tool to integrate into your customer engagement strategy. This customer relationship management software is essential for finding, capturing, and retaining your customers. It allows you to centralize all customer data and information from all your communication channels (online and offline).
How to Engage Your Customers Sustainably and Retain Them?
Discover 3 effective strategies to boost your customers’ engagement towards your brand:
1 – Listening, the Key to Customer Engagement
In implementing a customer engagement strategy, listening must be an absolute priority!
Indeed, customer engagement only works if you know your customers inside out, and for that, you need to listen to them!
Thus, active customer listening allows you to:
- Analyze the behavior of your clientele, identify their expectations and needs in order to offer them the best possible experience;
- Promote customer satisfaction in order to generate engagement and loyalty from your customers.
Listening to your customers is a process that consists of collecting, observing, and analyzing opinions and feedback from your customers regarding your company or brand, your products or services, and their purchasing or consumption experience.
To promote customer listening, several marketing tools and supports are at your disposal: social networks, ambassador programs, customer review modules, customer service…
To create this close and exchange relationship between your brand and your customers, remember to be available for your audience, to always respond to their questions, to thank your customers for their participation and to highlight them to show your appreciation. It’s a give-and-take relationship.
Finally, to truly engage your customers and retain them long-term, it’s not enough to just listen to them, but to always transform their feedback and opinions into areas for improvement: of the customer journey, customer relationship, and your product or service offering!
Trustt is a SaaS software that helps brands collect proprietary data from their own community through the implementation of an ambassador program directly on their website.
By implementing this ambassador program, brands can gather a multitude of detailed and sincere reviews, allowing them to better understand their target audience, continuously optimize their products and the customer journey to offer the best possible experience to their customers, engage them, and retain them in the long term.
Discover Trustt
Trustt is a digital marketing solution that allows you to create a virtuous circle between your brand and your consumers.2 – The Customer Satisfaction Survey, an Excellent Lever for Customer Engagement
The satisfaction questionnaire to be sent after a purchase via customer email aims to gather the opinion and feelings of your customers about the products and services offered by your company.
It’s essential for customer engagement because it allows you to:
- Collect valuable information to better understand your customers, their needs and expectations, their purchase motivations, their habits, etc.
- Identify product optimizations to refine your offer;
- Know the reasons for dissatisfaction to optimize your service and customer relationship;
- Defuse potential bad buzz in case of dissatisfaction and limit customer loss;
- Continuously optimize your commercial strategy if results are negative (understand which products are popular and which are less so…);
- Obtain precise data on your business sector;
- Value your customers’ opinions, by showing them that they matter to your brand and putting them at the center of your customer strategy;
- Continuously improve the experience throughout the customer journey.
It’s by regularly measuring your customers’ satisfaction with the aim of continuously improving it that you will manage to engage them by creating a relationship of trust with your brand, ultimately to retain them long-term and convert them into true brand ambassadors, spokespeople for your values on the web, social networks, and in their surroundings!
3 – Co-creation Stimulates Engagement
Rather than launching your products on the market and imposing them on your customers, ask them what they really need!
Co-creation allows you to come up with ideas for new products, or to find technical solutions to manufacturing questions.
Co-creation allows your customers to express themselves occasionally and to think with you over the long term. It’s an excellent vector for engagement.
Consumers nowadays are looking for precisely this kind of interaction with brands to engage long-term. They want to be active, to be solicited, and to give their opinions.
By implementing co-creation actions, you engage consumers with you on each stage of a product’s design cycle. This allows you to:
- Reduce the risk of discrepancy between the final product and your customers’ expectations;
- Launch products on the market that are truly anticipated;
- Ensure the success of your products thanks to an already convinced audience;
- Engage and retain your customers.
So what are you waiting for to implement a customer engagement strategy and propel your business?
