A Beginner’s Guide to Customer Engagement

In any business, regardless of the industry, the goal is to build a profitable enterprise in a competitive marketplace. Businesses must stand out from competitors and be the source of products and services that people choose to consume and use.

However, no business can achieve its goals unless it has new customers that it can then convert into returning customers. Businesses and customers must then maintain a level of engagement to drive loyalty. When businesses engage well with customers, those customers are much more likely to stay and even refer others to the business.

Podium is dedicated to making it easier for you to engage with your potential and existing customers. Podium excels at improving customer engagement through positive interactions, generating favorable online reviews, and communicating clearly and effectively. Moreover, Speed to lead is critical in today’s fast-paced market, and Podium offers an unparalleled advantage by ensuring businesses engage with leads within a couple of minutes—guaranteed. Podium’s AI Employee guarantees your business engages with leads within a couple of minutes; during peak hours, off hours, and every hour in between. If you are struggling to engage your customers or simply want a system for organizing your contacts, trust Podium to be your partner.

What is customer engagement?

Engaging with customers is not a new concept. However, in the digital age, the importance has only increased, and the methods have changed. What is customer engagement? Simply stated, it is the shared emotional connection between a customer and a brand. It comprises the relationship these two parties have, whether the relationship is a positive or negative one.

Another facet of engaging customers is the frequency of the customer’s participation. Customer engagement is something that can happen a single time or something that can occur sporadically or regularly. The period in which engagement takes place is critical, too, as is whether customers are reaching out to the business (and vice-versa) on their own, or whether they feel compelled to in some other way.

While customer engagement looks at how customers respond to you and how they use their own choices to interact with your organization, customer experience is a little different. This concept encompasses all the elements that make up a person’s experience with a business. This could include seeing advertisements for your business—either digitally or in print.

Another concept related to customer engagement is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is how happy a person is with your business and what you offer. This could include not only the items the customer buys but also how you interact with customers or respond to their needs.

Interestingly, a satisfied customer is not necessarily one that engages with your company. For instance, a person can be satisfied with their experience but not follow your company on Facebook, leave customer reviews, or take advantage of special offers or promotions. However, good engagement can lead to high customer satisfaction. Similarly, a highly satisfied customer may eventually feel inclined to engage more with you.

Benefits of Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is critical for both the customer journey and your success. There are many advantages to improving engagement—not only one-time interactions but repeated ones as well. The following are some common benefits you can get from these relationships:

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

It’s one thing to have a person be an occasional customer who comes around every so often or maybe even flip-flops between you and a competitor, but it’s much better to have a loyal customer. A loyal customer will stick with you through thick and thin, who loves your products and continually chooses you over other options.

Customer loyalty does even more than this, however. Some customers staunchly promote your business and brand, telling family, friends, and coworkers about you. This is an excellent way to expand your customer base and make more money.

Speed to lead wins; Podium’s AI Employee boosts lead conversion by 45%.

Higher Customer Retention and Reduced Churn

You’re happy anytime a person purchases a product from you or uses your services. But one-time customers don’t help your business grow much. Engagement with customers can lead to better customer retention. Keeping customers means they will return again and again, making them loyal and satisfied.

Good customer engagement can also help minimize customer churn or turnover. This occurs when a customer stops supporting your business and starts using another company for products and services.

Increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Long-time customers mean bigger profits for your company. When a person has a positive engagement with you, is satisfied, and is loyal, that customer is more likely to stay with you longer, sometimes throughout their lifetime. This benefits your business and its bottom line. The longer a customer buys from you, the more money you make. Chances are good, too, that lifetime customers increase how much they spend as time goes on.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing and Brand Advocacy

When customer engagement is high and effective, some of the most loyal and valuable customers will advocate for you. Some do this through word-of-mouth, while others might even do so through social media channels such as Facebook or Instagram. When someone asks them for a referral for a product or service that you offer, this loyal, engaged customer might think of your business first and highly recommend you.

Addressing Customers’ Needs

A good byproduct of effective customer engagement is that you and your business will have a better understanding of what customers are looking for. Be mindful that customers’ needs and preferences can change over time—sometimes frequently. As you seek and gather feedback—and then implement it—you can increase customer satisfaction. Good engagement helps you gain valuable insight into people’s attitudes, behaviors, and interests.

How to Develop a Customer Engagement Strategy

Whether you’re starting from scratch or seeking to revamp your tactics, it’s crucial to develop a sound strategy for engaging customers. This should not be guesswork; rather, there are tried-and-testing ways you can develop an effective customer engagement strategy and put it into practice. Here are some ideas:

1. Understand your audience and segmentation.

Every good business should know who its audience is and what they want. Your audience could include unique demographics, such as certain age ranges, gender, socioeconomics, or location. Every sector and industry has different target audiences. Though businesses within an industry (competitors) typically have the same audience, even these can have differences.

To understand your customer base, you can look at your competitors and see who they target. You can look at their successes and failures as well. Doing market research, sending out surveys, and even interviewing prospective customers can help identify and understand your audience. You can also use customer engagement metrics and KPIs and look at industry trends and the customer journey of those you are targeting.

2. Define clear goals and objectives.

Your customer engagement marketing strategy cannot be random. This is too important for you to simply try a few things or “see how it goes.” As with any business plan or endeavor, an engagement strategy needs to be well thought out, specific, and targeted. You need to decide what you hope to achieve, how you’re going to achieve it, and what the results will look like.

Make your goals measurable and relevant. Have a timeline that indicates when you will implement each step of your plan. Everyone involved in this plan should understand the goals and have a say in what the objectives are.

3. Craft personalized and valuable content.

To improve customer engagement, you need content for people to consume. Good content can hit on several important touchpoints. First, review your website. This is often the first place a potential customer will go for information about your brand. Your site should be user-friendly and easy to navigate. Importantly, it should have relevant, timely, helpful content for people to digest. You should make it fast and simple for people to see how to contact the right people, learn about your products and offerings, and understand why they should choose your business.

Always include a call to action on your site. You can also include blog posts, robust product descriptions, and company highlights and milestones. Make sure your content reflects your tone and voice.

Multimedia content can be an effective way of engaging your customers. It’s also an effective self-service tool for people to use. Use videos to talk to new customers about your business, products and services, and recent developments. You can post testimonials from current customers to improve engagement with customers you hope to gain or retain. Webinars are also effective ways to provide information and boost engagement.

Social media engagement can bolster your customer engagement efforts, too. As you understand your audience, you can decipher what platforms they use most, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or anything else. In all your work to improve content, make sure you customize it to your audience’s needs to give people personalized experiences. This can’t be a cookie-cutter approach; it needs to be focused and targeted.

4. Implement multi-channel engagement strategies.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. When it comes to customer engagement, using multiple channels is most effective. Use both social media and your website. Try email campaigns, too. Multichannel strategies can increase brand awareness and help you better connect with people.

5. Collect and analyze customer feedback.

It’s hard to know how to improve customer engagement if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong—or what you’re doing right. Ask for feedback from customers, and make it easy for them to give it. Soliciting feedback is a good form of outreach and can help make customers feel valued.

You can also gather feedback from social media by reading comments and even calculating likes and other engagement. But don’t make the mistake of simply requesting feedback and then letting it sit somewhere collecting dust. Analyze it, use it, and implement the ideas and suggestions you get.

Remember, feedback can be both positive and negative. Some customers may provide both forms, while others may give you one or the other. Don’t dismiss negative feedback either. Though some of this could be unfounded and given by someone who is emotional due to a bad experience, negative feedback can help identify areas for improvement.

6 Customer Engagement Strategies That Work

If you have struggled in the past with a customer engagement campaign, or if you are launching your business, you may not know where to begin with developing an engagement strategy. Some give you a better chance for success than others. Consider the following:

1. Implement an effective loyalty program.

Loyal customers are ones you want to keep, but even they can leave to pursue other options for goods and services. To engage them and keep them happy, you should have a brand loyalty program in place. This is a good way to give them incentives to continue to use your business and reward them for their patronage. Loyalty programs help you retain your best customers and show them how much you appreciate them.

Loyalty programs can come in many forms, but they must be customer-centric. Some businesses use a tiered points system for e-commerce activities, which rewards them based on how much they spend. Others use stamps for in-store purchases, giving customers a free item after making a certain number of purchases first. Find a program that works best for your audience.

2. Enhance customer service and support.

Customers not only want great products, but they also expect excellent customer service. You need to be responsive, helpful, and sympathetic. Your customer service team needs to be accessible through multiple channels. You should have extended hours of customer support availability, by phone, email, and chat forums.

Personalize your customer service, making all customer interactions meaningful. Lastly, look for long-term solutions to satisfy your customers rather than quick, short-term answers that will only handle the problem temporarily.

This is something Podium’s new service excels at! Podium’s conversational AI is outcome-driven – it doesn’t just respond to inbound leads it guides conversations toward a specific goal, such as a sale or booking. Unlike other AI systems that focus on providing correct responses, Podium aims to drive specific customer actions to grow your business.

3. Optimize user experience (UX) across channels.

If your user experience strategies need an overhaul, now is the time to do it. Evaluate the user experience provided by your website and social media channels and bolster them where necessary. Test their functionality to ensure customers have a positive experience. Your customers need to be able to easily interact with you on any channel, and you need to have the competency across all channels to respond to them.

4. Create engaging content and experiences.

You already learned that you need effective content to build successful customer engagement. Your content needs to be more than informative and interesting. It also needs to help customers take the next step or move to the next stage of the sales pipeline, such as making a purchase.

5. Try video and content marketing.

If your marketing campaigns and channels are too text-heavy, they can become bland and uninteresting. To improve engagement, a good strategy is to use video. You can use this visual media to talk about products and services or to encourage customers to take advantage of special offers and promotions.

6. Focus on connecting with your customers.

You engage customers best when you treat them like people rather than a number. You need to understand what they feel and what they want. Customers are more likely to respond well to this tactic and remain loyal. You can build customer relationships that last for years to come.

How to Measure Customer Engagement

Once you’ve developed a customer engagement strategy and implemented it, you want to know whether it has been effective. Fortunately, tools are available to help you measure customer data and how engaged they are. You need to look at specific metrics and KPIs to gauge whether your strategy is doing what you want it to or whether you need to make some adjustments.

Customer Retention Rate

While a customer conversion rate shows the rate at which potential customers take a desired action, your customer retention rate measures how well you keep customers over a given time. A poor rate helps you understand where you need to improve, while a good rate indicates that your strategies are working well and helps you know what your customers like.

Customer Churn Rate

A customer churn rate shows you the rate at which your customers stop doing business with you. If your rate is high, your profits could suffer, especially if you don’t replace the customers you lose. If you have a high churn rate, you need to assess how you engage with customers and improve your interactions with them.

Customer Lifetime Calue (CLV)

Customer lifetime value measures how valuable a person is to your business. It is the total worth a customer provides, not just from one purchase or another but across their entire relationship with you. It accounts for how much the customer has spent on buying your products and services and predicts how much the customer could spend on your brand in the future.

Effectively Engage Your Customer With Podium

To engage with your customers, you need the right tools and strategies. Podium is the right partner to help you achieve your initiatives attract more customers to your business and keep them with you. Using automation, technology, and innovation, Podium has the resources to help you deliver a personal touch to every customer and give them a customized experience.

Podium understands the customer lifecycle and the challenges you face in providing them with what they need. We can show you how to improve relationships and engagement so customers will continue to enjoy their interactions with you. Podium’s tools and customer engagement service help you with surveys, reviews, online chats, customer activities, notifications, payments, integrations, text marketing, and more.

Notably, Podium’s Lead Drive is an important CRM (customer relationship management) tool that allows you to manage your leads in one convenient place, even when your leads are coming in from different channels. When customers come to you or ask about your services, Lead Drive brings all these inquiries into a single inbox. This tool enables you to respond promptly and turn these leads into customers. Lead Drive enhances customer success and can thus help you bring in more revenue.

Also, beat your competition faster than ever with Podium’s AI Employee. Watch a demo today.