Improve your customer engagement strategy to increase the satisfaction of your customers.
Customer engagement is essential for customers today and to your brand as well. To become a successful brand, it is essential to actively engage with customers and make it fun. As a CMO, it is important to engage with customers in a way that relates to them best and turns them into brand loyalists.
Being able to effectively engage with customers is a top priority for CMOs today but many lack the most effective strategies that enable them to achieve this. While more than 80% of CMOs believe their customer engagement strategy is effective, less than 50% of customers agree with this. There are many ways for CMOs to improve their customer engagement efforts like increasing client engagement activities in their campaigns or creating and finding more innovative ways to engage with customers on social media platforms. Before a CMO can successfully create an effective customer engagement strategy, they first need to understand what customer engagement is.
What is Customer Engagement?
When a brand connects with a customer through the various channels available to them, this is customer engagement. This connection can be a reaction, an interaction, an effect or the overall customer experience. It is important for CMOs to understand that engaging with customers is executed differently online than it is offline. There are many channels to connect with customers but with the current digital engagement in our society, CMOs have an easier time being able to connect with customers through online channels.
Customer Engagement Strategy Template
The first thing to add to your customer engagement strategy template is to make customer engagement your number one priority. It is never a bad thing to obsess over your customers, as Jeff Bezos has said a few times, it is why he owns the most profitable company on earth. Making customer engagement your number one priority will increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. It has also been proven that 80% of consumers will pay more for a product or service when a company offers them a superior customer experience.
The next most important thing to add to your strategy is to make it a necessity to humanize your brand. When customers know that you understand their needs and they can relate to your brand, they are more likely to want to engage with your brand. When customers want to engage with brands, they usually actively engage and seek out engagement opportunities on their own, rather than companies having to proactively seek out customers to engage with the brand themselves.
Another thing to add to your strategy is to personalize customer experiences. Customers don’t like to feel like they’re just another pawn caught in your sales funnel. Most people like to feel like their voice matters and that they’re one in a million. Try personalizing customer experiences with Happy Birthday emails or even use advanced algorithms to alert customers when an item they viewed recently is now on sale.
There are many other good examples of customer engagement like being snarky with your Twitter followers but only if it fits your brand. It is important to not cross the line though, as this could turn your attempt at customer engagement from fun, light, and breezy, to offensive. It is difficult for companies to recover from offensive posts and as a CMO, you have to know that nothing is ever erased from the internet and once it is posted, it will get shared all around the world.