Why is customer engagement so important and how does it influence every part of your business? It’s simple. Every successful customer interaction that improves their experience is a success for your company.

Customer engagement illustrates your business’s dedication to your customers, adds value to your brand, and encourages customers to return to your business. 

In addition, engaging customers provides invaluable customer data and opportunities for growth. Despite this, studies show that businesses haven’t dedicated enough time to improve their online customer service. Almost 80 percent of companies believe that they provide excellent social media customer service. However only 8 percent of their customers would agree. 

Here are a few ways to develop your customer engagement strategies and why they work. We'll go into more detail on each below

  1. develop a plan for customer engagement
  2. establish a customer service platform
  3. leverage social media
  4. create interactive content for customers
  5. follow up on customer feedback

1. develop a plan for customer engagement

Personalized customer service is the best approach to customer satisfaction. This can be challenging for businesses if they are unable to envision their customers' experience. 

Mohanbir S. Sawhney, a clinical professor of Marketing at Kellogg School of Management, proposes that businesses develop a customer experience DNA for visualization. This process can assist businesses to help clarify what areas of their customer experience requires more personalization and investment. Before creating a new marketing strategy for your business, generate a baseline before implementing the plan. With this baseline, you are able to accurately compare the results.

2. establish a customer service platform

Why is building a customer service platform important for your brand? Communication directly influences your business’s success and can be a great tool for brand growth. Additionally, customer satisfaction is key for acquiring new customers and retaining current clients.

In fact, a report completed by Microsoft State of Global Customer Service revealed that 60 percent of customers stop doing business with a brand after one poor service experience. Creating a customer service platform provides an opportunity for customers to quickly and easily resolve any issues or concerns they may have.

How can businesses increase customer satisfaction and retain customer loyalty? Businesses or other software can supply flexibility for your business to develop a customer service platform. This way, you can ensure you're staying on top of the company’s customer needs. In addition, produce help materials so customers can readily assist themselves with simple queries. Monitor customer communications on a regular basis and develop a system to identify critical concerns and generate orderly responses. 

3. leverage social media

Create a Facebook group or another social media community for your customers to connect with and invest value into your community. Host Q&A sessions, run giveaways, or create blogs that provide an opportunity for customers to engage with your business. The end goal should be to create a dialogue with your audience. A study completed by HubSpot showed that 81 percent trust their friends and family’s advice over advice from a business. In addition, 71 percent of consumers who've had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others.

Communication — not just automatic replies, but real human communication — is vital for a successful and engaging community. Research shows that social networks are the biggest source of inspiration for consumer purchases. To illustrate this, one study showed 37 percent of consumers find purchase inspiration through social channels.

4. create interactive content for customers

Don’t just create content that promotes your products and brand. Specifically, create content that allows your community to interact with you in unique ways. Such as a question, poll, or asking expressly for feedback. Interactive content encourages customer engagement, keeps the customer’s attention, and improves customer appreciation. 

Quizzes, polls, interactive videos or tools can provide relevant data and insight into modern trends. These features should be a part of your overall social media strategy to continue engaging with customers online. Coupled with a strong engagement plan, the information you collect from your audience can be used in many ways. Of course, as you continue to create more targeted content, you will find what works best, what gets more shares, and how people are connecting. 

5. follow up on customer feedback

These are already uncertain and frustrating times, don’t further complicate it by responding late or unsuccessfully to customer’s inquiries. Social media not only provides customers with insight into your brand, but it also allows instant communication. 

Businesses should monitor their social media to consistently assist their customers. Prompt responses to posts and comments appease confused or disgruntled customers and also demonstrates the company’s dedication to your social media following. 

Approximately 50 percent of consumers reported that seeing user-generated content would increase their chances of buying products through a brand's social media. It's important to remember to always involve

your customers in your online activity.

In general, we think of the HubSpot flywheel. The wheel shows how your marketing efforts, engagement, and customer feedback are all connected and should work in tandem for your best results. As HubSpot partners, we use the wheel to guide much of what we do to help our partners.

start generating customer engagement today

Are you aiming to improve your customer engagement? It can be a journey to improve engagement. In the long run, it will greatly benefit your business to put your interactions with customers first. At energyhill, we have the tools you need to help you connect with your customer’s needs.

Contact us to assist in developing new marketing strategies to reach your business goals. Learn more about what we can do for your company, call today for a free quote or contact our team and we’ll be in touch.

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