Customer engagement refers to a business’s constant efforts to foster positive brand sentiment, trust, and loyalty lasting beyond fleeting transactions. According to one report, fully engaged customers have a strong brand attachment and spend 23% more on a business than disengaged consumers due to a larger average basket size.
Small businesses with a virtual office London and large corporations reap multiple benefits from customer engagement, including more referrals, shorter sales cycles, invaluable product insight, and marketing efficiency. Additionally, customer engagement is cheaper than most branding efforts. Therefore, below are tips on customer-centric approaches to developing sustainable business-customer engagement strategies.
- Have A Sound And Consistent Branding Strategy
Branding incorporates a business’s identifiers like its name, symbol or logo, corporate colors, persona, and tagline, distinguishing it from other businesses. Memorable branding properties attract consumers to interact with your products, services, or digital platforms. Therefore, consistent branding is crucial in keeping your consumers engaged with your business.
A vital factor in a long-term branding strategy is incorporating a color theory in creating brand identity. Color theory is a concept from color psychology leveraging color’s impact on human behavior. According to the Color theory, individuals respond differently to different colors because of the subliminal messages that color communicates.
Therefore, consider using brand colors and identifiers that appeal to your target audience and reinforce your brand message. Include such colors across all your social media platforms, website, email marketing channels, and other communication channels.
Besides color, the brand persona is a vital branding component. A brand persona humanizes your brand, making ir relatable, so a consistent brand voice across all communication channels reminds your consumers why they love your brand.
- Offer Value Consistently
Customers feel drawn to a brand when they feel they get more value from its products and services than they pay. Therefore, going the extra mile to meet consumer needs and offer value is a vital consumer engagement strategy.
Essentially, your consumers interact with your business because it meets a need. However, you can go beyond the “salesly” marketing strategies that constantly ask consumers to “buy, buy, buy,” creating a purely transactional business-to-consumer relationship. The danger with a non-emotional consumer-business relationship is that consumers would not think twice about ditching your brand for the next big thing.
As a business owner, you can create additional value by consistently updating and implementing strategies to streamline the user experience and bolster customer satisfaction. Second, you can take up the customer education role and offer product advice and industry trend insights through channels like blogs, video tutorials, and newsletters.
Third, loyalty programs reward consumers for interacting with your brand, promoting brand engagement. Lastly, product bundles and other promotional campaigns help consumers save money, earning your brand their loyalty.
- Be Accessible
According to one study, a delay in service affects a consumer’s perception of the service delivery and could impact their purchasing behavior. Therefore, taking too long to respond to consumer queries limits your chance to interact with the consumers and forms a negative attitude towards your brand.
A second study established that 15% of consumers unfollow brands that fail to reply to consumer comments and queries. Therefore, have your customer service team stand by on all official company communication channels, from phone lines to social media messages, emails, and search engine directory comment sections.
Additionally, you can automate some communication channels using chatbots to reduce the workload for your customer service team. Lastly, communicate your availability to your consumers so they do not feel neglected when you cannot respond promptly to their messages.
- Resolve Negative Feedback
Your consumers are your primary business insight source, and listening to them helps you to improve your business strategy and meet their needs. Unfortunately, some businesses only like positive reactions and ignore or delete negative reviews.
Negative reviews may cause temporary dents on your brand image but ignoring them will cause a future PR nightmare. On the other hand, paying attention to negative reviews allows you to streamline your business activities and improve service delivery. Responding to a negative shopping experience promptly and resolving the issue could be the difference between a five-star review and a one-star review.
- Encourage Consumer Interaction
As a business, you can be proactive and encourage your consumers to interact with your brand by posting engaging, shareable content on your social media pages. You can also send prompts via newsletters, especially after a purchase, encouraging them to post reviews.
Also, posting user-generated content encourages brand loyalty by cultivating an emotional attachment to your brand. Lastly, organizing meet-and-greet events and hosting live events on social channels encourages consumers to interact with your team.
- Create Consumer Self-service Resources
Consumer engagement does not always have to be in real-time. You can create self-service resources to empower your consumers to find solutions to typical product problems on your website without your intervention. Additionally, consumer self-service resources like FAQ pages and knowledge base media increase traffic to your website, reduce bounce rates, improving your website’s search ranking.
Conclusion:
Consumer engagement strategies are easy to craft and implement but require consistency. Therefore, follow the tips above to earn your consumers’ trust and convert one-time consumers into long-term loyal customers.
