What is a customer engagement strategy?
Is the correct usage of a set of systems, tools, and resources to collect data from your target audience, in order to create a successful relationship with new potential customers or existing ones, as well as to improve and increase the customer experience and engagement with your brand.
The company must focus on building a robust engagement, with the aim of creating an emotional connection with the customer. It is not just about attracting them, but also turning them into allies and supporters of your brand, building relationships, and earning their loyalty and retention.
The customer engagement strategy covers all your company’s communication channels, both online and offline, including social media; blog; WhatsApp; chat; telephone; physical points of sale of your brand; relationship with salespeople.
Customer engagement takes place when customers contact your customer service, like and comment on your posts, but also when your company contacts them, e.g. conducting a satisfaction survey. It is the frequent interactions between a company and customers. However, it is crucial to understand it is the company that offers the different communication channels and the customers to choose the most suitable one.
It is important to offer a unique customer experience, regardless of the interaction channel. For this, the marketing, customer service, and sales departments are essential.
To put customer engagement into practice, it is necessary to understand how the consumer thinks and acts. This will facilitate the definition of the best approach to create a relationship where customers actually have involvement and engagement with your brand.
Importance of customer engagement for an ecommerce
The main goal of e-commerce should focus on serving customers and selling products. The importance of a great Customer Experience for a brand is immense, it can make or break sales.
Your site could either inspire trust and create an attractive experience for the consumer, or it could promote frustration and uncertainty. The differentiator of Customer Experience comes down to this: a proactive focus on optimizing the user experience can prevent disasters and turn underperforming e-commerce sites into sales leaders.
Tips for implementing a Customer Engagement strategy in your ecommerce
Make your brand more human
Make your marketing, advertising, and customer service efforts to be empathetic, truthful, and related to your company’s values. Consumers are more demanding, and traditional advertising methods may not have the desired effect and they may even look fake.
Therefore, the best way to emotionally connect with your audience and get them involved is to humanize your brand. The goal is to create a personal and sincere relationship while avoiding seeming too forced. In this other article, you will learn how to create a professional welcome message from scratch. Think of ways to make the company more accessible.
Involve your teams, post photos of the office, show the staff’s routine, and share professional experiences.
Invest in your customer’s experience at every touchpoint
When customers need support, they expect efficient communication through omnichannel strategies. This strategy allows the company to better understand its audience and be aware of their doubts, needs, and expectations e.g. Based on past interaction registrations, draw a more precise profile. In emBlue, we have a CRM that allows you to get to know your customer and their evolution from the first interaction made.
In an omnichannel support experience, you already have all the necessary information about your customer’s product, interaction history, and even the search terms and content viewed—regardless of the channel they use (email, chat, etc.).
Personalize your communication
One of the main ways for a company’s success is to differentiate itself from the competition. Having personalized communications is crucial, It is through them the customer can receive the attention they expect.
In this process, social media is an excellent way to explore and personalize communications. Providing quality content and distributing it through social media is the most effective way to succeed in this strategy, as they are less formal methods that allow for greater proximity to the target audience. Email is also a powerful, low-cost, and highly effective tool.
Listen to customer feedback
Another pillar of this commitment is being a good listener, by welcoming feedback. This can be a valuable source of information and says a lot about customer experiences.
The main advantage of feedback is that it allows important information to be extracted about processes (and, mainly, their failures). From there, analysts and other experienced professionals can evaluate the opinions expressed and understand how they provide valuable information to optimize processes.
In this regard, using management systems (such as CRM) helps manage the relationship, improve service, and monitor through reports processes’ results. It is useful when implementing improvements, as it is necessary to know if they will have a positive impact.
Customer Engagement is important because it provides funnel visibility to all companies, allowing them to identify customer behavior at different stages of the buying process, where different needs must be addressed. With emBlue, you will have omnichannel communication solutions that place the customer at the center of the strategy, impacting them at the right time with relevant and personalized communications.