From raving recommendations to lifelong loyalty, effective customer engagement reaps major rewards.
But what is it that spurs such engagement? How can you effectively capture customer attention in such a busy world?
In this guide, we’ll cover some of the best customer engagement strategies to try in 2023.
Customer engagement is the approach you take to build a relationship with your customers. It covers every interaction from that very first discovery. Customer engagement is all about using each customer interaction as an opportunity to build trust, increase loyalty, and deliver an amazing customer experience.
Your customers want to feel like they matter. 73% of people say customer experience is a top deciding factor when it comes to buying from a business, which means that customer engagement should be a priority if you want to attract and retain your audience.
Customer engagement works, but it isn’t just a quick and easy tactic to add to your marketing strategy. It should be part of your brand’s overall way of doing business. Consider how you can switch to a customer-centric approach, decide which customer engagement strategies will work best, then track your customer engagement metrics to see what’s working.
We know why customer engagement is something we should be working on, but what does that look like in real life? With so many interactions across different touch points, it’s hard to know where to start.
Get inspired to take action with these fresh customer engagement strategies and ideas. Each gives you another way to create better, more meaningful interactions with your customers.
We all know how valuable a strong omnichannel social media presence can be, but these interactions can feel temporary and surface-level. Starting an online community gives you a chance to have deeper conversations with your target audience and build a fun place for your customers to spend time.
Online communities are wonderful as they act as a place for both existing customers to engage with you and a way for potential customers to discover you. Building customer relationships is often easier in this more casual, relaxed environment, so you can truly get to know your customers on an individual level.
Think about which online engagement platform works best — a tool like Circle is great for bringing people together, or you could consider Discord if you want something more casual or familiar for your audience. From there, decide what you want your community to be — the conversations you want to have, what value you can offer, and how you can encourage people to stay active. Once you’re happy with your plans, launch your online community and nurture it as it grows.
Gone are the days where someone needs to phone up one of your support agents for help with everything. Today, our customers are comfortable with self-service options right across the customer journey — like resource centers, knowledge bases, and video guides. Build these and not only will your customers be empowered, but you'll save your support team valuable time, too.
Create a resource center filled with useful content that helps people take action, discover features, solve problems, and learn something new. Not only does this give you a chance to show off the best of your product or service, but it’s a smart way to drive customer engagement too.
Take a look at Userpilot’s knowledge base for a great example of how to do this. The product growth platform gives its customers not only useful “how to” guides and feature information, but some great examples of use cases too.
Be intentional with your content marketing efforts and look for ways to transform how-to guides and onboarding documents into engaging pieces that help build customer relationships. Create content that empowers your customer, makes them feel like part of your community, and guides them towards customer success.
Virtual events are one of the best ways to improve customer engagement. Building relationships with clients can happen over email and support tickets, but real time interaction can go a long way towards establishing or strengthening a bond.
Think about which types of virtual events would work best for your brand, who you’d invite, and what your focus would be. You could host a welcome party or virtual happy hour for new customers, or a lunch and learn or webinar to help brand advocates learn more about a new product launch.
In the last few years, virtual events have really taken off. This means you need to do more than before to stand out and create an impressive experience for your customers. Use Hoppier to help you host an incredible virtual event, by offering a virtual credit card that your guests can spend on drinks, snacks, lunch, or even supplies for an interactive hybrid event. It’s a fun talking point, and another easy way to ramp up customer engagement before, during, and after your event.
We love virtual events, but you can’t host them constantly. For a great way to engage with your customers on a more regular basis, try adding a chatbot to your website.
Chatbots have had a bad reputation in the past for being awkward and unlike any conversation you’d have with a human. That’s all changed, and it’s now easy to build a chatbot workflow that feels closer to a conversation with another person. Use these changes to your advantage to build a new way for people to ask simple questions, discover the right content, and get information at speed thanks to automation.
Over at Honeybook, they use Intercom to run their chatbot and live chat feature. As you ask a question, the chatbot surfaces potential suggested articles and workflows based on the words you’ve used. If nothing’s quite right, you can connect with a support team member instead.
Hiring more customer support staff can have a huge impact on your bottom line. With an effective chatbot running, you can reduce some of the demands on your support team — so they can focus on serving and delighting your customers in a more meaningful way.
Prioritize making your chatbot feel human, natural, and easy to interact with, and you have another channel you can use to create positive interactions with your customers.
We’re all individuals, and that’s what we want to feel like when it comes to interactions with brands. Customer expectations are focused on this, with 52% of people expecting promotions and offers to always be personalized. Make use of the data you hold to create individual experiences, offers, and promotions that feel personal and unique.
People don’t want to be targeted by generic digital marketing campaigns and irrelevant offers. For a better way to build relationships and drive future sales, consider a discount code for an upcoming birthday, or a promotional gift to say thank you for a milestone anniversary.
Before you can run personalized offers, you first need the data. Use customer surveys, quizzes, polls, and other customer data collection strategies to build a picture of who your customers are, what they like, how they shop, and what their customer needs are. With this valuable data, you can then create unique experiences and upsell opportunities that surprise, delight, and motivate your customers to take action.
A great way to increase customer engagement is to give people a reason to interact with you. Loyalty and incentive programs reward your customers for taking specific actions, which you can use as a way to create more opportunities for relationship building.
Give your loyal customers the chance to earn points, discounts, or VIP exclusives with an impressive customer loyalty program. Create a sales incentives program that rewards the interactions and actions that matter most to you — whether that’s sharing a social media competition, sending referrals, or being active in your online community.
By taking part in your loyalty program, you’ll automatically create more engaged customers. The goal is to use this as a way to authentically create, grow, and maintain positive relationships with your customers. Look at this as a way to reward your most engaged customers to say thank you for staying with you.
Your customer support team is at the forefront of creating engaging experiences for customers. One wrong move and you could see a customer churn, but with the right moves you can foster brand loyalty through positive interactions with your team. Give your team more than just confidence by enabling and empowering them to make decisions in favor of customers.
Ask your team members to listen to customer feedback and make customer satisfaction a priority. Allow them to deviate from the script to provide excellent service, or to use their initiative to solve a problem for a customer. These personal interactions help build trust and loyalty, and can support customer retention as there’s a sense of feeling valued and appreciated.
A great way to empower your customer support team is with Hoppier. Use our virtual credit cards as thank you or customer appreciation gifts that your support team can assign when the moment feels right. It’s an inexpensive yet thoughtful way to deliver more than just good customer service, and create moments that feel personal.
There’s more to your customers than buying your product or service. They’re unique individuals with their own passions, interests, and causes they care about. Look to tap into their charitable side and bring them along with you for the journey by publicly supporting causes and initiatives that matter.
Encourage your customers to join you to celebrate awareness days, give back to charity, and help raise funds by buying products or earning referral points. Use social media and word of mouth to raise awareness of your campaign, which also helps with building brand awareness outside your existing customer base.
Razor brand Billie brings its customers on board by challenging the “pink tax” that’s often applied to womens’ products. Customers can share a referral link with friends, and in return they both get a coupon to spend at the company — all while highlighting a valuable and relevant cause.
Supporting charitable causes, volunteering, and raising awareness of causes that matter is a great way to create an emotional connection with your audience. It’s a chance to do good in the world — and earn valuable trust and loyalty from your customers too.
We all want super engaged customers, but to get that kind of attention we need to invest in rewarding them for it. With Hoppier, you can make sending customer appreciation gifts easier than before. In just a few clicks you can create a program, assign virtual credit cards, and send these mini digital gifts on their way to your loyal customers.
To get started, create a program within your dashboard. Next, give your campaign a name that’s tailored to the type — whether it’s part of a rewards program or a thank you gift. Customize your card design with your brand colors and logo, and add a fun emoji that matches the mood.
Once you’re happy with the way your program looks and feels, you can customize the spending balance, when the balance can be spent, and your available vendors. Narrow the vendor list to celebrate brand partners or create a theme, or leave it open so that your customers can redeem their balance anywhere they like.
There are lots of creative ways you can use Hoppier virtual cards to express gratitude, show appreciation, and encourage future customer engagement. Surprise your customers with one-off virtual gifts for their birthday or another celebratory milestone.
Empower your support team to send one to a customer that’s been through a tough time, or patiently waited for a problem to be fixed. Use virtual gift cards as a redemption reward for taking part in your loyalty program. There’s no shortage of ideas you could come up with to bring some fun and reward to your customer recognition program.
Engaged customers are happier, more loyal, and more likely to spend than disengaged ones. Take some time to figure out your customer engagement goals, then use some of the ideas on this list to create a personalized customer engagement strategy that helps you reach them — and delights your customers along the way.
If you want to bring customer engagement to your virtual events, you’ll love our webinar on how to create memorable and engaging virtual events. It’s packed with tips from event experts on how you can transform your virtual events from ordinary to extraordinary.
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
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