Forget talking at your customers and expecting them to buy. That doesn’t work these days.
You get real value by creating an experience that feels personal and rewarding. Engagement marketing aims to achieve just that. It’s a customer-focused approach with clear benefits for brand awareness and the bottom line.
Despite engagement marketing's seemingly conspicuous nature, implementation and strategy aren’t as clear-cut. However, your business can build a winning customer engagement platform with a blend of creativity and understanding of customer needs and wants.
For the novice or curious marketer, we’ve compiled a guide to discuss the principles and execution of alluring and appealing customer engagement marketing strategies.
Successful customer engagement marketing creates a two-way conversation with your customer base. Instead of generic ads and email campaigns, you personalize marketing efforts, making them unique and interesting while building customer relationships from the initial interaction.
The key to excellent customer engagement marketing strategies is to realize potential customer touchpoints, analyze customer behavior, and create experiences they can’t help but participate in. For example, you could create a social media campaign they can join, a poll they feel compelled to share their views on, or a push notification with a fantastic deal at the perfect time. It’s a marketing strategy that goes hand in hand with a personalized experience directed at your target audience — both existing customers and new customer acquisitions.
Engagement marketing persists through almost every marketing medium, with content marketing, field marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, and community building being some of the best ways to do this.
Weaving customer engagement marketing strategies into every stage of the customer journey —from branded events that raise awareness to personalized recommendations at checkout — can drastically improve effectiveness and may even boost customer lifetime value.
Creating engaging content and experiences is one of the best ways to retain customers and strengthen brand loyalty. When done correctly, engagement marketing can:
All of this can help you further optimize future marketing campaigns.
As marketers, we’re always looking for ways to impact and demonstrate how valuable our traditional and digital marketing strategies are to executives. To measure your engagement marketing, analyze key metrics like:
Engagement marketing done well will increase numbers across these metrics, so it’s a valuable way to see what customer engagement strategy is working and where you can make improvements.
If you’re looking for practical ways to add engagement marketing to your toolkit, you’re in the right place. Apply one or more of our favorite omnichannel customer engagement marketing strategies and discover how this customer-centric approach can build customer support and fuel your sales.
Unrelated new product suggestions or generic promotions should never be part of your effective customer engagement strategy. Instead, use data and automation tools to curate personalized product suggestions for your customers.
With data on your customers’ browsing and buying history, you can tailor product suggestions — just as Netflix does with personalized recommendations. Another option is to introduce an interactive product quiz on your website to help customers find their ideal product.
Consumers spend countless hours on social media — to the tune of two hours and 23 minutes a day — catching up with friends, family members, favorite brands, and influencers. Make your brand’s time on social media platforms count by finding ways to engage customers through social media campaigns. Some examples might include:
Social media offers endless opportunities. You only need to connect with your customer base to decipher their wants and interests.
Give your customers their own space to talk about all things related to your brand with a community group or forum. This customer engagement marketing strategy provides an ideal place to gain useful insights by sharing polls, asking questions, and requesting customer reviews and photos.
While Facebook groups are still significant, don’t forget to look beyond this for other opportunities to create community spaces. Discord and Reddit are quickly becoming two of the more popular ways to build a community.
One of the top customer engagement marketing strategies is an interactive experience that makes customers want to get involved. In-person and online workshops and immersive events are great ways to improve customer engagement.
Choose a theme or topic that interests your audience, then build an engaging experience or event around it. For example, give your customers a behind-the-scenes exclusive or help them learn a new skill.
For hybrid and virtual events, use our Hoppier virtual cards as a simple and fun way to provide lunch — with the bonus of your guests being able to order from their favorite local vendor.
Rewarding your customers’ interactions with your brand is extraordinarily powerful — both big and small. Introducing a gamified customer loyalty program is an exciting way to encourage and reward engagement and drive brand loyalty.
Give your loyal customers different ways to earn points, badges, stamps, or reward tokens. Reward customers for making purchases, providing referrals, completing surveys, leaving reviews, sharing social media posts, and participating in any other meaningful brand interaction you want to encourage. You can get really creative with your sales incentives scheme here and go all-in on a branded experience with a fun logo, creative tokens, and unique rewards.
Engagement marketing isn’t always about a significant event or campaign. Sometimes, it’s about improving the customer experience. You can improve customer satisfaction and encourage future engagements with a few optimizations to your ordering and checkout process.
Think about how you can make your ordering process more straightforward. One-click ordering and simplified recurring subscriptions are great ways to reduce friction and improve the customer experience. Add personalized product suggestions and offer the chance to earn loyalty points, and you have the recipe for one of the best customer engagement marketing strategies available.
Social media possesses a vast potential audience, but capturing their attention isn’t so easy. A great way to get people involved with your brand is to host a live Q&A session.
Partner with a celebrity, influencer, or industry expert for your Q&A, promote it in advance, and encourage your audience to ask questions before and during the event. This can create a unique moment for your customers to get involved and help you uncover valuable data about your customers’ preferences and interests.
You might have seen the request to enable push notifications when you land on a media website or online store. Though push notifications may seem like a marketing bombardment, sending relevant push notifications can be a powerful way to encourage your customers to shop with you at the right time. It just needs to be done responsibly.
As with any messaging campaign, you need to consider frequency and relevance. Stand out from other brands by only sending notifications for products or promotions your customers would love — something you can do with the right mix of data and automation. Make this clear to your customers upfront, and encourage them to allow push notifications to hear about offers you think they won’t want to miss.
If you have a creative audience or operate in a product-focused niche, a design contest makes other customer engagement marketing strategies pale in comparison. Challenge your customers to submit a design idea for a new product, product personalization, or branded swag, and allow everyone to vote on the designs they love best.
A design contest works well because it offers novelty, creativity, the chance to win, and a real sense of community. Even if your customer doesn’t want to submit a design, they can still vote, comment on others, and share their support.
Designers have a chance to see their designs come to life with a brand they love. You can also throw in other rewards, like a Hoppier virtual card for your design contest winner and the runner-ups.
We can all think of brands that closely connect to a charity or cause. For brands with a big heart, hosting or supporting a community event or fundraiser demonstrates how much they care — and is also an excellent opportunity to engage in effective customer engagement marketing strategies.
Fundraisers and community events are a way to give back and get closer to your customers. By having your brand attached to the event or experience, you can raise money for vital causes, meet your supporters, and increase brand awareness. Encourage your customers to donate if they can, spread awareness on social media, and take part in exclusive experiences at the event.
One of the simplest ways to encourage more customer engagement is to offer a genuine reward, thank you, or gift in return for their loyalty or engagement. Hoppier makes this easy with e-gift cards you can email in moments.
Building multi-pronged customer engagement marketing strategies takes time and energy, so easy-to-use tools are highly recommended. With Hoppier, you can set up a program and customize your card and experience with little time contribution.
Decide what you want to call your program, and find a fun emoji that matches the occasion. Personalize your Hoppier virtual card with your brand colors and company logo, or create a fun logo unique to your VIP loyalty scheme, workshop event, or community group.
Next, set a spending balance and redemption period for your virtual card. You can leave this open-ended so your customers can spend the balance whenever they like or set a deadline. Any money left unspent after the deadline gets returned to you, which means less waste and more money in the budget for future marketing campaigns.
Hoppier makes it easy to thank your customers and show you care about how they engage with your brand. It’s a great way to offer rewards as part of a customer loyalty scheme, design contest, or user-generated content campaign on social media.
Our virtual cards are also ideal for catering virtual or hybrid events. Customize your virtual cards so customers can use them at food and drink vendors, giving your event attendees a fun and completely personalized way to order drinks, snacks, or lunch for your event or virtual experience.
You can use Hoppier for other personalized customer moments, too. Set up a program where you send a virtual card as a thank-you bonus for referring new customers or email a virtual card to your customers on their birthday or renewal date. You can integrate our virtual cards into your engagement, loyalty, and experiential marketing campaigns in many ways.
Engagement marketing is about putting your customer at the center of the experience and designing opportunities that create that two-way interaction. It’s a marketing approach that fosters brand loyalty, customer retention, and more interactions that can make sales happen.
Engagement marketing tactics work great for both in-person and virtual events.
If you’re looking for more ways to ramp up the interaction for your next event, watch our webinar on creating memorable and engaging virtual events.
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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