6 Most Effective Customer Engagement Strategies for Business Owner

Do you know that the two-third of organizations earning depends on customer engagement strategies? Thus, C-suite of the large company’s always put customer engagement & support on the top of their priority. 

If you have a customer-centric business, nothing can stop you. Your relationship with customers can predict the value of your product. And, they are the biggest judge of the industry.  

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

-Jeff Bezos

Apart from that if you want to win the race with your competitors you have to stay close with your visitors and buyers. 

Today in this article, we will cover all the essential aspects of customer engagement strategies of a business or company. Let’s dig deeper and conquer the top achievement from the current business world. 

Difference Between A User and A Customer

Who uses your product often at no price like free trials or service and utilize platforms like search engines, social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, so on), email service, and more are known as Users.

On the other side, who pay for utilizing your product is the Customer. Still, they are users but you successfully sell your product to them. And that’s the ultimate desire of your business.

A customer has more expectation than a user

Because everyone wants a better service in the same price range. Don’t you expect new Google or Facebook updates which makes it more user-friendly? So, when a customer or anyone who is paying his/ her hard-earned money the demand and expectations is bound to rise high.

Customer Engagement vs User Engagement

Customer engagement is considered a high-touch relationship model. At the same point, user engagement is considered a low-touch relationship model. 

Users use your product, sometimes comment on it, but rarely talk to the company. But customers are different. At first, they are your user. And once your marketing and their need come together then they decide to buy your product and become one of your customers. 

Sometimes users randomly use your product and leave it facing any difficulties or any defect. On the other side, customers don’t let the problems go by because they have spent money on it. They will address complaints, talk to your support team, and sometimes give you bits of feedback to improve your product quality or performance. 

Thus the engagement between users and customers can’t really termed the same. 

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.

Steve Jobs

If your customer engagement is not up to the mark, it means you are not doing business with the right approach. Your engagement with your customers should be like friends and family. Each customer account has brought you a great value of money. They can raise it more and demand something new and better.

6 Customer Engagement Strategies You Should Maintain

Engaging your customer is complicated if you are not familiar with the strategies. Many business owners even don’t know the useful techniques of involving buyers in the right way. However, we can bet you will manage customers way better than before if you follow our strategies below.

1. Surprise Your Customers

You can increase customer engagement by surprising your buyers all of a sudden. You need to do this on normal days because people know each company sends greetings or wishes on special holidays like- Christmas, New Year, or Easter Sunday.   

So, when they receive something back on regular days, they will definitely get surprised. So, how can you surprise customers? 

Basically, surprising means making your client feel special And there are a bunch of ways you can follow to do so. Like- 

• Sending personalized email
• Calling them on their birthday
• Free duration on a program 
• Sending gifts like- Journals, E-books, Expert’s effective advice
• Sending free cards or vouchers
• Sudden discount on a premium product

Sometimes sudden insightful pop-up messages can surprise your customers as well. They will feel engage with you and understand how much you care about them. It’s a bond of love with benefits. 

There are some easy to use Pop-up Building WordPress Plugins. You may try them out- 

• Pop Builder
• Popup by Supsystic
• Poptin
• Popup Maker
• Hustle Pop-Ups

Contacting through your popups is a great way to impress your customers. So, don’t miss out on applying this strategy to engage better with your customers.  

2. Stick to Your Customers on Social Media

Before discussing this strategy let’s have a look at the fascinating factors about people with social media:

• The number of daily Facebook users is 1.5 billion  
• Every day a US adult spends almost 38 minutes
• People around 16-24 years spend 3 hours on social media per day
• 330 million people remain active on Twitter every day
• Worldwide all internet users spent 2 hours and 24 minutes on an average in 2019 
• Per day 1 billion people stay active in WhatsApp
• In 2018 the average social media usage time was 142 minutes per day

Not only that, but a projection on social media usage also shows that an adult person is spending about 6 years and 8 months of his/ her time on an average. (Personally, we recommend not to use this much time on social media)

We have gathered all these statistics to make you understand that social media is the only platform where you can generate & stay engaged with customers free of cost. All you need to do is target your customer base and post based on their desire and expectation.

Even if you want to boost your sales, you can use paid social media marketing which works like magic in most cases. You have to just target your customers and select your advertisement criteria on that. Besides that, the return on investment in paid marketing is also very good. 

3. Engage with Your Quiet Customers

You may have some customers who are quite for a long time. Break the silence, find out and connect with those shy folks.

Believe me or not, they will be happy for your acknowledgment. Even some of them can speak out some reason for being silent. 

You can thank them for staying with your company and doing business. Truly, people feel happy when someone feel thankful to them. Moreover, quieter people don’t like to talk directly but love the virtual conversation. 

Make a nice and special newsletter for them and don’t forget to mention their name individually. If your website is powered by WordPress, you can try weMail for creating mindblowing newsletters to engage with your customers. Furthermore, it’s email marketing service is probably the most cost-effective one out there right now. 

4. Post Edgy Content in Social Media 

Like, Share, Comment, Retweet- all these by your audience make a marketer or site owner very happy. But it will only be possible if you write attractive yet relevant content for your customers. It’s one of the powerful customer engagement strategies. 

Also, your edgy posts can lead to huge traffic. And, the average page session will improve as well. There are some useful tricks to increase your customer engagement through social media posts. 

• Avoid generic post and add some exceptional information in the post
• Use emojis and GIFs
• Add a different version of the post in several social platforms
• Use related images to draw the attention quickly
• Add landing page link to earn the traffic

The harsh truth is most of the time users only scroll down and don’t notice your insightful post. So, following these tips can bring you a good number of like/ share/ comments/ visitors. 

Customer relationship management can differ on the authority of your plan and platforms. You should plan according to your user’s background and based on the concern about that sector. So, before planning for social posts, identify what will bring your customers to you.

However, always try to provide anything that would be useful to your audiences, it could be blogs, tutorials, video content, social post, etc. Because they are the fuel to your customer’s engagement activities. 

5. Take the Negative Feedbacks Positively

Which business doesn’t get negative reviews? It is a natural phenomenon that based on their experience, your customer may rate and review your product negatively. So, don’t get hurt or angry about it, try to take it nicely replying to them in a positive manner.

Now, you have to work on those reviews which will show the customers that you care for them. 

Something that you should do as soon as you receive negative feedback-

• Respond to the feedback or questions as soon as possible
• Don’t avoid the replies intentionally. If you do, it will mean you are surrendered to their allegation.
• Note down the problem they have mentioned in the comment and do homework on that
• The better way is to contact the annoyed replier personally
• Send apology email and offer a solution to it

Well, we think you can have a better engagement with your dissatisfied customers or users. Actually, all types of comments work as a free audit for you. 

6. Use Webinars as Customer Engagement Strategy

Have you ever done any webinar for your company? Actually, the webinar is used to engage customers and educate them about your product. You have to talk with your customer in a live session to make it more lively & effective. There will be a comment box where the customer will ask any questions regarding your product or the seminar. 

When they will see that you are answering their question announcing their name on-screen then it makes them feel important providing an inner satisfaction in them. All around the world, the webinar is considered as the most effective customer engagement strategy because the response is significant and it happens live. 

Few tips for making an outstanding webinar-

• Select trendy or product-related topic
• Announce the topic of your webinar on social media (Facebook or Twitter)
• Must have a host and one or more guests in this event
• Try to bring well-known speakers
• Keep some time for Q&A from the customers or viewers

Why should You Apply Customer Engagement Strategies

Now you may ask, what are the benefits of customer engagement, or what will I or my company gain from applying these strategies? Well, the advantages of customer engagement are uncountable. But here we have tried to discuss some of the frontline benefits- 

Earn Customer Trust

It is the most essential benefit of customer engagement. Without gaining customer trust, you can not stay in the market, beating your competitors. 

The largest companies in the world work for customer engagement though they have a huge number of customers. 

Here are some example of engaged customers- 

• 37% of engaged customers give more annual fee to their primary bank
• 56% of engaged customers visit their favorite dining spot more often
• Per year more than 46% of engaged customers stay in their favorite hotel

Gain Life-long Customer

By applying customer engagement strategies, you can get a sound number of life-long loyal customers. Like- Apple and Samsung have some loyal customers and some blind loyal ones too. Once you have such customer-base then no matter what they create, there will always be some buyers who will always grab the deal of your brand at any cost.

To make these types of clients, you may need a long time and consistent marketing plan year after year. In that case, you have to follow some powerful & proven marketing strategies to be in the heart of your target audience.

Customers Act Like Marketers

When you have credible customer engagement, the buyers will share and comment on your social posts. And, that’s what marketers do.

Besides that, if they find your service or product helpful, they will suggest it among their friends and family. Such word of mouth is the best free promotion of your product or services that you can ever ask for.

Moreover, If you arrange any event or competition, the engaged client will spread the message among his/her area. You will be getting free publicity everywhere they go.

So, well-engaged customers can act as a true brand ambassador for you and your business. The only thing you need to do is, always think about your customers before any innovation, announcement, or arrangement are made.

Increase Your Sales

Undoubtedly, engaged customers always help to increase your sales ratio. Yes, it’s true that when you launch a new product every previous customer will not buy it but most of them will.

For instance, we can talk about the popular brand Apple. Every year this gadget company launches innovative laptops, desktops monitor, smartwatch, their most popular item, smartphones and all its related accessories. Yet you will see a long queue for buying Apple products every time every year.

Their main strategy for engaging customers is by caring about what the customers want from them. They are always trying to improve the customer experience, not the megabytes.

Moreover, they do marketing with their relatable yet sleek designs and send simple yet powerful messages to the people. Thus, customer engagement strategies have increased the sales of Apple over the years.

Point Out Your Mistakes Like an Auditor

You may have a rational mentor or auditor to find out the mistakes or problems you have done in your business. But we can bet, they will not use your product as your customers did after buying it with their hard-earned money.

If any of your customers feel it is difficult to use your service, he/ she will definitely contact the support team or send emails to your company address. So, you can immediately fix the issue along with your team. And in this case, also, your customer engagement strategies do the trick for you.

Apply Customer Engagement Strategies in Your Work Place

Well, we are almost at the end of this discussion. We have tried our best to provide you all the essential information about customer engagement strategies. These techniques and plans are taken from our personal journey & experiences over the years. Honestly, they work very well. And, we can proudly say, so far we have acquired many sustainable and loyal customers by applying many of these customer engagement strategies. And more importantly, they have an incredible relationship with us. 

Moreover, if you can use a feature-rich Customer Relationship Management solution for your WordPress site, your work will get way less complex than it is now. WordPress CRM is an extended module of WP ERP – A complete business management solution. You can get both of its free and premium versions from here. ⤵️

Also, if you would like to have a hands-on experience of this powerful ERP solution, then you can always check out its Free Official Demo.

Let’s share your user-experience in the comment section below. We are eagerly waiting for it.