66% of customers expect personalized and tailored engagements from companies that are based on past interactions. But despite that, a staggering 39% of companies don’t even have a process for regularly asking their customers for feedback.
And that’s a big reason why many businesses struggle with keeping their customers coming back and buying again. Without understanding what the customers want and developing engagement strategies, even the most eager customers will eventually forget about the company and move on to something else.
But the good news is that for those who are willing to develop their engagement strategies, that can become an incredibly powerful method for generating new revenue. As any growth marketing firm with a data-driven approach will tell you, your current customers are the best source of new revenue, as they will always be cheaper and easier to attract than new leads.
So, let’s look at a few meaningful customer engagement strategies that will actually have an impact on your business and revenue potential.
Understand Your Audience
Engaging your customers is only possible if you have a solid understanding of who they are, what they want, and how to get their attention. Without the right context, even well-crafted customer engagement strategies will fail because the people they are meant for won’t be interested in the specific offers or actions the business is taking.
Because of that, the best place to start with customer engagement is to create a comprehensive process for collecting feedback from your best and most loyal buyers. These are the people who have brought the most revenue for your business, so it makes sense to prioritize their happiness and try to craft your engagement strategies to make them come back for more.
The single best way to understand what your customers want is through one-on-one interviews. Even though putting together these types of interviews takes time, the ability to dig deeper into problems, ask follow-up questions, and see the non-verbal cues, makes in-person (or video conference) interviews an unrivaled way to discover insights about your audience.
If you want to discover new ways to engage your customers on a larger scale, consider running surveys to your customer lists. But make sure you only ask relevant questions that you can actually use to make decisions and run campaigns.
Finally, you should analyze customer reviews, support interactions, and social media comments to find common themes about what your customers really want and how you could get them to buy again.
Utilize Less-Known Engagement Methods
Most companies understand the importance of having an email list and social media presence. These are excellent tools for keeping your audience engaged and sharing information about your product launches and special promotions.
But if you want to create a broader customer engagement strategy that drives revenue, you need to get creative and devise more methods for keeping your customers on your radar.
For instance, if you have a physical location, such as a restaurant or a cafe, you could run WiFi marketing campaigns, where you offer guest WiFi in exchange for a sign-up and then use the information you collect to provide relevant, timely, and engaging offers that entice people to buy from you.
It’s also a great way to create a brand-new customer database you can work with, allowing you to target more people and expand the scope of your engagement campaigns.
You can even run specialized campaigns and promotions for these types of customers, offering them exclusive discounts or special deals, which would further encourage people to sign up.
Make Retention a Priority
Keeping your customers engaged and coming back often comes down to company-wide dedication to the goal. And that means you must establish a general policy of prioritizing the current customers over acquiring new ones.
With so many lead generation methods available today, it can be tempting to focus most of your efforts on generating new business. But while that can deliver short-term results, you can’t expect the marketing channels to work indefinitely. Once they become too expensive or dry out, you can be left with no sustainable way to keep the revenue coming in.
Because of that, make sure that you put your current customers first, always looking for ways to keep their attention and developing solutions that keep them interested in what you have to offer. Try to anticipate their needs in advance, mapping out the customer journey and designing products and services that could be helpful as they progress and overcome the initial challenges they were facing.
As part of keeping your customers happy, make sure you allocate enough resources to your customer service team so that they can offer omnichannel support and provide quick help to customers wherever they might be looking for assistance.
Finally, consider launching a loyalty program to further incentivize sticking around for longer. If people know that each purchase results in additional savings, they will be more likely to continue buying from you instead of looking for alternatives.
Bottom Line
Keeping your customers engaged should be a top priority if you want a business you can sustain over the long term.
And with the strategies listed above, you will be well on your way to ensuring that your customers are happy, feel understood, and always have something new they can discover that’s tailored to their needs at that specific moment.
