Before the start of online marketing, customer engagement was talking to the regular shopper who stopped by to say, “Hello,” or the complaint letter mailed to a company. The words customer engagement didn’t represent a concept. Today, it’s one of the most important concepts for the success of your business.
Customer engagement involves the relationship of a customer to your business. A thoroughly engaged customer becomes invested and loyal to your brand. It’s not organic. Customer engagement requires work. If you see any of these five signs in your business, it’s a good indicator of a customer engagement problem and that you might not have enough touchpoints to engage with your audience.
Customers only interact with you when there is a problem.
When customers complain, they’re interacting with your business. Complaining can show that they care about the product and have expectations for it. When they jump online to complain, they want you to know about and resolve them.
If customers’ only interactions with you are to complain or to identify problems, you have a sign of a faulty customer engagement effort. Addressing the complaint is a starting point, but you need to find other ways to keep them engaged.
Can you put them on a feedback panel? You can give customers a special offer for providing feedback, and gain valuable insights that will help you improve your product and prevent future customer complaints.
Are you tracking your complaints in order to prioritize your action plan? It is important that you are capturing your customer complaints in a way that will help you track and analyze the pain points so that you can put a solution in place to solve the most impactful issues.
As you build a relationship with your customer, you can connect them to more of your points of engagement.
When you want to promote something, there is no audience to promote to.
No one wants to have a party without anybody to invite. Maybe your party is a used video game sale. What’s the audience you’re trying to reach? How do you reach them? If you don’t have an audience built up through engagement, you won’t know who to promote your sale to.
Do demographic research and reel customers in by creating opportunities to interact. Here are a few ways to get started:
- Find out which social media sites your target group uses.
- Create and develop value-based content for your audience specifically. Use the 80/20 rule of value-based content v. “salesy” content.
- Try out contests and giveaways to promote your products and increase digital engagement with your audience.
- Build out your email list by offering value-based content as well.
These are just a few ideas, but a great place to get started building out your audience more and connecting with them.
Your audience has few positive interactions with you.
Complaints create negative interactions with your brand. Poor customer service, nonresponse, and failure to perform all fall into this category. Think of a project manager that hires a construction company for a remodeling project. Faulty work is done by the construction company, they don’t return calls immediately, and are still charged for extra work. Three strikes and they’re out.
It doesn’t take a big brain to see that this scenario lacks effective communication. Similar experiences can happen with negative technological interactions.
Always bring upset customers back into the fold and nurture their engagement, whether that’s through a discount, free gift, or something else.
There is no reason for your audience to interact with you on an ongoing basis.
Let’s say Noah buys a pack of socks from your fashion sock company. A year later, he needs more socks and places an order with you or with another sock company. What opportunities were missed within that year due to the lack of interaction with the customer?
Consistent interaction creates more sales opportunities for an existing customer. Customer satisfaction leads people to tell others about you. Feedback surveys, email newsletters, text notifications, Facebook comments, and asking for reviews are all forms of audience interaction. None are difficult to implement but they require careful planning and continual upkeep.
Customers drop off after the initial engagement.
Did you ever get a product or service inquiry through an online form, then the potential customer disappears? What could you have done to continue the interaction? Did you store the email address and send a follow-up note? Did you invite them to like your social media pages or inform them of an upcoming product release?
The same ideas work for walk-in businesses. A coffee shop owner gets into a conversation with a local couple on their first visit and doesn’t see them again. If she’d asked them to sign up for notifications or invited them to a coffee tasting night, she might have influenced their decision to return.
Turn the 5 signs around with strategic customer engagement. Your loyal base will grow, putting you on the path to success.
We can help you create greater engagement with your audience, customers, and keep their attention over time. Schedule a free consultation to learn more.
