Customer Engagement Strategies to Build A Successful Brand

9 minute read

Believe it or not - Customer Engagement strategies drive success for every business objective - be it monetary or non financial.

Customer engagement defines how vital and beneficial is your connection with the customers. It is essential that as a brand, you make constant efforts and investments to build meaningful engagement experiences with your customers.

In this article, we have formed together with some essential explanations, benefits, and customer engagement Strategies.

What Is Customer Engagement?

The meaning of customer engagement is the effort that you make as a brand to connect and form valuable relationships with your customers. It can be done through different channels and experiences that result in driving long-term benefits for your brand.

It goes beyond the basic notion of increasing sales; instead, it is much more than that as it taps into consumer emotions. The sentiments of consumers about your brand shape their intention to engage and purchase from your brand.

What Are Customer Engagement Strategies?

These are the strategies - be it organic or paid campaigns - aimed at attracting and engaging audiences with your brand products, profiles, and people. The customer engagement strategies help in building positive brand interactions with consumers, delivering customer satisfaction, and engaging experiences.

Importance of Customer Engagement For Brands

We have listed some benefits about how having excellent engagement opportunities for customers can help your brand.

Increasing sales with a shorter sales cycle.
Enhanced customer loyalty
Consumers’ preference for your brand over competitors
Improved customer retention
Long-term relationship building
Online community formation
Humanized interactions with customers
More personalized approach with an individual customer focus
The escalated brand image on digital media
Positive user-generated content creation
Authentic & voluntary Word-of-mouth marketing

These are some key benefits, and if you formulate a creative and active customer engagement strategy, then you can unlock further possibilities for your brand.

10 Best Customer Engagement Strategies

1. Acknowledge Customer’s Voice

The statement inspires the first and foremost strategy that the customer is always right. If you focus on your goals and promotions over the customers’ expectations, you won’t be able to survive for long in the marketplace.

Acknowledging the customers’ voice means encouraging them to share and express their suggestions, opinions, issues, questions, etc. If they are investing their valuable time to share these, then you should also acknowledge their efforts and respond to them.

Doing so will help you understand what customers feel about your brand, their viewpoint about you & your products, and you can identify the areas of improvement.

As part of a digital product strategy, businesses can leverage various digital platforms to engage with their customers, such as social media, email, and surveys. Companies can collect customer feedback and respond promptly by utilizing these digital channels, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. It is important to keep track of your valued customers' satisfaction levels by conducting a customer satisfaction survey.

2. Encourage & Promote Customer Reviews

For effective and maximum engagement from the users, you need to encourage them to share their reviews, feedback, opinions, ideas, and experiences with your brand.

Social media platforms are the best placed to ask the customers to share their reviews or as we call it in marketing terms - User-generated content.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be positive content only; instead, you can showcase both negative and positive. It will be more reliable and authentic, as even being too perfect can lead to adverse outcomes.

Besides, you should promote this valuable user-generated content on your social profiles to build social proof and display customer-brand transparency. It will attract a greater audience with maximum engagement.

Brand Example: APPLE

Apple’s campaign called as #ShotOnIphone was aimed at regaining the user trust as there were some issues highlighted stating that Iphone’s low-light camera quality isn’t upto the mark.

Apple asked users to share the compelling photos which Apple shared on their social media to rebuild trust and showcase the proof of camera quality through authentic & reliable UGC. It resulted in increased engagement from the iPhone users to a great extent.

3. Present Engagement With Gamification

Gamification is a developing concept in the marketing field that has come into the spotlight due to the tremendous engagement levels of online users with digital gaming.

Building a gamification strategy into your brand-pushed content for promotions or otherwise on digital media can help you gain engagement with new heights.

It is successful in gaining engagement as it is entertaining, taps into consumer interest, increases brand-user interaction, an edge over the competition, and creative use of technology. Also, rewards & exposure for customers, social sharing & peer-to-peer competition, and gratify customers with superior engagement experience.

Brand Example: Nike+ Run Club

Nike is one of the best global brands with great customer engagement and product portfolio. Nike+ Run club app is a great example of gamification strategy to increase engagement and interaction.

Nike’s customer community can log in to the app and add their training program details to the app. This helps in members of the community to compete against each other, earn trophies & badges, and keep the users retained and engaged to the brand.

4. Identify the Point of Interaction

It means that you need to identify the key points or channels through which consumers come to your brand and interact with it. Once you identify these points, then lies the task ahead.

Optimize those points of interaction as your storefront that will bring in the consumers to engage further and shop be it landing pages, website, blogs, social profiles, in-store marketing campaigns etc.

It is essential as not having engaging interaction points will increase the bounce rate and reduce engagement.

5. Reach Customers at Maximum Touchpoints

Also, provide your service to the customers wherever needed, i.e. omni-channel customer service. You can use cloud contact centers, chatbots or outsourcing live chat support can be a good option.

Omni-channel presence includes social media networks, emails, mobile-notifications, brick-and-mortar stores, websites, and all possible touchpoints. You can just create a live hashtag feed for your campaign and display it anywhere you want using Taggbox!

Talk to your customers, send them offers & updates, provide shop&collect options, resolve queries, focus on customer sentiments for your brand to make most of the available opportunities.

6. Personalized Communication brings Engagement

Today the technology has become this advanced that you can gain insights and focus on every individual customer with personal communications. Even consumers are more inclined to brands that provide personalization.

It is vital from the customer’s perspective, as they also want a relevant and personalized experience.

Customers are more likely to engage with brand communications that provide personalized content, product recommendations, promotional messages, offers & discounts, emails, and more.

7. Humanize Your Brand Identity

Consumers are more likely to interact with humans over some profiles or digital storefront, so having a humanized approach can help you form meaningful relations with consumers.

By humanizing, it means that make the consumers feel that you understand their emotions & needs, which will make them relate to your brand more.

Having a humanized brand identity can build more consumer interactions and relationships. Replying to audience questions & comments, having social conversations, liking & sharing UGC, showcasing sentiments can help you achieve it.

8. Importance of Quality Content Creation

Content is all you have for communication, promotion, and interaction of your brand to consumers, and having interactive & creative quality content will help in increasing engagement.

Using enticing visual content on your website and social profiles can bring increased engagement from users. It is as visuals are known to be more engaging over the text content.

Visuals like compelling images, UGC visuals, videos reviews & promotions, 360-degree photos, animated infographics, etc. can help you enhance engagement from consumers. As visuals get way more likes, comments, & share comparatively.

Brand Example: Rolex

Rolex is a world-renowned uber-luxury watch brand with ultra-premium quality high-end watches. But it understands the importance of visual content for showcasing its product quality and premium feels.

Rolex’s social media is filled with compelling images of premium watches and their detailed photography to highlight every little element. The engagement can be understood by the fact that Rolex has more than 7 million followers on Instagram & Facebook each.

9. Focus on Customer, not on Sales

Customers don’t want you to continually promote your brand and products as constant selling becomes annoying to the customers, and they drop out of the conversation.

The better way is to focus on the customers’ interests, needs, tastes, and preferences and deliver contents accordingly. Once you form an interaction with customers, then you can occasionally do promotions.

This way, you can build a positive rapport with customers by catering to their requirements that will provide maximum engagement and conversions are positively correlated to customer engagement.

10. Escalate Engagement with Creative Tools

There are various tools available in the market that can help you engage with your audience better through practical concepts. TaggShop is one such tool that lets you drive interaction and engagement that can increase eCommerce conversions & sales.

TaggShop is a visual commerce platform that can help you aggregate interactive and engaging content especially UGC from different social media networks into a single feed that you can embed on your website.

It helps you create an interactive social feed that customers can engage with and explore amazing pieces of content from diverse channels in a single feed.

As a brand, you can link social media to your business, promote user-generated content, integrate point of inspiration to the point of sale with shoppable content, enhance your website content quality for better engagement, display fresh, authentic content, and increase eCommerce sales with maximum engagement.

Closing Statement

There you have all the in-depth details about customer engagement and its impact on the overall brand performance. These strategies are all interconnected and effective if implemented appropriately.

Customer engagement lets you form all-important connections with the customers that you can leverage for your benefits in the long-run.

Sales and customer retention are areas of concern for any business at all times. So, with these strategies, you can create a plan that will bring increased sales and enhance customer loyalty.