54% of customers think companies need to fundamentally transform how they engage with customers. Despite this, it seems an uphill battle for customer experience champions to start new initiatives for such a transformation. Think about it, how can you see the value of customer experience?

It’s not like ROI or other investment measures with a clear-cut figure dictating success.

Despite being difficult to measure, customer engagement will indirectly transgress benefits to your bottom-line. It is important then for you to make efforts and engage with your customers.

In this article, we at Process Street share with you our secret to success. We give you our top 4 steps we adopt for increased customer engagement. With these steps, you will build strong customer relationships, loyalty and ultimately grow as a business.

Our 4 steps for increased customer engagement are:

  1. Unify your social media efforts
  2. Personalize the experience
  3. Make the most of your communication
  4. Measure, tweak and improve

With that said, let’s not waste any more time and jump straight to it.

 

Step 1: Unify your social media efforts

32% of the world’s population uses social media, which is equal to 3.2 billion users worldwide. That is a large user catchment, one that you can digitally engage with a few quick, clicks and swipes.

It sounds simple, but don’t be complacent. Social media engagement can be an economic burden, taking a tremendous amount of time and effort.

Foremost, you need a social media following. Whether you are using Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter the principles of growing this following remain the same. You then need to make sure you are engaging this following to your brand, making a lasting impression for strong customer relationships.

These steps need to be unified, to formulate a thorough social media strategy. To help you get started, consider the below top 12 tricks to grow and engage with your social media following:

 

  1. Let them know you are human – Interact on your social media accounts often. This involves responding to posts from your audience, interacting with them when they show interest.
  2. Understand their needs – Understanding your audience’s needs and what they want to read to assist you in meeting common necessities.
  3. Create an integrated social media strategy – Integrate your social media accounts with your marketing calendar. This means including upcoming events, blog posts, and everything else you decide to do with your business calendar.
  4. Produce valuable content – You want to make sure you are producing valuable content on your blog and your social networking sites. Good content showcases your business and website, bringing in more customers and money.
  5. Optimize your social media accounts – Optimizing your social media accounts involves selecting keywords that will drive the most traffic and aligning them with your business.
  6. Use hashtags often – Hashtags bring more people to your social media account. However make sure to use them carefully by not tagging posts with irrelevant, unrelated hashtags.
  7. Provide a benefit to your audience – People visiting your social media page will be asking “What’s in it for me?” You can contemplate giving something away for free, for instance, a short tutorial, free trial or book.
  8. Consistently post at a comfortable rate – Most studies agree that posting once per day is optimum for Instagram, 3 times per week for Facebook, and 1-5 tweets per day with Twitter.
  9. Do your research – Your social media strategy will differ depending on what industry you are in. Make sure to research the best approach to take for your industry.
  10. Go further in customer service – Go above and beyond if a user has a problem.
  11. Cross-promote campaigns – Cross-promotion could include: Partnering with a non-direct competitor and exalting each other’s business and offerings; sharing your website pages and posts to drive hard-sales on these platforms – note social media should not be used for hard sales, and sponsoring or co-hosting events.
  12. Utilize user-generated content – This could include blogs, vlogs, audio files, images, discussion forums, and other forms of media created by the end-users. To encourage user-generated content, choose social networks most effective to your campaign, set specific generated content goals, tell your audience what content you want, focus on the community aspect and collaborate, and most importantly don’t take without asking.

For more information on social media marketing, read: Social Media Marketing — 5 Tips That Work

 

Step 2: Personalize the experience

The power of personalization.

It is truly a super-power. For instance, personalized emails have a six times higher transaction rate and personalized videos give an 8x improvement in click-through rates. This isn’t surprising as personalization has been shown to justify one’s self-disclosure and induces increased trust. Personalization also helps to build loyalty and strengthens relationships with your customers.

Gather as much information as possible from your users. This could include tracking past-purchases, browsing history, and recording customer information such as birthdays, names, anniversaries, and place of residence. This information creates categories from which you can segment your audience. You can then target each segment with personalized campaigns, for instance:

  • Send an email using the customer’s name – Hello Ann, Good afternoon Ben
  • Send a happy-birthday wish – We heard it was your birthday, happy birthday!
  • Give your congratulations – On an event, such as an anniversary.
  • Recommend products based on gender, location, etc – Recommend your gender, age, etc specific product.

For the implementation of your personalized marketing strategy, use marketing tools such as SnapRetail. Utilizing intelligent software as such will assist you in the delivery of your smart marketing campaign. Personalization has never been this easy.

 

Step 3: Make the most of your communication

In our modern, digital world, there are many ways you can communicate with clients. What is difficult is choosing the correct communication strategy to be applied. Top communication methods include:

Out of these, email marketing is the most cost-effective regarding Return On Investment (ROI) – for every $1 spent, you can expect a $51 return.

With this in mind, it is no wonder many marketers use email marketing as their go-to marketing channel. Capitalizing on communication via increasing customer engagement, therefore, needs a substantial amount of time and resources pumped into creating and maintaining an effective email marketing strategy.

As part of this strategy, you can send unsolicited emails to a receiver without prior contact to touch base. A strategy termed cold emailing.

People often shy away from cold emailing, labeling it as spam. However, if you are offering a solution to individuals’ needs then this is not the case. You need to make sure you communicate this need by applying best practices. Such best practices include:

  • Don’t dedicate your introduction to introduce yourself or your company. Cold hard fact, the recipient does not care (initially). Get to the point and focus on THEM. What will you do for the recipient?
  • Keep it short, which aligns with getting to the point. We are talking 2-5 sentences.
  • Personalize. Personalize. We have already talked about the benefits of personalization. These benefits apply here.
  • Put your contact information in your signature. This should include your business address, which is non-negotiable. To note, adding a phone number and email address helps to build trust and credibility.
  • Follow up, then follow up again! Response rates can increase by up to 27% with a follow-up email campaign. For more information on generating an effective follow-up email campaign read: How To Write Follow Up Emails: Templates, Processes, and Guides

SnapRetail has a range of professionally designed email templates to help you get started and create a powerful initial cold email, with its subsequent follow-up email campaign.

 

Step 4: Measure, tweak and improve

The final step is self-explanatory. Tracking marketing campaigns means continual assessment of campaign performance. Take stock of which deals and strategies perform better.

Think of each marketing campaign as an experiment. Perform split tests, have a play around and see what works best.

Use what you learn to tweak your approach for the future, adopting the idea of continuous improvement. No matter what workflow software you use or SOPs you follow, you always need to have room for testing and improvement, especially when it comes to something as finicky as marketing efforts.

Let’s say that you have a set process for listing your ecommerce products to make sure that they have the best chance of getting sold as possible.

The above process is one we’ve created to serve as a basic standard, and it can be used without any issues as it is. However, there is always room for improvement, and just because it’s been documented and finalized doesn’t mean that we can’t go back and improve it.

For example, we could run A/B tests on which SEO tactics work best, then record the results in the process for all future use.

 

Engage with your costumes with our 4 easy steps to increase your bottom line

Our 4 steps for increased customer engagement take very little time to implement. Considering the potential benefits these steps deliver for your bottom line, why wouldn’t you implement them?

  1. Unify your social media efforts
  2. Personalize the experience
  3. Make the most of your communication
  4. Measure, tweak and improve

Tools such as SnapRetail have been specifically designed to support you and your business in your customer engagement goals. Use them.

Business is all about relationships. Building strong, supportive and positive relationships with your customers should be treated as a transaction, and therefore something you need to prioritize. The advice and tips in this article will help you take this priority in your stride.

 

Jane Courtnell is a Content Writer at Process Street with a passion for environmental issues and business sustainability. When she’s not writing she enjoys being in the mountains, running and rock climbing.