Every day, customers receive truckloads of entertaining content and enticing offers from numerous businesses -- some of which might even be your closest rivals.
With those potential distractions, how do you keep your customers engaged and pleased with your brand? Do you still stand out among the sea of businesses advertising to them?
If you’re unsure, implement these five tactics to ensure and enhance your customer engagement strategy:
1. Implement omnichannel strategies.
If you’re using several channels to interact with your customers, harmonize them through omni channel implementation strategies.
Omnichannel schemes make your customer communication platforms more cohesive, ensuring all information is up-to-date.
Let’s say your customers scheduled for a full-body massage on your app and log in on your site the next day for details.
They should see their booked schedule (or any other response) on their member profiles. When they ring you for further confirmation, your reps should give relevant, real-time information.
Another example is when your store implements buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) and other customer-facing processes.
Your ordering and packaging systems should be in sync and receive the latest details. Your brick-and-mortar store’s person-in-charge must have this information and purchases ready for customers to get upon arriving.
Implementing omnichannel schemes can sound intricate. However, you can simplify that by using robust integrated systems at the onset.
Headless ecommerce site builders are one example. They separate the front-end processes from those at the back-end (an order management system, customer database, etc.).
This functionality streamlines your operations more smoothly, resulting in enhanced customer experiences. Shoppers are then more likely to keep buying and interacting with your store, especially from digital channels.
2. Exhibit awe-inspiring visual content.
Mega-attractive visuals catch your customers’ attention and stimulate them to want your goods.
So, leverage photos and videos in your product and landing pages, website banner, social media, and other platforms.
Take pictures and film your products under natural light, in high-definition, and from different angles.
Use modern editors and appropriate, built-in effects to emphasize product features and intensify the emotions connected to your visuals.
For instance, you can speed up your videos to demonstrate accelerated movements and evoke an adrenaline rush. Alternatively, you can slow down videos, make items spin, and add filters to accentuate details.
For maximum stimulating and engaging effect, enlarge your visuals or publish them in vast spaces of your site.
However, ensure optimizing your visuals so they don't eat up your website's memory and ruin its performance.
3. Employ interactive chatbots.
Install live-chatting bots driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to engage first-time and repeat website visitors.
These technologies can:
- Initiate conversations to assist shoppers with any request
- Proactively introduce new products and offers
- Function from any time zone and beyond your operating hours
- Respond instantly and correctly in human-sounding dialogues
- Gather and use relevant customer intelligence for personalized interactions
- Refer to previous conversations when engaging customers
Because of these capabilities, AI-driven chatbots can impress and make your shoppers feel extra-valued. This consequently makes customers want to return and explore your site even more.
Take advantage of AI-enabled chatbots for customer support, sales dialogues, lead nurturing, and other related workflows.
4. Digitize forms and processes.
Customers now want transactions with their favorite brands to be fast, secure, and convenient. Cater to that expectation by digitizing your business forms and processes.
Leverage technology and electronic formats to turn once-laborious workflows into instant, low-cost ones -- both for you and your customers.
Doing so even lets you include helpful features, e.g., photo and video cloud uploads, hand-drawn signatures, third-party app integrations, etc.
This enables your staff and customers to do more with one instrument remotely anytime. Shoppers don’t need to wait for you to open or go to your physical store to complete transactions.
As a result, your customers will prefer your store over still-traditional rivals.
Modern rental companies give a perfect example of digitization. Their technicians use electronic equipment inspection forms to examine company assets before and after releasing them.
Along with the forms, they can take and attach photos and videos of the equipment’s defects or overall condition.
Technicians can then hit the "Submit" button to send their reports and alert their operation managers electronically.
The companies also let their customers sign documents electronically to acknowledge the assets’ conditions before and after renting them out.
The result? Quicker and smoother transactions and increased customer satisfaction, among others.
Follow these tips to simplify your digital forms:
- Shorten them as much as possible
- Design them neatly and attractively
- Use checklists and single-tap options when applicable
- Execute autocomplete features for fields.
Then set up comprehensive self-service mobile or website apps that allow customers to transact in several ways with your store.
5. Involve customers in your causes.
Turning your customers into philanthropists is among the best tactics to increase sales and engage shoppers effectively.
Modern shoppers love to participate in causes, so use their altruism to make them love and interact more with your brand.
You can incorporate causes into your operations, products, and services. Donate specific percentages of your profits to charitable organizations, use local materials and production processes, and others.
Be creative, then invite customers to join your campaign by buying your products or signing up for your services:
Here’s how social enterprise GiveMeTap did that:
GiveMeTap sells refillable, environmentally safe water bottles and allots 20% of its income to finance water projects in Africa. Every bottle bought also provides five years of drinkable water to a resident in Ghana.
GiveMeTap exhibits how much it has currently funded water projects from its products:
Tentree is another example. It is a sustainable clothing company that produces apparel from eco-friendly materials and through ethical manufacturing processes. It minimizes its environmental footprint and plants 10 trees for every item sold.
TenTree similarly showcases its accomplishments in this way:
GiveMeTap and Tentree invite shoppers to join their movement by littering several calls-to-actions and visuals across their homepages.
You can do the same, along with these ideas:
- Advocate for specific causes relevant to your brand
- Be authentic, not pretentious, with your advocacy
- Make your invitations actionable
- Simplify your campaign explanation
- Showcase your current achievements and plans in bitesize content
- Remain transparent.
Time to enhance your customer engagement strategy
Keeping customers engaged and delighted with your brand doesn’t have to require complicated strategies.
You only need to infuse the correct customer-centric techniques in your game plan and be creative with them.
This can take time, effort, and commitment, but never give up on your engagement strategy.
In time, your customers will be increasingly responsive to your brand and bring in profitable gains for your company.