What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement measures how brands interact with clients throughout the customer's lifecycle. It’s no longer just about selling, supporting, or providing services. Instead, it's about brands anticipating customers' needs and staying in touch to build long-lasting bonds.
Customer engagement increases customer loyalty and improves retention rates. It takes center stage as more companies adopt the customer-centric approach when creating their marketing strategies to create awareness and achieve growth.
Marketing automation software support companies trying to engage customers at every touchpoint.
Types of customer engagement
Effective customer engagement requires a deep understanding of the customer's needs, preferences, and behavior. It can take many forms, including:
- Social media engagement. Social media platforms help brands communicate with customers by responding to comments and direct messages. Brands can also post relevant content and offer customer service on social media.
- Email engagement. Brands send newsletters, product updates, and personalized offers in emails.
- Content engagement. Businesses provide informative content to customers through blog posts, videos, and infographics.
- Events engagement. Brands organize events like webinars, workshops, or conferences to interact with customers directly and provide valuable information, training, and networking opportunities.
- Loyalty programs engagement. Loyalty programs offer incentives to customers engaging with a brand. These offers include exclusive discounts or rewards points.
- Customer service engagement. Customers often engage with businesses on support channels by delivering assistance.
Benefits of customer engagement
Customer engagement is critical for building strong consumer relationships and driving business success. Many benefits come from properly engaging customers, including:
- Improved loyalty. When customers feel engaged with a brand, they’re more likely to remain loyal and make repeat purchases.
- Increased satisfaction. Engaged customers are more satisfied with a brand and its products or services, leading to good reviews and referrals. It ultimately contributes to positive word of mouth on the market.
- Higher revenue. Effective customer engagement tactics encourage buyers to make additional purchases and spend more money.
- Valuable customer feedback. Interested customers provide feedback that can help the brand improve its products and services.
- Enhanced brand reputation. Positive customer interactions help improve the brand's reputation and strengthen customer relationships.
- Better customer retention. Customers appropriately engaged are less likely to switch to a competitor, reducing customer churn.
Customer engagement model
Customer engagement aims to discover the factors that influence a customer’s decision-making. It’s a step-by-step approach that happens at various touchpoints. Below are some common steps in a company’s customer engagement model.
- Learn about target audience preference. Understand the target audience's needs and use surveys and other methods to reach out to them.
- Find out why a customer takes an interest in a product. Companies conduct video interviews to find out how customers respond to a product. Some companies make use of video conferencing software to conduct the interviews.
- Encourage customers to pay and upgrade. Customer engagement tactics aim to sell, upsell, or cross-sell a product to add more annual contract value (ACV).
- Keep customers interested. Businesses should appoint a customer success staff or account manager to educate customers about driving maximum value from their product.
A customer engagement model should be flexible, easy to adapt, and offer a complete journey. The main priority should be adding value and improving the customer experience across their journey.
Furthermore, the messaging must be consistent with a brand’s value proposition for its audience.
Customer engagement vs. customer experience
To fully understand customer engagement, one should know how it differs from the customer experience.
Customer engagement refers to customer interactions, experiences, and communications with a business throughout their journey. Customer engagement aims to build and maintain a strong relationship with customers, which can lead to increased loyalty, advocacy, and revenue for the business.
Customer experience (CX) focuses on every business action, including advertisements and billboards. The company aims to put itself in the customers' position and experience what they go through. The customer experience is the outcome of each customer interaction with the business, from using the website to contacting customer service to receiving the goods or services ordered.
A great customer experience is critical to success because everything the company does affects how the customers perceive the brand and their decision to return.
Learn more about customer experience and ways to measure it in an organization.
Sagar Joshi
Sagar Joshi is a former content marketing specialist at G2 in India. He is an engineer with a keen interest in data analytics and cybersecurity. He writes about topics related to them. You can find him reading books, learning a new language, or playing pool in his free time.
