Consumer engagement is an essential factor for business growth. It is defined as the level of touchpoint and experience that a customer has with your brand, company, product, or service. It is the ongoing interaction between your company and your customer, often offered by you and chosen by the customer.
Since strategies for consumer engagement are evolving and differ from product to product, no app can instantly tell you what you need to learn. And, although it is one small piece of the vast marketing realm, it is frequently ignored. Here we have ten most essential strategies for consumer engagement for 2019.
Use Analytical Systems
There are quite a few affordable and resourceful analytical systems available that make it easy for you to measure product engagement. These Analytical Systems analyze customer engagement through product usage by running reports and building dashboards on different metrics.
These systems help in identifying –
- Where precisely in a customer’s journey, your product is succeeding
- Where it is falling short
- Where you need to experiment
- Where you must implement a new development process
Use quantitative reports and qualitative research tools to solve your problems.
Social Media is the New Ally
Social media is skyrocketing because it is a competitive marketing tool. You can use social media to connect with your consumers and engage them. It is an excellent tool for end-user engagement, as well. Customers also use social media to convey their product-related grievances to the brands, brands need to resolve those issues proactively to create a positive brand image.
Build a Mobile Application
Today, even small, local companies, such as laundry, door-to-door delivery, have their mobile applications. You can quickly drive growth through apps and provide a customized experience to mobile app users. For instance, Big Basket, Swiggy India, and let’s not forget, Flipkart, which offers exclusive discounts and personalized deals for regular users.
All Hands Support
Excellent customer support can set you apart and heighten consumer engagement. Organizations like Stripe, StatusPage.io, Olark, Basecamp, Slack, Customer.io, New Relic and Wistia use a hand in support approach, which implies every person on the team will spend some part of their day, week, or even month interacting directly with their customers to solve any problems.
Announce Features and Improvements in Your App
In-app messages are several times better consumer engagement strategy than emailing. For example, when Swiggy launched their ‘Swiggy Pop – Meals for One,’ they announced the feature to their customers the moment they visited the app, via an in-app pop-up ad, which still shows up at the top of the search section.
Engage Customers in Trial Periods
Free-trial periods prove to be the best time to engage customers with best features, products, and services. There are two types of customers. The first one merely signs-up after seeing a random ad or link on social media. They are not stickers so that you can ignore them. Then there are the original ones, who look for long-term memberships. You need to nudge them towards success by simply asking them questions or offering them something relevant to their search.
Provide an Omnichannel Experience
Omnichannel experience is a multi-channel tactic to marketing, selling, and serving customers. Paytm’s 24/7 support system is categorized in such a way that users can reach the right customer support for an issue without having to press different number keys. Moreover, they have email support, message support, and even FAQs.
You have to think more holistically about your users and customers’ experience and offer different ways of engagement, including mobile, over the phone, desktop, email, in-person, at events or wherever. However, you have to make sure that these experiences are cohesive and work together seamlessly. For example, YouTube allows you to continue watching a video on your mobile app from where you had left it on your desktop site.
Change your NPS Outreach to In-app
NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a helpful metric that measures the loyalty of your customers. It measures customer satisfaction and collects feedback. To calculate NPS, the brand needs to ask a simple question to its customers – how likely they are to recommend the brand, product or service to others.
For instance, a survey to calculate NPS could consist of one or more questions that ask customers how they found their recent purchase experience, what was missing from experience, and how likely they are to recommend the brand, product or service. The right time asking for NPS is right after a user achieves an understanding and workflow or after a series of purchase. Sending in-app NPS is better than repeated email surveys.
Involve Story Telling
One of the world’s popular TV series ended with a new revelation: everything vanishes, everything dies, but a good story remains. Companies are made up of people and while not many businesses use this tactic, giving a peek to behind the scenes of the company can help you come across as a very reputable, authentic, and customer-oriented company. Storytelling helps customer engagement and rebranding. And to really hit the sweet spot, use images, small clips, and videos, and ultimately human voice to connect with people.
Have a Planned and Practiced Customer Development Process
A well-practiced customer development process is beneficial, no matter how successful you are or how large your company is. The process will point out customer pain points that you need to address and feature request that you need to scope at different levels of consumer engagement. Both are inevitable even after years of competing. With a well-planned Customer Development Process, you can also ascertain the products that will further engage your customers.
At its root, Consumer Engagement is about creating various incredible channels and touchpoints for customers. Right from highly engaged customers and loyal followers to bigger pays and lesser bounce rate, the results are magnificent, let’s not forget that.
