When it comes to improving your business and increasing revenue then the easiest way to do this is to sort out how you engage with your customers. If you can successfully engage with potential customers in a meaningful way, then this will help drive sales and improve your business. Customer engagement – when done properly – can really help your business get to the top, so it’s not something that you should forget about.
Engaging properly with your customers is a lot harder than it used to be though, however, when done properly it can be incredibly successful. Rather than just dealing with your customer in your store, you should be looking at improving your social media reach via things like email marketing campaigns, live chat etc. These are all things that can help your business succeed. But let’s look at the top three customer engagement trends, to see what your business can be doing to help it succeed.
Conversations Beat Transactions
Obviously, you can’t grow a business just on conversation alone, however, businesses need to realize the importance of supporting long-term, continuous dialogues with their audience. Businesses no longer roll out one big-budget campaign every year. Instead, they attract customers through micro-interactions every day. This is why the voice that consumers have online can make or break you. So, it’s important that before you do anything, you know exactly how you need to go ahead.
The easiest way to make sure that you do exactly what your customers want, is to listen to them. You’ll learn a lot of valuable information about what your customer wants, how you can improve your service and they will be very grateful when you listen to what they ask you. If you decide to ignore them though, then you’ll soon find that you are losing customers, and it won’t do your business any favors.
Delivering Brand Experience
One survey suggests that 93% of customers were more interested in buying an experience, rather than the product itself. This is an important thing that businesses will have to consider as it will affect how they market themselves. Customers don’t just want a product to be sold to them, they expect more from brands now. You need to tell a story and you need to get customers interested in that first before they buy your product.
Why should they buy your product? What’s in it for them? The easiest way to explain is to make use of things like AR and VR to create novel digital experience (something which many big businesses are delving into). It doesn’t even need to be that complicated, instead you can focus all your efforts on creating a well designed and visually appealing website interface, something with tailored discounts and even personalized messaged. The customer wants to feel valued and appreciated, so why not tailor their experience in order to achieve this?
Natural Connections
This one shouldn’t be a surprise to you, as natural connections, such as referral from friends have been the things that have helped businesses succeed. You need to get your business online, and make sure that you get good customer reviews, and peer recommendations. This doesn’t mean that you get one good review on yelp. You need to make sure that you make the most of things like user forums, popular blog, and even Pinterest boards.
There are many ways that you can now get your business’ name out there, you just have to make sure that you do it properly. Remember, to encourage good influencers and referral sources, it more about quality over quantity. You also need to make sure that you utilize your best and most influential referrer to make the most of customer engagement. If you don’t think that your customer engagement is good enough, or you keep getting complaints, then check out this article here for how you can turn those complaints into compliments.