The difference between success and failure often comes down to one crucial factor: customer engagement. Did you know that engaged customers are significantly more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend brands to others? Specifically, they are 23% more likely to buy from you again and 13% more likely to recommend your brand to others. [Source: Gallup]
This article is for you if you’re ready to revolutionize your customer relationships and looking for some inspiration to improve customer experience.
Here, we will dive deep into various strategies and how a cutting-edge customer engagement portal can skyrocket your business growth.
What is Customer Engagement and Why is it Critical for Your Bottom Line?
Customer engagement is. the art and science of building meaningful, long-lasting relationships with your customers across every touchpoint of their journey. Keeping customers engaged helps build customer loyalty, increases lifetime value, and provides valuable insights to fuel your business strategies.
Customer engagement is the secret sauce that transforms one-time buyers into brand evangelists. It’s not just about transactions; it’s about creating emotional connections that make your customers feel valued, understood, and excited to be part of your brand’s story.
Investing in customer engagement brings in many benefits, such as:
- Increased ROI: Engaged customers spend 67% more than non-engaged customers
- Higher customer satisfaction: 84% of companies that prioritize customer engagement report an increase in revenue
- Reduced churn: Highly engaged customers are 90% more likely to make another purchase
- Boosted sales: Engaged customers buy 90% more frequently
- Stronger brand presence: 71% of consumers recommend brands after a positive experience
7 Proven Strategies to Supercharge Your Customer Engagement
You can use different channels like social media, emails, and push notifications. Offer additional services like shipping and customer support. Here are 7 powerful strategies to engage with your customers effectively:
1. Create Content Strategy and Share Useful Content
Content isn’t just king – it’s the entire kingdom. Here’s how to rule it:
- Define your buyer personas with laser precision
- Anticipate customer needs, interests, and pain points
- Create a diverse content mix:
Engaging video tutorials
Interactive webinars
Eye-catching animated explainers
In-depth how-to guides
Valuable blog posts
Informative podcasts
Develop a robust content calendar that outlines:
- Content types and themes
- Posting frequency for each channel
- Distribution strategies
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success
2. Gamify Digital Experience
Transform your digital experience into an addictive game that customers can’t resist:
- Host thrilling social media contests with irresistible prizes
- Create interactive quizzes that educate and entertain
- Organize virtual treasure hunts during key sales events
- Implement a points-based loyalty system with exciting rewards
The above image shows how Lifebox Food and Punk and Chancers ran their collaboration contest on Instagram.
3. Collect Customer Feedback
Your customers’ voices are gold – here’s how to mine that treasure:
- Ask targeted questions about their experience
- Listen actively and empathetically
- Close the feedback loop by implementing changes
- Show customers how their input shapes your business
Leverage customer feedback to:
- Refine your products and services
- Improve internal processes
- Train your team more effectively
- Inform your marketing strategies
4. Add Human Touch to Communication
In a world of chatbots and automation, the human touch is your superpower:
- Offer personalized live chat experiences
- Share authentic behind-the-scenes stories
- Engage genuinely on social media
- Develop a unique brand voice and storytelling style
- Leverage video content to showcase real faces and voices
- Start a podcast to have deeper conversations with your audience
You can even humanize your social channels like Flipkart. They have an official Twitter handle where they share updates, stories, and other events happening at Flipkart.
https://twitter.com/workatflipkart?lang=en5. Personalize Customer Experience
Personalization isn’t just a buzzword – it’s the future of customer engagement:
- Leverage AI and machine learning to analyze customer data
- Understand individual preferences, behaviors, and purchase history
- Anticipate needs and offer proactive solutions
- Deliver tailor-made product recommendations
- Craft personalized messages that resonate on an emotional level
Implement personalization across all touchpoints:
- Product recommendations
- Customized deals and offers
- Tailored content and newsletters
- Personalized app experiences
- Individualized customer service
6. Reward and Acknowledge Power Users
Transform your power users into brand ambassadors:
- Identify your top 20% of customers
- Offer exclusive perks and early access to new products
- Involve them in beta testing and product development
- Create a VIP feedback loop for continuous improvement
- Showcase their success stories to inspire others
Launch a next-level loyalty program:
- Tiered rewards for increased engagement
- Experiential perks beyond discounts
- Gamified challenges to boost participation
- Social responsibility initiatives that align with customer values
Starbucks presents the perfect example to drive customer engagement with loyalty programs.
7. Implement Omnichannel Engagement
Use all the possible ways to interact with customers – text messaging or text marketing, social media, website, email, phone, SMS, in-app, call, and so on. Delivering a positive customer experience through all the channels is paramount for success.
Going through these actionable ideas, you might be thinking, “what if I could drive sales, interact with customers, offer discounts, and provide relevant content all in one place?” That’s when a customer engagement portal comes into the picture.
Customer Engagement Portal & Its Importance
A customer engagement portal is a tech solution that provides a secure log-in space with relevant content, communication channels, educational materials, and other features for your customers in one place.
An engagement platform centralizes customer interaction and helps create product experiences that improve customer engagement. They are great for reward systems and to aggregate customer data to deliver excellence.
A customer engagement portal helps automate the following:
- Build an efficient workflow that allows collaboration and customer engagement.
- Form customer segments and deliver a personalized experience.
- Facilitate omni channel communication via different channels like social media, live chat, etc.
- Announce the launch of new features or products.
- Reward users for promoting your brand.
- Define key metrics and measure the output of the communication.
Automating these activities not only helps you streamline workflow but also lifts the load off your customer-facing team. Instead of repetitive tasks, they can focus on developing customer engagement strategies for business growth. Here are a few reasons businesses should go for a customer engagement platform.
Reasons Customer Engagement Portal is Important
Competitive Advantage
Customer experience is the key to business success. According to research, customers are willing to pay 16 percent more if it involves a better customer experience. For that, it’s essential that you interact with your customers, know what they need, and deliver appropriate services.
However, implementing customer engagement strategies requires a lot of work. It’s not a one-time approach. You have to interact with customers consistently, and the portal helps you do that efficiently.
‘You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.’ – Steve Jobs (Apple Founder)
It connects you with your customers in their preferred way—for example, chatbots, in-app messaging, call, self-service, etc. Customer experience gives you an upper hand while dealing with competitors.
Revenue Growth
Businesses want to increase revenue without spending more on customer acquisition, and that’s where custom engagement software is useful.
It helps engage customers, leading to increased product adoption, upgrades, and revenue. Research by Gallup shows that successful engagement helps companies achieve 63 percent lower churn, 55 percent higher wallet share, and 50 percent higher productivity.
Reduced Customer Complaints
Customers want self-service for easy to answer questions. They want to find answers and solve their queries themselves. A customer engagement platform provides access to necessary information along with a rich resource library to help themselves. This, in turn, results in fewer phone calls and emails to respond to. Your team gets more time to focus on delivering better service.
Streamlined Operations
Customers can access the dedicated space any time and from anywhere, making it convenient to manage busy schedules.
You, on the contrary, can see if there are any pending tasks/ requests or more. Customers can communicate with the team internally via chat messages from any device without connecting with the support team on calls.
For better productivity, you and your team can preview the files without leaving the portal. You can manage files, documents, and other important information from your dedicated space and get better clarity of every stage of customer service and business operations.
Tips to Develop Customer Engagement Portal
To develop a great platform, you need to understand the user journey. Know every stage where you interact with your users and what they want to achieve from these interactions.
It will help you discover the customer engagement platform features best suited for your users.
Think of the interactions that will benefit customers through the journey and find answers to these questions:
- Do you need to support customers at every stage?
- At what stage do you interact more with customers?
- What’s your main mode of communication?
- What kind of help/support do customers expect from you?
Find answers to these questions, and you’ll have a clear picture of your requirements. If you need any help, our team of experts can help you identify the best solution for your business, considering the features, business requirements, and market trends.
Must-Have Features of Customer Engagement Portal
To help you select a suitable customer engagement solution, here are the must-have features that should be on the top of your list.
Segmentation Capabilities
To divide customers into small groups for better communication. Categorization helps deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.
Your customer engagement portal should have advanced grouping features based on various factors such as demographics, user persona, user journey analytics, product usage, etc.
With segmentation, instead of broadcasting similar messages to all the customers, you can send relevant, personalized messages to different groups of customers.
Analytics and Tracking
Reports with a smart dashboard that provide all customer related information and help make data-driven decisions.
A tracking feature will help see how customers are interacting across several channels at the same time. With reports and numbers, you can know what’s working and what’s not.
A great customer engagement platform gives you in-depth knowledge about users, such as who the users are, their buying journey, what they search for, favorite features, and more.
Communication Channels
To automate the emails and engage with users. Your engagement platform should have automation features to send emails, reminders, notifications, announcements, and more.
It should have a chatbot and other communication tools like live chat, in-app messaging, and in-app calls for customer engagement. Most importantly, it should have an in-app onboarding tool to personalize user onboarding.
Implement triggered behavioral automation. For example, sending messages to users who perform a certain action or match specific conditions.
Tip: Ensure communication is contextual and to the point. Make messages relevant to customers and timely.
Automation with a Human Touch
Engagement solutions help manage customer support. However, not all requests will be handled automatically. Some will need manual action or human support.
Hence, your customer engagement portal should have a balanced self-service and customer support feature. For example, chatbots and a knowledge base can help customers with simple queries and in-app messaging, live chat to solve complex questions.
Third-Party Integrations
Ensure that your platform communicates with other tools seamlessly. The data should auto-sync, and customers can interact with various channels.
A customer engagement solution with better integration capabilities enhances data utilization across different channels and reduces confusion.
These are the must-have advanced features. Some basic features include:
- Drag and drop builder
- Responsiveness
- Resource center
- Community support
- Ticket generation
The need to connect with customers on an emotional level is never-ending. And if done correctly, it can be advantageous for your business.
A custom-developed engagement portal helps you protect the information while giving customers the full freedom to control and manage their operations. It also helps businesses promote brand loyalty.
CRMJetty can help you leverage all those benefits by developing a custom solution.
About CRMJetty
CRMJetty is a hub of portal solutions. We help businesses with readily available and custom-developed portals well-suited by considering the 8 years of industry experience, market trends, and client requirements.
If you need help in developing a custom customer engagement portal, we can be your helping hand.
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