Usually, when we think of customer relations, we refer to support and service. Both customer service and customer support teams should be cost-effective and actually interested in helping customers get exactly what they need.

Service and support, however, are not the only components of customer relations.

If you want to retain customers, have good customer interaction, and provide the best customer experience possible, you should demonstrate that you sincerely care not only about your customers’ money but also about them.

You should build strong long-term relations, so you need to engage with your customers on a regular basis.

The value of customer engagement is perfectly illustrated by the statistics: as much as 80% of consumers are likely to choose a brand that stimulates engagement with personalized experiences. Obviously, well-crafted engagement strategies combined with the right software can make a huge difference for a company.

If you’re interested in the development of your business, you need to make sure that your marketing strategies work effectively across different channels, and that your audience is engaged. You want a strong customer base and effective customer retention.

In this article, we will consider some key components of effective customer engagement and methods that can help you increase it.

  • What Is Customer Engagement? 🤔
  • How To Create A Customer Engagement Strategy 🙇🏻‍♀️
  • Key Metrics to Help You Execute On The Customer Engagement Strategy 📊
  • Conclusion 💁🏼‍♀️
  • Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra). For more information, read our affiliate disclosure.

    What Is Customer Engagement? 🤔

    First, let’s think of the very concept of customer engagement and its role in marketing. Customer engagement is all about interaction and communication.

    When you build relationships with your customers, you need to maintain effective consistent communication. Customer engagement reflects the state of your relationships with customers and customer loyalty and the success of communication.

    The level of customer engagement and customer satisfaction depends on your ability to choose the right approaches. For instance, a solid customer engagement strategy is personalization.

    Personalized communication helps brands provide relevant and engaging content that is tailored to their audience’s interests and has a higher chance of creating a consistent customer experience.

    However, there is no single method that could solve all problems at once whilst boosting your customer engagement in no time. Your main goal should be to provide the best customer experience possible.

    Your customers should also be interested in your content, interacting with your brand on a regular basis. For instance, you can start a blog. According to statistics, if you write 51 blog posts, you’ll be able to increase your website traffic by 77%.

    Customer engagement refers to interacting with your existing and potential customers through different channels in order to strengthen relationships with them.

    Marketing tactics that are based on customer engagement enable businesses to provide additional value, delivering relevant, timely, and personalized messages.

    Personalization is a strong customer engagement strategy that stands out. However, there are also many other approaches aimed to improve brands’ relationships with customers and to decrease customer churn.

    We will consider some examples of successful customer engagement strategies, but first, let’s figure out how to measure your customer engagement. You need to measure the right metrics to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts and to understand what areas of your strategies need to be improved.

    How To Create A Customer Engagement Strategy? 🙇🏻‍♀️

    Build Your Brand Voice 😎

    No matter what niche you’re working in, the chances are that you have many competitors. It’s not enough to just offer good products or services.

    People will choose you if they like your brand and if this brand resonates with their values, needs, and preferences. A unique brand voice will help your company stand out and make it more relatable and memorable.

    A distinctive brand voice will help your brand become a thought leader with loyal customers.

    Use Personalized Recommendations 💁🏼‍♀️

    Personalized recommendations are a powerful tool that can help you not only increase customer engagement but also boost your sales in no time. For example, after Amazon introduced personalized recommendations, its sales grew by 29%.

    Personalized recommendations help your customers get exactly what they need. They also make the overall customer experience more seamless.

    We recommend that you don’t recommend random products. The data-driven approach became so popular because it’s effective.

    Personalized recommendations that are based on your customers’ online behavior and preferences can help you connect with your customers in a more personal way and encourage them to make a purchase.

    We also suggest that you test your recommendations so that you can find the best place on your website to show them and the best time so that your audience will be most likely to make a purchase after seeing them.

    Use Customer History to Create Content 📝

    You can use customer surveys to create content based on your customers’ purchases. There are benefits of customer engagement and good customer communication with this approach.

    Your suggestions are aimed to enhance customer experience and to add a personal touch, and your content has a similar purpose.

    You can use insights into your customers’ behavior and preferences as a source of inspiration when creating the content for your website.

    Image Source: Spotify

    A great example of a brand that uses customer data to provide relevant content is spotify.com. For instance, this platform creates a Discover Weekly playlist for each particular user.

    An AI algorithm analyzes your tastes and creates a playlist based on the tracks you’ve listened to, while also adding similar tracks from other artists. This way, Spotify helps users discover more content that they might enjoy, and this approach also enables the company to keep users engaged.

    Run Surveys 🧐

    Surveys are a good tool for gaining an engaged customer/s. They enable you to learn what your customers think of your products and services so you can figure out what areas of your business need to be improved, you develop a better connection with customers this way.

    Besides, when you ask your customers for their opinion, you demonstrate that you’re genuinely interested in providing the best customer experience possible. As a result, surveys can increase customer engagement.

    An example of a customer feedback survey by Paperform

    Surveys will help you determine what exactly customers like about your brand so that you can focus on the features and offers that drive the most profit.

    We recommend that you ask your customers to complete a survey after purchase so their customer experience will still be fresh in their memory. You may also provide some motivation so that your customers will be interested in completing surveys.

    Use Interactive Videos 📹

    Interactive videos can help you not only increase user engagement but also educate your customers and entertain them, leading to happier customers. Besides, interactive videos offer businesses a great opportunity to use their creativity.

    This way, you can make your brand stand out and make your website visitors' experience as engaging and memorable as possible.

    Interactive content is always a good choice for user engagement and the user journey.

    For example, Honda created an interactive video "The Other Side" so that users can compare to different realities as perceived by the same driver. Users can tap their screens or hold the R button on the keyboard to switch between the alternate realities.

    When using interactive videos, you can also encourage viewers to replay them. Some of them may get distracted, and you should encourage them to get back to your video and watch it when they'll be able to focus on it.

    We also recommend that you make sure that when you're creating videos, as well as the rest of your content, it's all optimized for different devices to have a wide customer influence.

    The element of interactivity can work wonders when it comes to increasing customer engagement, so if you can add any interactive elements to your website, you should do it. Your visitors will likely spend more time on your site, and they'll be able to interact with your brand in real-time.

    Key Metrics To Help You Execute On The Customer Engagement Strategy 📊

    Measure Time on Site ⏱

    This is one of the most important metrics that reflects the success of your customer engagement strategy. In addition, if you increase the time visitors spend on your website, you’ll also improve the performance of your website in search engines.

    The more time people spend on your website reading about your products or services, the more likely they will make a purchase. Your content creation should also be good and appeal to your customer base.

    Reduce Bounce Rate 👍🏼

    This metric is very important if you want to properly measure the client engagement level. It reflects how engaging your web pages are.

    When you keep your website visitors engaged, they are likely to check out different content and to read a few articles. In this case, your bounce rate will be lower than if they leave your website quickly.

    According to Google, you can measure your bounce rate if you divide your total number of single-page sessions by the number of website sessions. Single-page sessions are sessions that don’t demonstrate any hits after the first one, and they last zero seconds.

    We also recommend that you keep in mind that high bounce rates are not necessarily bad. However, measuring your bounce rate is really important if the success of your business depends on how many pages your visitors see.

    For instance, this is the case when businesses use their home pages to lead visitors to other pages on the website.

    If people simply visit your home page without actually checking out your products or services, all the work you’ve put into lead generation will go to waste  resulting in a low engagement rate, as well as low profits.

    Keep Tabs on Likes, Comments, and Shares on Social Media 🕵🏽

    Many companies use social networks to share content dedicated to their products and services. The way people react to your social media and other communication channels content can illustrate the effectiveness of your customer engagement strategy.

    Likes, comments, and shares are more than just statistics, as they reflect what your existing and potential customers think of your brand.

    If somebody likes your products or services, they will likely leave comments asking about the price or features. They may also share your content and recommend your products or services to their friends and followers.

    We recommend that you make sure to monitor your comments. First, the number of comments reflects the engagement level. Secondly, you should make sure to actually read comments to understand how many of them are positive or negative.

    Another metric that used to be considered important is the number of followers. However, given the popularity of fake accounts and fake followers, the number of followers no longer illustrates customer engagement.

    It’s important to know how many real followers actually interact with your content.

    Check on Monthly Active Users 🙌🏽

    The number of your monthly active users can also help you better understand the level of customer engagement.

    If you check out how many people visit your website every month, you’ll be able to see whether or not your products or services actually resonate with your target audience.

    We also recommend that you check out your daily users and compare these numbers so that you can see how many people don’t return to your website.

    Keeping an eye on returning users helps with keeping a high retention rate and helps you ensure that you are creating relevant content that allows for opportunities for engagement.

    Monitor Pages Per Session 🖥

    Pages per session are a metric that reflects the average number of pages users browse through on your website.

    This metric can help you understand whether or not your website content resonates with the target audience, as well as whether or not they are interested in purchasing your products or services.

    A high number of pages per session will also make your website perform better in search engines because this parameter indicates that people are interested not only in a certain page but also in the website, in general.

    Increase Return Frequency 👩🏽‍💻

    If people purchase your products and then don’t return, it means that there is something you should be concerned about.

    We recommend that you track how often users return so that you know how frequently people come to your brand. It is a competitive market out there, so knowing if something of yours is working is important.

    Of course, this metric also depends on the types of your products or services.

    However, if you see that your customers return frequently, it certainly means that the engagement level is high. In contrast, if you realize that they could return more frequently, you may want to improve your digital marketing strategies and interactive content.

    Keep an Eye on App Usage 📲

    Online purchases from smartphones are expected to grow by 18% every year until 2023. Therefore, you should make sure to provide the best mobile experience possible and to measure customer engagement for mobile.

    We recommend that you monitor your number of app downloads. Many eCommerce businesses and other companies have their mobile apps, and if your competitors have them, you should have one too.

    The number of app downloads will help you evaluate customer engagement. However, we also recommend that you monitor the usage of your app.

    Once people have downloaded your app, you can send them notifications about your offers, and you can also see whether they use it or not, the real time engagement, is it high or low?

    Various analytics tools can help you see when users open your app and how they interact with it. This way, you’ll be able to measure customer engagement much more accurately than when considering the number of downloads.

    Conclusion 💁🏼‍♀️

    Customer engagement is crucial for every company's success. It's not enough to just tell your customers about your products or services.

    If you want your business to grow, you should make sure to retain your existing customers and to engage with your prospects on a regular basis.

    No matter what your industry is, the chances are that you have many competitors, and if they have a higher level of customer engagement, consumers will likely choose them.

    Consumers like to do business with brands that can not only talk about the advantages of their products but also establish a genuine connection with their audience.

    Building beneficial relationships that foster a connection between customers and you is vital, and is one of the basics of customer engagement.

    People who visit your website shouldn't just check your prices and go away. You must make their customer experience as engaging as possible, from the moment they see your brand for the first time and to the moment they make a purchase.

    You should also stay in touch with them afterward so that they can become your loyal customers or even recommend your brand to their friends.

    We hope that our tips will help you increase customer engagement and make your brand more attractive to potential customers.

    If you create an effective content strategy and listen to your customers, you'll be able to make sure that people get the best customer experience. You'll establish a connection with your audience, and it will be much easier for you to convert them into customers.