5 Proven Ways to Increase Customer Engagement and Loyalty

If your business’s sales are starting to flag or not meeting your expectations, then you need to go directly to the source of the problem: your market. More accurately, you need to see why your target market isn’t choosing your products. It’s often down to a lack of engagement and the failure to build loyalty. So, what do you do to correct that? Understanding the engagement engine and then using this understanding to develop your marketing actions will help along with these five proven ways to increase customer engagement and loyalty.

What is customer engagement and why it matters

There are several interrelated definitions of customer engagement. Each shared the common thread of interactions between a brand and its target market. However, some definitions are more nuanced, including the level of customer engagement based on the depth and degree of interaction.

But, a definition doesn’t help much in implementing a strategy for increasing customer engagement. Instead, we need to understand which consumer actions reflect engagement.

In social media spaces, customer engagement involves users taking actions that amplify corporate messages. Not only do actions such as retweeting, liking, and sharing help a corporate message reach new markets, but the act of engaging with the brand acts as a tacit endorsement of the brand — a brand recommendation, if you will.

Customer engagement offers several key benefits, including increased customer satisfaction, higher loyalty, improved brand reputation, reduced churn rates, better customer insights, more upselling opportunities, and ultimately, increased revenue by fostering stronger relationships with customers and encouraging repeat business; essentially, it helps companies to build a loyal customer base that actively interacts with the brand and advocates for it.

Enter the customer engagement engine

The underpinning of customer purchases is that it’s a process. From communication theory, we have the AIDA model, an acronym that reflects attention, interest, decision, and action. Consumers progress through these stages prior to making a purchase (the action). The notion behind the engagement engine, which comes from journalism rather than marketing, is that consumers are instrumental in both bringing a product to the attention of other consumers (attention) and motivating others to make a purchase (by sharing information about the product and helping other consumers decide to purchase it), especially in the age of social media.

An engagement engine is a powerful tool driving consumers (whether B2B or B2C) toward a purchase. Hence, it doesn’t replace the funnel but augments it. Consumers still go through the four stages, but it’s the engine that moves them through them rather than brand communications, which are less visible in a world where consumers watch streaming video, where social media dominates their means to acquire information, and where there’s an inherent distrust of anything a brand says.

Now, I don’t blame Northwestern or the J-school for being anemic in their understanding of consumer behavior. They’re both great institutions with stellar reputations. But they’re not marketers, and they don’t have a strong sense of consumer behavior or marketing strategy.

So, let’s delve into this further.

How the engagement engine drives consumers down the conversion funnel

As I said, it used to be brand communications — advertising, PR, salespeople — that moved consumers down the conversion funnel. Now, everyone is in the act.

Today, we find that between 50% and 90% of the purchase decisions occur before the consumer ever sees a salesperson or buys a product on your website. Even business customers make decisions before buying and they like the option to purchase online without seeing a salesperson. IBM proved this when their terminals were commoditized and they sold more than $1 billion of them through IBM Direct. Once a business customer owned some terminals or even mini computers, they didn’t need a salesperson to reorder. It was faster to do it online or by phone.

What does this change mean for brands?

They can’t just produce brand messages to drive sales. They have to provide the information necessary to make decisions. In many cases, all the customer wants/ needs is pricing information.

Amazon is a great example. They provide extensive information about products prior to purchase and their recommendation engine is incredible. By crowdsourcing information from users, they provide the best, most accurate information to drive sales.

How to drive the engagement engine

Brands don’t control messaging using the engagement engine framework — which I think is pretty accurate. That means brands don’t have control anymore but are simply another voice in the mix. And their voices aren’t even the loudest or most persuasive voices. Trained by decades of brand lies and misinformation, consumers now take everything a brand says as suspicious. Brands must work to de-commodify their messages. In other words, brands need to get influencers to spread the good word about their brand rather than advertising their brands.

In the days before computers, word of mouth spread a brand’s reputation (good or bad — although bad spreads faster and farther). But, there were limits to the value of word of mouth since consumer voices were muted. Enter social media. Now, consumer voices are LOUD and can even drown out brand voices. Consumers believe other consumers, even when they’re wrong or unethical. Recently, Amazon sued thousands of brands for posting fake reviews on its site, and consumers face lawsuits for paid or false negative reviews on Yelp in an effort to keep these customer views honest. Despite this, misinformation can quickly dominate, which is why managing your brand reputation online is critical for a brand’s success.

So, what’s a brand to do?

1. monitor online conversations and join those conversations naturally as part of the community
2. understand your target market and what’s most important to them
3. prompt conversations by posting engaging content, especially images and infographics
4. be a good corporate citizen and share your involvement
5. build and engage online communities by recognizing and celebrating consumer voices and sharing your brand messages
6. analyze engagement and use insights to enhance engagement efforts
7. employ SEO to make it easy for potential buyers to find your content
8. craft websites that provide excellent user experiences, making it easy to learn about products and make purchases online
9. understand the mobile platform and provide user experiences optimized for that platform
10. share content from others to position yourself as a thought leader in your product lines and to encourage others to share your content
11. learn how to harness a community of influencers to promote sharing
12. create social customer service teams to address questions, problems, and concerns voiced through social networks 24/7 — create performance metrics to ensure prompt responses and escalate problems
13. identify roadblocks interfering with  purchase intentions and remove them
14. build subscriber lists to keep interested users up-to-date and offer special promotions to encourage purchase

Fundamentally, the engagement engine turns marketing from push communications to listening, responding, and understanding. It makes communications more customer-centric rather than brand-centric.

5 ways to increase customer engagement and build brand loyalty

Invest in customer service

If your customer is left to shop on their own and to succeed or fail in their goals without any assistance, then you are making a mistake. You should seek to increase interactions with your customers, doing it in ways that make your team and their insights readily available but don’t interrupt them too much. FAQs are terribly old-fashioned. Today’s shoppers want a chatbot ready to answer questions whenever they happen to be on the website. They want you to share content that creates customer engagement by providing value in making purchase decisions and getting the most from their purchases.

When customers run into problems, they want help 24/7 on a variety of platforms. Having a chat widget on the site or a helpline they can call can provide the opportunity to help them feel heard and supported, creating positive associations with your business. But, increasingly, customers want support in other communication forms. For instance, some brands offer customer support hours on social media platforms, while others create a ticketing system or offer email as a means for customers to get help.

Consider a rewards program

Loyalty can be built through emotional attachment that develops over time, but tangible benefits tend to generate it a lot more quickly. This is why loyalty programs are so popular in the first place. They are proven to improve customer retention and encourage repeat purchases when done well. Ensure your loyalty program offers incentives that are worth the attention, such as discounts, exclusive products, or special perks, and make it easy to accumulate loyalty points and use them.

The world today is full of loyalty programs, so you need something to help your’s stand out. Think outside the box and make them incredibly simple to use.

Ensure your message is heard

Put your feelers out into the market to see your target customer’s sentiment about your brand. If the response is overwhelmingly along the lines of “I don’t know that brand,” then you need to start implementing some small business marketing ideas immediately. Improve your outreach by ensuring that you’re marketing through all the relevant channels, from social media to influencer marketing. Just as importantly, ensure that you have crafted a brand and voice that is more likely to get noticed with the help of professional designers and writers.

Demonstrate consistent value

Your job isn’t done once you get your customers to make a purchase. You want them to keep coming back and to keep spreading positive word of mouth. As such, maintaining good value through product quality, providing insightful content, and reaching out, such as with email marketing campaigns, can be crucial. You want to keep your brand in the conversation to build that familiarity and loyalty.

Focus on memorable experiences

Brands that go above and beyond to stick in the memory of their customers for positive reasons are those that tend to sink their hooks the deepest into the market. This can be done with deliveries, such as with unexpected thank-you notes or complimentary gifts. It can also be done by addressing common pain points for your customers, even when they’re not directly linked to your main products and services.

Conclusion

With the tips above, you can ensure that you’re going enough to keep your customers engaged and, as a result, a lot more likely to keep shopping with you. Take a fine-toothed comb to your business, finding any elements that put a wrinkle in your customer’s experience so you can straighten them out.

Need marketing help to support business growth?

We welcome the opportunity to show you how we can make your marketing SIZZLE with our data-driven, results-oriented marketing strategies.  Sign up for our FREE newsletter, get our FREE guide to creating an awesome website, or contact us for more information on hiring us.

Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.