6 Customer Engagement Tactics to Boost Profits

No matter which industry you’re in, a customer-centric approach is always going to grant you a giant leap in your profits and brand reputation.

This is why top marketers today are looking for new tactics to upgrade their strategies to make their customers’ journeys more engaging and humanized.

In fact, research shows that customers who are fully engaged with your brand are likely to contribute 23% higher share in revenue, profitability, and relationship growth! 

Customer engagement can be the missing piece in your marketing strategy and, once done right, can lead to massive improvements in your business profits.

Hence, there’s little doubt that amplifying your customer engagement through advanced technologies and data is the best investment that you can make today! 

Let’s look at some new-age strategies to boost your customer engagement starting today.

1. Amplify User Experience

A survey by SuperOffice shows that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience! Hence, customer experience is not something that should be taken lightly by businesses.

Here are a few ways in which you can amp up your customer experience:

1. Best possible onboarding experience – Onboarding is the first experience that your consumers have with you. Hence providing a comprehensive and smooth onboarding experience is imperative. Offer in-depth training, live-demos, and continuously check in on your customers to ensure they enjoy the experience.
2. Reward loyal customers – Your loyal customers and brand advocates are those who bring in referrals for your business and put in a good word about your company with other potential customers. A bad experience can completely turn this around. So make them feel special and keep in constant touch. Most importantly, reward them with special offers and discounts to retain them for a lifetime.
3. Win-back about-to-churn customers – About-to-churn customers are likely to leave your brand either because they have not been using your products or had a bad experience with you. Reach out to them personally, address their concerns, and win them back.
4. Use feedback to update your products – Listening to what your customers have to say, be it good or bad, can give you some useful insights. If your customers need more of something or less of something, it’s best to address their feedback and update your products accordingly.

2. Build Strong Customer Relationships/Use a Powerful CRM

With the amount of information and the number of options available today, a strong customer relationship is what makes successful brands stand out. Focusing only on the acquisition and not nurturing existing customers can never get you far.

But with the number of customer engagement platforms available today, managing customer relationships can become quite challenging. Hence, an advanced CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution can lead to a massive boost in your profits.

Here a few ways in which customer engagement can be amplified using a CRM:

1. Manage a vast database of customers at a commonplace – Your prospects have likely had multiple interactions with you through emails, phone calls, social media, etc. Managing all this can be a piece of cake if you use a CRM that can pull up your consumers’ entire history within minutes.
2. Immediately respond to customer complaints – Your customers are likely to use social media platforms to give negative feedback or make complaints. Using a CRM, your team can keep track of all such customer complaints and provide immediate responses to avoid angry customers.
3. AI-based analytics to optimize campaign performance – A powerful AI-based CRM will provide you with vital analytics that can help you fine-tune your marketing campaigns. You can personalize and target specific customer segments to maximize your campaign ROI.
4. Nurture customers through personalized communication – People always want to feel special and valued. This is why personalization wins the game when it comes to marketing. AI-powered CRM can help you create target lists based on demographics, age, and gender. You can use this data to have personalized interactions with your potential customers to gain maximum conversion rates.

3. Proactive Customer Support

Gone are the days when merely reacting to customer queries, complaints, and feedback was enough. Today, customer expectations have gone through the roof, and hence a more proactive approach towards customer support is the need of the hour.

As mentioned in the point above, customers are growing more and more impatient by the day. Hence, it is super important for you to be ready on your toes 24/7 to address your customers’ concerns.

AI-based solutions such as chatbots, live chat, and co-browsing can help provide round-the-clock support to your customers. By enhancing your customer support this way, you can drastically reduce your customer churn rates and thus increase your profits.

4. Follow Omnichannel Social Media Strategy

An omnichannel marketing strategy refers to providing a seamless customer experience across all platforms. You can put across a unified message that represents your brand and engage with customers across multiple channels.

Research says that 78% of customers prefer omnichannel engagement! So, let’s look at some ways in which you can provide a seamless omnichannel engagement to your customers:

1. Use CRM data – An advanced CRM tool can provide intelligent insights to you about your customers. Using this data, you can improve your social media marketing strategies across multiple channels to provide the best possible customer experience.
2. Actively engage with customers on social media – Active engagement on social media can lead to highly valuable conversations between you and your prospects. Hence, go the extra mile and engage with prospects on social media by replying to comments, providing suggestions, and adding value to them. Social media lives and webinars can also generate a significant amount of engagement on social media. Hence they are worth a try!
3. Hashtag research – Hashtags can make or break your social media reach and engagement. Hence always research and create lots of optimal hashtags for every post you put out on social media.
4. Encourage user-generated content – Many businesses today, especially B2C, generate a vast majority of leads through user-generated content. All you need to do is create a brand-specific hashtag and encourage people to put out content. When done right, you’ll be able to get a lot of new leads your way.
5. Create contests – Who doesn’t love contests and giveaways! Set aside a budget, create innovative contests, and promote them on all channels. Create lots of hype around it, and the kind of engagement you’ll see will be unbelievable!
6. Create fun forms of content – Put out content that is interesting and super-fun and instantly catch your prospects’ attention, such as polls, quizzes, illustrations, exciting videos. This kind of engagement can considerably improve your lead generation.

5. Focus on Email Marketing

Email marketing is considered as the best channel for customer acquisition and retention for most SMBs today. According to a 2019 report, email marketing can give you an average return as high as £42 for every 1£ spent!

1. Don’t spam, Add value – Emails that you send to your customers shouldn’t always be promotional and have a commercial intent. Instead, try sending emails with the sole purpose of adding value to your customers. Try to create special and more valuable content exclusively for your email subscribers. This way, you are likely to gain more subscribers.
2. Go beyond the first name – Personalization is not just restricted to adding the first name to your emails. Using email marketing tools, you can send emails that are personalized based on demographics, profession, customer’s buyer journey stage, and many more. This way, you will see a rapid increase in your email open and response rates.
3. Add clear CTAs – Never send emails without a call to action. You can ask your subscribers to hit reply to the emails to start a super-valuable conversation with your leads.

6. Use Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is, unfortunately, not given the amount of attention that it deserves. Influencers can create the right buzz for your company. They can expose you to a whole new set of audience, which in turn can expand your brand’s reach like never before. Hence, you should give influencer marketing a try if you haven’t done it already.

You can start by identifying top influencers in your industry whose audience is likely to be interested in your products. Next, reach out to them and collaborate with them to create fun and entertaining content. Analyze the metrics to find the influencers that bring the maximum profits for your company and pivot your strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

Today, customers value human beings more than brands. Hence, adding a human touch to all customer touchpoints can change your marketing game forever.

So start today and apply these customer engagement tactics to your marketing campaigns, and you’ll definitely see a considerable boost in your company’s profits.

This post was written by Gaurav Belani, a senior SEO and content marketing analyst at Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. He likes sharing his knowledge in a wide range of domains ranging from business, marketing, technology, ecommerce to human capital management and much more. His work is featured in several authoritative  publications. Connect with him on Twitter at @belanigaurav.