With substantial competition across every industry, it has never been more important for businesses to improve their customer engagement strategy.
And as a business, what better way to engage with your customers than through your various marketing channels?
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement involves more than responding to complaint emails or simply creating an Instagram poll from time to time. In its essence, customer engagement involves the various interactions your business has with your existing and prospective clients.
The purpose is to establish a lasting relationship with your consumers. Effective customer engagement means higher customer retention – something every business fights for.
With nearly 2/3’s of businesses profiting on effective customer engagement, you can take part in that as well. Below we’ve compiled a list of the best marketing strategies you can do in 2021 to improve your customer engagement.
Eight Effective Marketing Strategies
Survey Texting
Businesses focus too much on analytics, they forget about how convenient, simple and useful a customer survey can be. It’s probably why 39% of companies don’t ask for customer feedback on their experience.
Customer surveys are a great way to engage with your existing clients – it shows that you care about their opinions. If you find it exhausting to create an email survey, there are other ways. For example, you can utilize business texting to send out customer feedback surveys.
For one, the average American spends around 4 hours on their phones. Mobile devices are also taking over by a storm. As such, there’s a greater chance these surveys reach your customers when you do it through business texting. Secondly, it makes the process a lot quicker and easy for you.
At Text My Main Number, we offer the option of conducting survey clients over landline texting. Simply create and send out a mass survey to those in your contact lists and that’s all it takes
Interact in the Comment Section
One of the best ways to engage with customers is by personally responding to some of their comments. Scroll down to the comments on your Instagram posts, YouTube and Facebook Videos.
Maybe they were curious about your product, perhaps they wanted to compliment the new website layout. Whatever it is, it doesn’t get more personal than responding to their comments and suggestions.
Direct responses exemplify your efforts as a business in building a genuine relationship with your existing clientele. Take the time to respond – not to all of the comments but the few that stand out to you.
Offer Relatable Content
To get customers engaged and interested in your business, they need to find value in what you have to offer. This could be your product/service or your social media content.
To create relatable social media content you need to:
- Know who your target audience is
- Understand what appeals to that demographic
- Provide content that has an emotional or educational value: anything that resonates with that audience.
When you create content that appeals to your audience, you will see a spike in engagement levels. Your posts will get more likes, shares, and comments as a result. Naturally, more people will become aware of your business as well.
Create Live Video
During the pandemic, businesses have witnessed an uptick in engagement with Facebook Live and Instagram Live videos. People comment ten times more on live videos than on a standard video.
Live videos allow you to respond and interact with your clients in real-time. Questions, concerns, appreciation comments – you can reply to it all while live streaming. It’s the best outlet to engage with clients and develop a genuine relationship with them as well. These live videos give customers a sense of your brand, your values and the face behind the business.
To continue the engagement levels, use your business texting platform after the Livestream. Take this opportunity to thank those who tuned in and promote the next session.
Business Texting
Mobile platforms are taking over with more than 5 billion people using their phones every day. So why not take a powerful medium like text messaging to interact with your customers?
Business texting is taking over by a storm. 98% of text messages are opened and read – this is drastically higher than emails which only have a 20% open rate. This is why more businesses integrate business texting into their marketing strategy.
Use mass text messaging to remind your clients about flash sales, promotional content, or the latest updates to your website. Landline texting allows you to reach your customers quickly and efficiently.
For small business owners, there are many benefits that business texting offers for small businesses. Better yet, Text My Main Numbers gives you a plethora of templates so you can efficiently send a reminder to your clients.
Let the Customer Journey Guide Your Marketing
Make sure that the foundation of your marketing strategy is guided by the customer journey. You can create as many customer profiles as you need. Understanding how your customer behaves helps you brainstorm relevant customer engagement strategies to target your audience.
You will also learn how to better engage with your target audience when you’ve mapped out the customer journey. For example, gen Z and millennials rarely use Facebook in comparison to the older generation. Knowing this allows you to create content on platforms that better target your audience.
Run Contests
Your customers should be rewarded. While we emphasize establishing an emotional connection with your customers, there’s nothing wrong with holding a contest from time to time. Contests generate huge engagement. It’s a positive situation for both you as a business and your customers as well.
You can use your business texting number to send out notifications for the contest. For example, a reminder of the requirements, when it’s closing, etc. Landline texting is an efficient way to communicate with all your clients from Canada and the USA to remind them of your offerings.
Here’s how to run a simple contest on Instagram:
- Know the rules of the contest: what exactly do customers have to do to win?
- Make sure you have the prize ready.
- Create an eye-catching Instagram post with the guidelines listed out.
- Select a winner based on the requirements and announce it on your socials.
Team up with Other Businesses
You can grow your audience by so much more when you team up with like-minded businesses. This increases your business exposure as your partner’s customers gain awareness of who you are and vice versa. You can partner together to hold a contest, Livestream a behind the scenes and so much more.
While you don’t have to work on a particular project together, you can use the other business’s platform to promote your products.
The emphasis and importance of customer engagement are not going anywhere any time soon. Thankfully, there are many routes you can take to strengthen your current marketing strategy to better engage with your customers. Once you integrate the tips and strategies mentioned above into your business, your customers will stick around for the long haul.
