Customer engagement involves the art of getting to know your customers, along with their wants and needs so that you can best serve them as a business.
Why would any business do such a thing?
Does beating the competition, increased customer loyalty and ultimately, more sales sound appealing?
If so, customer engagement is just the trick, and it’s something every business can (and should!) be doing to stay ahead.
For those new to customer engagement, here is everything you need to know, including how to engage and delight your customers through EcoSend.
What Is Customer Engagement?
In a nutshell, customer engagement is the equivalent of providing a concierge service to your customers.
Everything begins by storing all customer data (securely) on a customer engagement platform. This way, you can see information about the customer including their name, job title, location, sales history and overall preferences.
With this information in mind, businesses can create a seamless experience when that customer contacts the business.
But more than this, customer engagement allows businesses to best cater to customers by providing relevant information, products or services when reaching out to them.
As a result, every interaction between that business and the customer feels super personalised.
What to think about when performing customer engagement:
How can I make the customer experience even better?
What methods can I use to reward customers?
What techniques would allow my business to get ahead of the competition?
How can I personalise my communication with each customer?
Wait, Isn’t Customer Engagement The Same As Customer Service?
Nope. Both customer engagement and customer service are important, but it’s good to note they aren’t the same things.
Customer service is primarily there to respond to customers when they have positive or negative feedback about a service. In many instances, customer service is the last line of defence before customer churn happens.
On the other hand, customer engagement is when a business goes out of its way to engage with customers.
Customer engagement isn’t posting on social media by the way (that's straight up customer communication). Instead, customer engagement involves contacting customers directly with relevant, helpful or positive interactions to improve their overall experience of the company.
How To Do Customer Engagement
To be able to perform customer engagement, you need a dedicated platform (such as EcoSend!) and a customer engagement strategy.
Once you’ve chosen your platform, let’s talk strategy.
Examples of customer engagement could include:
Letting customers know if their favourite products are on sale or back in stock.
Sending personalised offers, incentives, free gifts or birthday greetings.
Conducting feedback surveys to check if the customer is happy with any recent experiences and contacting them personally if they aren’t.
Creating reward programs that reward customers for repeat business.
Information on how customers can get the most out of their purchase or service.
Here’s another example from the EcoSend team: We provide free product demos of our email marketing and customer engagement software. We’ll also personally assist companies throughout the migration process, again for free. This is how we ensure customers are truly satisfied with our product. Businesses can also follow a similar format tailored to the products or services they provide.
Why Is Customer Engagement Important?
Don’t just take our word for it. According to Salesforce, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
Think about it from the perspective of yourself when you’re on the customer side of the debate.
Customer Engagement Scenario:
Say your dentist has 6 locations, and the admin isn’t processed in your usual branch but at the head office.
If you want to query an invoice with the head office, you will be contacting a different branch. So how will they know your details?
Explaining everything from scratch to each new person would soon get tedious. Maybe you’ll even give up trying and head to a competitor instead.
However, if that dentist uses a customer engagement platform, your details instantly show up no matter which location you call, since your information is tied to your phone number.
So even on the days when you call in pain needing an urgent appointment, or if you just want to schedule a regular checkup - the entire process only takes seconds to arrange.
Likewise, when an appointment is due, customer engagement means they’ll reach out to you to schedule, and so on.
All in all?: The use of customer engagement improves the entire experience for the customer and reduces the chance of churn for the business due to ineffective practices.
Now rinse and repeat for any business type that is looking to engage, delight and retain its customers!
For instance, best serving your SaaS customers, or understanding your ecommerce shoppers - every business can do customer engagement and succeed as a result.
EcoSend - The Customer Engagement Platform That Lowers Your Carbon Footprint
EcoSend is the world’s first sustainable email marketing platform that rolls email marketing and customer engagement into one simple interface.
Not only does using EcoSend lower your digital carbon footprint, but our tool gives you everything you need to best understand your customers.
Best of all? You can grab a free trial of EcoSend to try before you buy.
Interested in that personalised demo we mentioned above? Reach out to us (opens a new tab) and we’ll be with you shortly.
