What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is the degree of intensity of the interaction of customers with a company or brand. As customers have many alternatives to almost every brand, customer engagement has become a key performance indicator regarding a company’s ability to foster customer loyalty and encourage long-lasting customer relationships. Customer engagement is built — or harmed — with every brand interaction, both online and offline. Each interaction is an opportunity to provide customers with value and strengthen engagement, by successfully addressing their needs and preferences.

Why is Customer Engagement Important?

Customer engagement is important because it is a strong reflection on the depth of the emotional connection a customer has with a company or brand. The deeper this connection, the more likely it is that a customer will continue spending on the brand – and telling others about it. Given the high cost of acquiring new customers, succeeding at increasing the engagement of existing customers is a key success strategy for any business.

What are Some Customer Engagement Strategies?

Marketers use a variety of strategies to try increase customer engagement with their brands. It is a given that brands need to offer customers the products they want with the service levels they expect, but what else can marketers do? Below are 3 examples of customer engagement strategies.

1. Send Personalized & Relevant Messaging. One way to increase engagement is to consistently communicate with customers in ways that are relevant and appealing. For example, understanding which customers will appreciate which kinds of promotions and incentives – and delivering those messages in a sensitive and welcome way – is sure to increase customer engagement.
2. Be Proactive in Addressing Customers. Another way is to proactively address particular customer experiences soon after they occur. For example, customers tend to respond very favorably if a brand quickly and proactively mitigates a bad experience that they just went through.
3. Incentivize Customers. A third customer engagement strategy is to implement tools for rewards/points programs, membership/loyalty programs and VIP clubs. Incentivizing customers to increase their engagement with a brand helps in two ways: it encourages them to be more engaged in order to achieve goals, and then, once they reach those goals, it provides them with even more reason to remain engaged with the brand.

So, how do you make sure your company is delivering top-notch customer engagement strategies that work? Watch the 3-minute mini-workshop or read the transcript here it to find out.

How is Customer Engagement Measured?

Different types of businesses measure customer engagement in different ways. For example, a retailer will focus primarily on purchase frequency, number of items purchased, total spend and percentage of products returned. The same retailer might also measure engagement with its website/app (e.g., visit frequency, number of pages viewed) and its promotions (e.g., clicks on emails or ads). Another example might be a gaming operator measuring number of days of game play, variety in the games played, number of deposits and withdrawals and responsiveness to incentives.

The Leading Automated Customer Engagement Software

Optimove is the world’s leading Relationship Marketing Hub, combining an advanced customer engagement platform with an automated customer marketing orchestration platform. In a nutshell, Optimove helps marketers implement a systematic approach to planning, executing, measuring and optimizing a complete, highly personalized customer marketing plan. The result is maximized customer engagement, loyalty and lifetime value.

Contact us today to request a Web demo and learn how you can use Optimove to increase customer engagement, reduce customer churn and maximize customer lifetime value.

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