Why is customer engagement important?
Simply put, non-engaged customers lead to high brand attrition. Customers don’t feel the need to stay with a company that doesn’t interest them. On the other hand, businesses that invest wisely in building meaningful relationships with their consumers enjoy long-standing benefits. When leveraged well, client engagement is fruitful at all stages of a buyer’s journey leading from prospecting, acquisition, onboarding, and support. A high level of customer engagement also leads to long-term repeat purchases, customer retention, brand loyalty, and advocacy.
The need to invest your resources in creating a sticky customer engagement and ensuring brand retention becomes very critical at an age when the customer acquisition costs run 4–10 percent high.
The most evident instance of customer engagement and its direct impact on consumer behavior can be found with brands that invest heavily in creating and distributing highly engaging social media and video content. These content are created not just for marketing and branding intent but with an aim to inform, educate, and entertain consumers so that there is some level of emotional involvement for consumers to feel the need to take certain action.
Here’s a visual depiction of the engagement journey that consumers go through when they interact with a brand’s social media content:
But the customer engagement that happens through social media is just one dimension of it—engagement isn’t limited to a brand’s Facebook page or its Twitter posts. Below are some of the different dimensions of customer engagement:
1. Interaction types
The quality of interaction that customers have with a brand says a lot about their involvement. For example, customers checking to ensure the subscription expiry date doesn’t sound much like an engaging interaction compared to when they visit the pricing page for review upgrade options.
2. Interaction frequency
You can establish positive client engagement when you find that customers are a lot engaged with a mobile app when they use it multiple times a day.
3. Level of involvement
A customer who visits your product to change password is not as engaged with your products as much as the customer who exploits all the available features and doesn’t hesitate to ask for more.
4. Purchase frequency
Customers who love your brand and who are deeply engaged with your products are likely to buy from you more frequently.
5. Customer behavior
Highly engaged customers tend to advocate your brands and refer your products to their friends and families when the opportunities present.
What is customer engagement in marketing?
Of all the disciplines that are there in the business world, client engagement is most akin to relationship marketing in its mission and motive. The term customer engagement is, therefore, often thrown around as a marketing function to make it a more overt and proactive business practice. That way, it doesn’t become a dormant experience that comes to life as a reaction only when a customer prompts an action.
In this sense, customer engagement is a set of imminent business activity that is carried out in order to encourage consumers to increase their brand interaction and perform certain actions that lead to repeat purchase, retention, loyalty, or brand endorsement.
Marketers heavily depend on customer relationship management (CRM)—both, a discipline and a system—to improve customer engagement and maintain relationships with customers. A CRM tool allows brands to create a central repository of customer data, trace individual customer interactions, and collaborate within the team.
Other strategies by which marketing teams improve customer engagement is by producing a set of content and experiences that pull consumers in for some level of interaction. For instance, your consumers will enjoy reading and sharing the listicle article your content marketing team might have posted on your business’ Facebook page, titled “7 productivity hacks you can learn from the animal kingdom.” It could be a feedback form you display on your website or a customer success team that you set up to reach out to your existing customers to help them achieve their goals with your product.
Similarly, live chat is one of the best customer engagement channels that your business can use to offer timely, contextual, and proactive interaction. Customer engagement is high when your prospects find answers to their queries in a quick and easy way. Unlike other customer engagement tool, a modern live chat software also doesn’t feel like a traditional business touchpoint—if offers the convenient experience of a messenger that users are familiar using on a daily basis. Live chat works best for marketing and sales because the client engagement at the consideration level of the customer journey is extremely high—prospects are evaluating the product and need a little push to proceed through their decision.
Here is an illustration of different types of brand content or experiences created for customer engagement.