Customer engagement is one of the most crucial factors that your business should track. After all, it’s directly correlated with the revenue that you’ll gain. If people aren’t engaging with your website or social media platforms, it’s unlikely that you’ll make any sales.
Research has shown that profitability, revenue, and relationship growth increase significantly when buyers are fully engaged. Fortunately, there are best practices you can implement to ensure that you keep your customers engaged. (1)
Just like any other endeavor, this task will require you to invest time and resources into a developmental campaign. Don’t expect leads and conversions to magically happen overnight. Nonetheless, you’ll reap the benefits soon enough once you’ve put the right foundations in place.
Here are some evergreen tips to help you keep customers engaged:
- Optimize your website
In today’s digital age, your website is your primary tool in attracting your target audience. This fact has become even more pronounced with the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to an increase in online shopping due to travel limits imposed by governing bodies all over the world. (2)
Knowing this, you ensure that your site is optimized to meet the demands of consumers and search engines alike. It can be tricky, and there are lots of factors to consider. But the overarching one is to provide valuable content as well as products and services.
These are the aspects that you should look into:
- Site Speed—Speed matters. When consumers look for solutions, they want to have them right away. If your website doesn’t cater to that need, they can easily find it elsewhere—most likely with your competitors. The ideal page load time should be three seconds or less. You should aim for two seconds if you’re running an e-commerce site. (3)
- Security—Website security is another factor that you should be mindful of. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) mode of communication between browsers and servers was developed to ensure the safe transfer of user data. It’s so important that Google has made it one of their ranking signals since 2014. (4)
- Mobile-Friendliness—With most consumers tethered to their smartphones these days, a majority of searches are performed on mobile. You don’t want to miss out on this significant chunk of the market. That’s why you should check if your website is mobile-friendly and ensure that your site performs well on various screen sizes.
- Optimize multimedia
Along with the technical side of your website, you should also optimize its front end. You can achieve this by getting the most out of your multimedia elements. Adding images and leveraging videos can help startups and small businesses catch and retain the interest of potential customers.
Video, in particular, has become the favorite medium for sharing knowledge. This is because they enable content creators to pack a lot of information into just a few seconds while ensuring that viewers can easily understand the message through audiovisual cues.
- Personalize your messaging
Personalization is another factor that can boost customer engagement for your brand. You may have received marketing emails that address you by your first name. This is a classic example of adding a personal touch to sales pitches.
You can elevate customer experience further by ensuring that a buyer’s journey matches their needs and interests. For instance, you can track the types of products that each user views on your e-commerce site and recommend similar items or ones from relevant categories based on their browsing behavior.
A few tips to help you perfect personalized marketing and increase customer engagement:
- Leverage data—Before you can personalize your messaging, you need to gather data first. You can start by collecting simple information like customer names and locations then move toward more complex data, such as interests, occupations, and other socioeconomic factors.
- Identify customer personas—Once you have data on your customers, you’ll likely get a picture of the type of buyer that will be attracted to what you’re offering. You can create “customer personas,” archetypes that embody the major traits of your target audience according to the data you’ve gathered from user research and web analytics.
- Publish customized content—After determining customer personas, you can then write content that will appeal to their needs and preferences. This way, they’ll feel highly valued and engage with your brand more naturally.
- Create product guides
Engagement shouldn’t stop once customers have completed their purchase. You should continue giving them excellent service by creating product guides, such as video tutorials to help onboard them onto the product. In doing so, you’re ensuring that they can utilize your merchandise to its full potential and reduce any frustrations that may arise from the incorrect use of your products.
These are the type of product guides that can boost engagement and conversions:
- Case studies—This guide includes company-specific data along with descriptions that can give customers a more comprehensive idea of your products and services.
- How-to guides—These offer step-by-step instructions on how buyers can use your products in a real-world scenario.
- Product demo videos—As mentioned above, you can create video tutorials to demonstrate the different specs and functionalities of your merchandise.
- Connect with consumers
Lastly, it’s important to connect with potential customers through your website and social media platforms. With so many companies vying for the attention of consumers, you have to take the first step in reaching out to make them notice you.
Join community groups or enable alerts for hashtags that are relevant to your brand. Then, interact with users that are active in those forums or who are using those hashtags.
For offline engagement, you can promote an inviting atmosphere in your brick-and-mortar store. Boost the welcoming vibe by having your representatives put on a sincere smile for customers, helping the latter with their purchases.
Conclusion
Customer engagement is a crucial factor that businesses should be mindful of. Today, the primary way of reaching and retaining the interest of potential clients is through online platforms, such as your website and presence on social media platforms. Make sure that you optimize your domain and social profiles so that you can interact with consumers, increase conversions, and ultimately boost sales.