Welcome to your complete guide to customer engagement marketing! Discover how to grow and maintain customer relationships at scale with a successful customer engagement strategy.
It feels odd that we live in a world where 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs, but only 34% of them do. And while almost everyone agrees that customer engagement significantly contributes to business profitability, not enough brands have a marketing brand engagement strategy that works.
This is because striking the right balance is hard. While customers expect a personalised experience, they also value their privacy and personal data more than ever. And once you’ve got the balance, it can be challenging to create programs that scale globally.
But we continue to strive towards delivering these types of experiences because engaged customers are valuable. It’s thought that fully engaged customers represent a 23% higher share in profitability, revenue, and relationship growth. They’re easier and cheaper to convert into sales. So, this guide will help you understand customer engagement, build a scalable strategy, and make the most of the latest martech innovations to power it.
Let’s get started.
Gartner defines customer engagement as “the process of interacting with customers through varied channels to develop and strengthen a relationship with them.” Customer engagement marketing means keeping customers engaged through their journey and it is crucial as it provides marketers with a range of invaluable benefits, including:
There are many ways to improve marketing brand engagement. Throughout their journey, a customer may have multiple online and offline touchpoints from an in-store display, commercial, social engagement, to purchase. Great customer engagement ensures that every touchpoint is meaningful and builds towards a specific action or objective outlined in your strategy.And remember: customer engagement is an upward spiral. As you pull customers in, they become more closely connected to your brand and they become even more engaged. The more engaged they are, there’s a higher likelihood of repeat purchases and increased brand loyalty. It’s a continuous, positive feedback loop that you can enhance with robust customer engagement platforms. After reading the guide, don't forget to also see 6 Customer Engagement Examples here.
Why are engaged customers so valuable? It’s simple: they perform actions that benefit your brand organically. Like any great relationship, they pull their weight and put in the effort.
Now that we know why customer engagement is so important, let’s look at how to build a scalable customer engagement strategy. This will vary depending on your business, but you can break the process into 8 clear steps:
Engagement can take many forms, so it’s important to decide what behavior you want to drive. Do you want to increase customer activity within the product and keep users engaged longer? Or do you want to build a community to increase the power and effect of your MVP brand advocates?A clear outline of outcomes allows you to identify the success metrics that measure your progress towards better customer engagement. While the definition of customer engagement marketing is vague and open to interpretation, the metrics to measure engagement shouldn’t be.
Data should drive everything that follows, not hunches or intuition. Thanks to advances in technology, it’s never been easier to capture customer data in some form or other. No matter if brands have historic data to work from, customers are always changing. So, keep your data up to date if you don’t want to fall behind!
Most brands will have historic data to work from, but others may need to capture it anew. Either way, up-to-date and accurate customer data is key to a successful customer engagement strategy.
There are four types of customer data: Zero-Party, First-Party, Second-Party, and Third-Party.The type of data you have depends on how many entities are between you and the course of the data. For example: third-party customer data could be acquired from a market research agency, while zero-party data is given to you directly and willingly from the customer.
Customer engagement data is typically first- or zero-party because it’s data that’s captured when a customer interacts directly with a brand.
First-Party Data: Data from your audience. First-party data is passively collected from customers via a brand’s properties – social media, point-of-sale, website/app visitors, and data that aggregates into your CRM. Customers implicitly provide consent to first-party data collection as they directly engage with a brand.
Zero-Party (Explicit) Data: Data your customer proactively shares. Zero-party data is that which a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand. It can include delivery preferences, purchase intentions, personal context, or how the customer wants the brand to recognize them. This data is especially valuable because it requires a customer to trust a brand enough to provide specific and personal data. The more zero-party data you acquire, the richer and more contextual your dataset becomes. This can allow you to create highly personalized and emotionally engaging customer experiences.
These are the preferred types of data for brands because they’re the most personal – instead of capturing a general feeling of the customer base, you’re gathering specific datapoints from individuals, which you can use to create hyperpersonalized brand experiences. To collect customer data, many brands already have existing sources they can tap into. This includes product finders, quizzes, contests and promotions, surveys, digital campaigns, promotions, chatbots, and email preference centers.
For some brands, customer data can be trapped in specific departments. This leads to a situation where sales, marketing, customer support, product development, and the board all have a different impression of what the perfect buyer looks like. Customer engagement transcends all departmental silos because every touchpoint is an opportunity to build a relationship.
Pull all your customer data channels together and bring governance and standardization to the raw information you collect. This won’t give you a single view of the customer, but it will give you a comprehensive dataset for each department to build their own. For us in marketing, it provides insight into a key aspect of the customer experience: the post-sales activity that’s often ignored. By addressing pain points before a transaction, you secure a better experience for your customer post-transaction and therefore better engagement.
It’s amazing the things you learn about your customers when you look. And you need to look hard. Go beyond purchase data and explore basket-level data to develop a richer understanding of how your products are bought in context.
For example: Starbucks realized that when people bought Starbucks coffee in-store, they also bought bananas. So, Starbucks asked to put some of their items by bananas to improve sales.
The insights that inform your customer engagement strategy will be determined by your outcomes, but always bring a structured approach to your consumer engagement data analysis. And don’t neglect the qualitative data from surveys and direct feedback in your analysis.
How you segment your data depends on your customer engagement strategy. For example, demographic segmentation models will use different segments to behavioral models.
Segmentation makes it easy to tailor and personalize your marketing, service, and sales efforts to the needs of specific groups. This helps boost customer loyalty and conversions.
The more detailed your customer profile, the better the personalization.
72% of consumers only interact with highly personalized content. Given these lofty expectations, brands must be proactive and offer personalized experiences. Don't let your customer pick from a list of things and hope they see something they like.
Consider Netflix – not only do they present personalized options based on your view history and ratings, the cards you see are tailored to your tastes.
Segmentation allows you to personalize your messaging effectively, so your customers feel more connected to your brand. Create content that empathises with your customers’ fears, aspirations, and specific needs to make your brand more relevant to their lives. But since everyone is doing this, brands that want to stand out need to go deeper. Zero-party data allows you to zoom in on the needs of an individual, so you can build a 1-2-1 relationship that creates true advocacy.
Now, if you have 100,000 customers doesn’t this mean that you must create 100,000 times as much content?
Well… yes. But not always.
A large enough dataset will allow you to find similarities between groups and you can create content based on your segmentation. But, the closer you can get to individualization, the better.
Fortunately, marketers have access to sophisticated martech that makes it easier to quickly create personalized content at scale if customer data is present and property tagged and attributed.
Customer engagement is the responsibility of the whole business – not just Marketing. Why? Because every touchpoint matters. An omnichannel approach is a preferred way to ensure consistent quality of customer engagement regardless of how your customer chooses to speak to you. This means having a system to recognize and engage with both purchase and non-purchase behaviors.
Once you’ve rolled out your strategy, you need to measure your success. Not just to give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back – but to refine your strategy. How effective are your activities in engaging customers?
Invest heavily in the channels and activities that work and not in those that don’t. If your activities fail to improve customer engagement and customers are quiet and uninterested, don’t despair. It took Chipotle 3 years before they got the loyalty program to where it needed to be!
Every failure is a data point that you can use to refine and improve your strategy. Building a highly engaged customer base takes time, patience, and consistency.
Keep the end goal the same but change up the tactics. Let the campaign run for 3 months then at month 4 make a change if nothing is happening.
Your customers want to like the businesses they give money to - they will connect with you one day.
Rewards and loyalty programs turn short-term engagement into long-term advocacy.
72% of consumers are more likely to recommend brands with good loyalty programs. But while traditional loyalty programs offer customers tangible benefits, like discounts, freebies, and rewards for purchases, these offerings often only come into play when a transaction takes place. This limits a brand’s ability to take up more meaningful space in a customer’s life.
A successful loyalty program requires thoughtful design and execution, but at its heart, it needs to be able to add value to its members’ lives, wherever they are, however they choose to engage, and in ways that match their lifestyles. In addition, providing the right incentives for engaged and loyal customers can really keep your brand top of mind.
These elements are key to true loyalty and building brand ambassadors, not just by pushing promotions and points. People look to brands for more than just discounts – they’re taking a hard look at a brand’s values and social responsibility.
So, consider how you can incorporate your authenticity, transparency, and honesty into your loyalty program. An effective loyalty program serves as the stepping stone to long-lasting brand-customer relationships, by telegraphing brand values that resonate with their audience.
Pick the metrics that matter, depending on what customer engagement means to you. Here’s a list of common metrics to measure digital engagement:
Measure customer engagement by tracking the number of people who interact with your brand over a certain period across all touchpoints in a timely fashion. Measure digital metrics weekly or monthly to build a solid dataset and deliver surveys at a time when your customers are most likely to engage with them. This will ensure a high rate of return and high-quality data.
One of the many benefits to a website is that you can record, monitor, and track visitor behavior as first-party data. There a several website metrics that can reflect specific behaviors. These include:
The simple act of completing a survey is a positive customer engagement data point. But there are ways to structure questions that allow you extract even more value.
Unlike customer experience surveys that ask questions like “how happy are you with [product name?]” and “how would you rate the support you received?”, customer engagement surveys should focus on your channels, reach, and activation such as:
Customers are willing to stay and even pay a little more for brands that align with their values.Other reasons why they stay include:
Customer engagement and retention go hand in hand. The more valuable customers feel your offering is, the longer their lifecycle is, and the better customer success rates are.How to improve customer retention
73% of customers use multiple channels during their shopping journey. But even though a brand may have an effective mobile, social, physical, and online presence, in many cases the customer still lacks a uniform experience when they move from one channel to another.
And as we continue to build better ways to capture customer information, historic data will give way to predictive analytics – a means of predicting behavior and using that to inform customer engagement strategies.
Brands also regularly and lawfully collect more customer data than ever, from a widening variety of channels. Anyone looking to the future is boosting their data and analytics capabilities to harness predictive insights. This allows them to connect more closely with their customers, anticipate behaviors, and identify engagement opportunities in real-time.
In addition to data-drive omnichannel strategy, a seamless look and feel throughout the customer journey is essential. Many brands do this already, but it will very soon become the norm, not the exception. And the best way to manage and grow a data-rich, omnichannel customer engagement strategy is to deploy specialized martech.
The right martech tool is whichever one holds up to critical scrutiny in the context of improving customer engagement. We believe that in general, this means they have:
Snipp’s solution is modular, so brands can pick and choose the elements you need to optimize your martech stack and deliver outstanding customer engagement strategies.
Customer engagement may be difficult to measure and perform well at scale, but it undoubtedly leads to higher profitability and customer retention. Looking ahead, the future of customer engagement is going to involve even more personalized experiences.
To reach this future, brands need to optimize their people, operations, and technology to create a consistently positive feedback loop with customers. This will keep you in touch with your customers’ evolving needs, build your brand integrity, and allow you to use data to further improve their experiences.
And that's where Snipp comes in.
We provide global marketing and loyalty technology solutions that bring together modular SaaS technology with best-in-class marketing expertise to help you increase sales, retain customers, and unlock intelligent decision making.