Put a Ring on it: How to Boost Customer Engagement Today

How do you build customer engagement? You put a ring on it! (OK, not that kind of engagement.)

Instead – just like with any healthy relationship – you show customers you like them and build a relationship with them over time.

Customer engagement is all of the communication between a brand and its customers, and vice versa. According to Loyalty 360, the association for customer loyalty, customer engagement aims to encourage customer loyalty and advocacy through all interactions customers have with a company.

Strong customer engagement involves having a two-way dialogue with customers and showing customers you care, rather than marketing or advertising at customers.

Why should you care about customer engagement?

Engaged customers are happier, more likely to buy and more likely to be loyal customers and brand evangelists.

Here are three ways to boost customer engagement today.

Personalize Content

Welcome to the age of People-Based Marketing. Thanks to robust technology and on-demand services across all industries, customers expect tailored, personalized content. To keep up, marketers need to meet their customers with the right message from the get go.

Crafting the perfect message starts with knowing your customers. And knowing your customers requires relevant, complete data. Marketers must collect customer information, such as email address, postal address and relevant customer demographics, purchase intent and/or household data. This data can be collected at sign up, via surveys and webforms, or from reputable third-party customer demographics data vendors.

Then, it’s time to put that data to work by segmenting your list and personalizing your content. Segmentation and personalization helps you send more relevant marketing content, showing customers that you are listening.

When you listen, customers take action. Delivering relevant marketing messages helps to eliminate friction and frustration, smoothing the buyer’s journey and creating customer satisfaction.

Connect Customer IDs

Engaging your customers isn’t just about the right message. It’s about delivering the right message in the right medium.

Think about it: You send your Valentine a card and flowers – not a text message. On the other hard, it’d be a little heavy-handed to ask your new date out with an elegant bouquet and singing telegram.

To deliver the right message in the right place, you need to collect customer data for every channel, including email, postal, mobile ID and cookie, along any of your own proprietary customer IDs, such as their ID number in your CRM or e-commerce platform. Then, you need to use Identity Matching to connect these customer identifiers.

Identity Matching allows you to create a holistic, 360-degree view of your customer. It also allows you to open up new marketing channels, such as postal mail or display advertising, and improves marketing attribution.

Re-Engage the Smart Way

Some of your customers will inevitably fall off. In fact, marketing databases degrade by about 25% per year naturally.

Does that mean the end of a beautiful relationship, or are your customers just ghosting you? Only one way to find out: smart re-engagement campaigns.

Done right, re-engagement campaigns are a great way to revive dormant customers. There are lots of ways to craft beautiful re-engagement copy and art, but these campaigns need to be focused on users who are likely to engage again.

That’s where Email Activity comes in. Email Activity allows you to better understand which of your customers recently engaged with another commercial email. If you know who is active in the inbox, you can segment these users into a list and send a relevant, targeted message.

Getting your customers to fall in love with you requires time, sure. But it has big payoffs. According to Forrester, 91% of customers who feel valued by a brand, stay with a brand. That’s a huge win.

How are you engaging your customers – besides getting down on one knee, of course!