There’s not much purpose putting content out there if no one sees it.
Low engagement rates on your content can take the buzz out of your business. 77% of customers say bad engagement experiences detract from their quality of life, so it’s no surprise that they don’t come back following a bad experience.
You need active customer engagement for lead generation and conversions, and even to retain your customer base.
Below, we’ve put together 15 proven customer engagement strategies that will double your conversion rate.
1. Jazz Up Your Landing Page
Strong customer engagement marketing starts at home.
Your landing page is vital to the success of your client engagement strategy. In most cases, this will be your site’s homepage.
The purpose of your landing page is to convert “window-shoppers” (or, those just visiting your site for more info) into paying customers. To do that, you need a landing page which grabs the eye and clearly leads customers down the sales funnel.
Make your landing page legible and free of clutter. Transform your call to action into the star player of your page. It’s a simple equation: the easier it is to engage with you, the higher your engagement rate (and your conversion rate) will be.
2. Offer Something
We all love to get something for free.
Consider driving up customer engagement by offering small incentives. Push your mailing list by providing access to exclusive content, for example. Or include a free promotional item with purchases.
This strategy fires straight at the reward centers of the human brain. It makes your customers feel spoiled, which is an excellent way to help your brand stand out.
You don’t have to break the bank to offer freebies. Keep them within your means, and you’ll increase customer engagement without bankrupting yourself.
3. Blog Your Expertise
Blogging may sound old hat in the age of social media marketing and Big Data, but in truth, blogging remains the stable foundation behind many an engagement strategy.
The reasons for this are simple. Blogging creates a voice for your brand and a chance to show off your expertise. It’s also engaging by nature, giving you an evergreen way to bring customers to your site.
By running a blog, you can add value for your customers without asking for anything in return. We’ve already outlined the value of a freebie, so your blog is a brilliant opportunity to build some goodwill and credibility for your brand.
Blogging is a way to stand out, to establish your voice and show how much more you know than your competitor. Think of blogging as a kind of self-testimonial. By speaking with authority, you build trust in your brand.
4. Establish Your Tone
Speaking of your voice, have you thought about the way your brand communicates?
Many businesses overlook the value of establishing a tone. By striking the right tone, you can communicate with your customers in a way that helps drive engagement. It’ll also help you stick to a consistent message and strike the right balance between professionalism and accessibility.
Your tone will depend on your industry and your target audience. A law firm working with wealthy clients will benefit more from a tone that’s authoritative and professional, while a travel company might want to aim for a more fun and exciting tone.
5. Engage On Social Media
With the right tone struck, you’re in a good place to get your voice out to a wider audience.
Social media is the perfect venue for that. It might seem a little like shouting into the wind these days, but the companies who use social media right still get huge returns out of it.
Using social media gives you a chance to reach out and create a two-way connection with your customers. This is the perfect chance to put a human face to your brand, which makes you easier to remember and creates trust with your audience.
Social media is a fantastic platform for engaging content. You can like, share, and retweet while others do the same for your posts. In many respects, social media has replaced the homepage as the store window of the internet – for many customers; it’ll be the first time they see what you have on offer.
Paying careful attention to your tone can stop you blundering into social media faux pas. While you shouldn’t sound too corporate, don’t make the mistake of forgetting you’re a business.
6. Be Consistent
When you’ve established a brand identity, you need to keep to it.
When customers interact with any of the big brands, they know what they’re getting. You buy a can of Coca-Cola because you know what it tastes like. Consistency ensures regular customers come back and also makes it easier for customers to recommend your product.
Consistency can be a struggle for smaller businesses. They’re more likely to operate on an ad hoc basis and don’t benefit from economies of scale. But if you can nail this down early, you stand to increase your engagement and even prepare yourself for growth into a larger company.
7. Create Positive Customer Experiences
While “do it right” might seem like a basic business strategy, it’s hard to overestimate how important it is to brand engagement.
Given the choice (all else being equal) between a mediocre company and a better alternative, customers will choose the better option. Far from being common sense, that should act as a call to never settle for “good enough.”
Take pride in your brand, and your audience will see it. We all encounter terrible customer service, so be the exception and make the lives of your customers easier. Not only will you drive up engagement, but you’ll also get to feel good about what you do.
8. Crowdsource
Crowdsourcing is a wonderful way to engage your customers while also getting something directly from it.
By using crowdsourcing, you can drive customer investment in the future of your business. That means you’ll engage your customers even from the earliest stages of a new project, which can help manufacture loyalty.
Crowdsourcing doesn’t have to follow the model of asking for donations, either. You can flip it on its head and ask for other contributions from your customers. For example, you could try soliciting art from your talented customers to show off the passion of your fans. That’s one way to create a real buzz around your brand.
9. Work With Others
Nothing says “credibility” quite like a nod from your peers. With credibility comes engagement.
Work with others in your sphere to boost your signal. You don’t have to work with direct competitors if you don’t want to. Try reaching out to businesses on a tangent to your niche. If you’re a travel company, for instance, then consider working with a company that sells travel accessories.
The simplest way of working with other publications comes in the form of backlinks. These are links to your material from another site’s blog. You can take it a lot further than that with cross-promoted video content or even shared discounts.
The internet might be a fantastic platform for marketing, but it has a discoverability problem. Working with other outlets expands your reach, allowing you more opportunities for online customer engagement.
10. Stand Out
The internet moves at a breakneck speed. For every marketing success story, there are hundreds of other companies which disappear in the shuffle.
Standing out is another way to ensure customers are choosing you over the competition. It might take some out-of-the-box thinking, but coming up with an exciting way of separating yourself from the crowd could transform your engagement.
Flex your creativity and become a leader, not a follower. Innovation shows confidence and the willingness to move forward. That’s the kind of thinking which leads to brands gaining true prestige.
This is easier if your brand is fun by nature, but even a serious brand can stand out with a quirky new marketing campaign. Once you’ve caught some fresh attention, the quality of your product can speak for itself.
11. Keep Innovating
Businesses are the proverbial shark. They have to keep moving, or they’ll suffocate. Even the most cutting-edge marketing campaign grows dull over time.
This is true even for big brands, so yours is no exception. For trendy brands, falling out of style can even be a death sentence.
If you see your engagement plateau, it could be time to try innovating. Relaunch your product, design a new logo, or come up with a new slogan. Even rearranging the furniture can bring new life to a room, and businesses operate on much the same principle.
12. Be Sincere
With all this talk of tone and communication skills, it’s easy to forget one basic tenet. That’s the need to appear sincere.
Customers are savvier than marketers think. They can often sniff out an insincere corporate statement, even when it’s disguised as ethics or philanthropy.
That’s why it’s important not to forget who you are. Engage with your customers on a sincere level. Don’t fake it for internet points.
To frame it another way: you might get away with insincerity, but it’ll never give you the benefits of truly sincere engagement.
13. Solicit Feedback
Let’s face it: it’s human nature to offer our opinions, even when they’re unasked for! We all love to play couch quarterback. Soliciting opinions is a cunning way to drive more engagement.
Give your customers a voice. Not only will it humanize your brand, but it’ll also make your customers feel like they’re part of your company’s success. Taking opinions is a way of saying you value those who engage with you.
Use polls, Q&As, and review forms to find out what your customers think of you. With enough information, it can even form part of your business development plan.
Gathering feedback will also keep you ahead of any trends, which will make it easier to keep your brand fresh and respond to changing tastes.
14. Negotiate Negativity
Tackling negativity is the most delicate part of driving engagement by far.
Look around, and you can find cautionary tales about what not to do. You should never meet negativity in kind. You should keep your emotions on the sidelines and adopt a professional attitude.
When done well, positive handling of negativity can become part of your brand identity in its own right. That usually means meeting criticism with an open mind. Make it clear you’re prepared to take on constructive comments and develop your brand to fit your customers better.
That doesn’t mean you have to kowtow to every Negative Nancy, but meeting criticism with hostility is a sure-fire way to drive people elsewhere.
15. Create Brand Ambassadors
Between a customer and a paid promoter, whose opinion on a product would you trust most?
The answer is, of course, the customer. The customer has no ulterior motives when recommending your product. That makes a customer recommendation the purest form of promotion there is.
So why not turn your customers into your army of brand ambassadors?
You can build customer goodwill through some of the strategies we’ve mentioned above. When you have that, it’s trivial to make requests for customer testimonials or to ask for shares and likes on social media. Just like that, your customers become your most prominent advocates.
You can achieve the same result with your employees, too. Foster a healthy and open workplace, and your employees will be some of the biggest champions of your brand. When your employees are enthusiastic about the brand, that enthusiasm will catch on with your customers.
Building Customer Engagement Strategies
The trick behind customer engagement strategies is to a) employ many different techniques and b) employ them well.
By diversifying your techniques, you reach the broadest possible customer base, which means the greatest possible customer engagement. It’s tricky managing all those strategies, so be sure to use this list as your guide.
At The MLE Agency, we offer different strategic marketing services, including search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, lead generation, and content marketing. We can work with you to ensure the best results possible.
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