Tips for Customer Engagement

Currently marketing is going through a revolution. We are seeing a fundamental shift from brands pushing marketing messages in one direction to organisations now getting involved in a two way engagement with their customers. Engaging with customers in a two-way dialogue, connecting online and offline channels within an analytics framework, and fully recognising the value of each individual customer is the way of the future. With this ‘revolution’ in marketing we feel it also calls for a revolution in the strategies used to engage with customers. To help in navigating these new strategies, and this new approach, we have come up with the following top ten tips to make customer engagement more successful.

1. Be ready to engage with customers now – The fact that internet search is now ubiquitous means that when customers are looking for a new product or service, they are likely to type into a search engine what they are looking for and they are ready to engage with the brands they find immediately. When they arrive on a website they are looking to be engaged with interesting, dynamic content and offers to lead them in to a relationship and buying cycle.

2. Engagement permission is valuable, do not squander it – If customers give a brand permission to engage with them by opting into receiving email or responding to a direct mail, this is extremely valuable. The latest popular statistic is that every email opt in on average costs an organisation $118 USD.  When brands decide to “sell to them” or they don’t  engage them with relevant content or offers, be warned, this is likely to end with the customer terminating the brand relationship. Organisations need to take heed that they can lose customer permission faster than it takes to gain it.

3. Engagement is an ongoing process – Engagement is about taking the customer on a journey. This travels from an unknown to the brand, to familiar with the brand through to customer and finally on to advocacy. This takes multiple engagement cycles and therefore an organisation needs the process and technology in place to capture, analyse, create, optimise and deliver content in a continuous engagement cycle.

4. Engaging customers means focusing the business on customers – Start thinking and orientating your organisation around customers, ideally as individuals. It may sound simple, but many organisations instead focus their business on their different product segments or channels. To do this effectively organisations need to use a customer database with which to build and record customer relationships and engagement cycles to track who is spoken to, about what and when.
5. Engagement needs new marketing and agency skills – If marketers don’t understand all of the different tools in a marketing arsenal then they could find themselves left behind very quickly. Some of the tools marketers need to be aware of include multichannel marketing, analytics, online marketing and SEO, social media monitoring, social media marketing, content management democratisation, the list goes on. There is also a new category of agencies emerging that understand the need for these new skills, these are called Customer Engagement Agencies. This has been brought on by the demand from clients to orientate around the customer, which means the creative side and the data side of marketing agencies need to act as one. There are organisations that can help clients with this change and integrate the strategy, analytics, creative, CRM and execution as a whole. Agencies that move into this new category will thrive, agencies that don’t, will die.

6. Engage in the conversation first – With new social media monitoring tools, it is now possible to listen to conversations about brands as they happen. However, judging when to engage requires respect for the individual, for their privacy and how to approach will vary as a result. Reputations are at stake here. In the same way it is considered rude to force yourself into an unknown group at a party, hand everyone a business card and then ask when they will buy from your company, it shouldn’t be done online. Listen and wait to engage in the conservation, provide valuable input, build trust and understanding and the business will come.

7. Engagement is an organisational journey – The shift from mass marketing to customer engagement doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey of defining a strategy, understanding a starting point (better web engagement, better social media engagement, better email engagement etc), and planning and rolling out the necessary technology process, skills and campaigns to support the strategy.

8. Engagement is a team game – If marketing is organised in silos both from an operational, digital and data perspective, then customer engagement will be a challenge. The objective is to engage with, and understand, the customer and then communicate and deliver in the way that best suits them, at a convenient time, with their preferred frequency. The marketing department, and its respective agency silos, sending uncoordinated communications to the same customers is old, unresponsive marketing that can cause a brand irreparable damage. To achieve true customer engagement, marketing must act as a whole.

9. Engagement is everyone’s responsibility – Simply put, engagement is moving from one-way mass marketing into two-way interaction. It’s inherently a conversation and, with the rise of social media, more than ever before, everyone in the organisation is engaged in the conversation. From the receptionist engaging politely and efficiently with visitors in reception, to the services reps doing the same by responding to twitter service complaints, or sales teams listening and engaging in the conversation on social media networks  and blogs – everyone needs to be aware they are part of an engagement strategy. It really is the democratisation of marketing. Companies take note: engaged employees equal engaged customers – keep them part of the engagement process.

10. Engagement builds relationship assets – What engagement is building is relationship assets for the firm. We all know the stats about how much it costs to acquire versus retain customers, but there is a new terminology – it’s keeping them engaged and understanding them as individuals that matters. If it is done correctly it will build a predictable, loyal, profitable set of customers that will become of more measurable value than any other asset of the firm.

Bob Barker, VP of Corporate Marketing and Digital Engagement, Alterian

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