Customer engagement marketing is one of the most important aspects of business, but many entrepreneurs don’t understand what it is. Here’s what you need to know.
Customer engagement marketing is increasingly popular in the digital age as two-way communications between buyers and brands become more visible. It can be difficult to define, however, and the explanation you get depends on who is giving it.
The quality of engagement increases and becomes more beneficial as the business meets customers’ preferences. That’s true whether a customer is currently buying or leaving a review post-purchase. Every interaction between a company and a customer adds to or diminishes this relationship.
Here’s what you need to know about creating an effective customer engagement marketing strategy and what doing so could mean for your business.
Understanding customer engagement marketing strategies
The first step toward any sale is engaging a customer and encouraging them to interact with your brand. That requires customer engagement marketing, which:
- Consists of all that organizations do to keep customers or users coming back to their offerings
- Helps brands stand out in congested marketplaces with lots of competition
- Could be the difference between success and failure
A successful customer engagement marketing strategy requires a critical look at customer participation, including when it occurs and how often. It also requires that companies understand how the concept relates to customer loyalty and sales, including whether the customer is a promoter or detractor.
Factors to consider when exploring customer engagement include:
- Longevity: Over what length of time are interactions spread?
- Proactiveness: Do customers interact with a brand on their own or do they need prompting?
- Repetition and frequency: Are the interactions frequent and similar, or sporadic and different?
- Context: When do customer interactions happen? Post-purchase, during the consideration stage, or only during promotions?
- Volume: How much interaction happens over the entire customer lifecycle?
Understanding customer engagement marketing helps businesses re-examine how they interact with their audiences and where they might be failing to make connections. Better connections can ultimately lead to conversions.
Why customer engagement marketing is important
Good customer engagement is important because it benefits both buyers – your audience – and sellers (you). There is a direct correlation between meeting expectations and seeing results: The more a business meets its customer’s expectations, the more sales per customer it can expect.
Furthermore, keeping customers engaged throughout the sales funnel increases brand loyalty and helps you gather relevant information. Those who find your brand valuable engage with it, resulting in insights that help with future marketing efforts such as retargeting, content development, messaging, and more.
How customer engagement marketing boosts sales success
Customer engagement marketing works to boost sales success in many ways. This leads to:
- Better customer trust and loyalty – It fosters trust between your customers and your sales team through personalized touch points across channels. The better your customer engagement marketing strategy, the more likely you are to fulfill expectations along the buyer’s journey and accelerate their movement toward purchase.
- Gaining customer feedback and insight – A winning customer engagement marketing strategy enables your sales teams with insights gleaned from customer interactions, which they can then use to craft impactful messaging and content to accomplish specific goals. Sales reps are thus empowered to fully support prospects during the consideration stage.
- Stronger marketing efforts – Customer engagement marketing leverages insights into which customer interactions are the most profitable and where they take place. This enables your business to optimize its sales approaches.
- Improved brand experiences – Customer engagement also impacts the connection between the marketing and sales departments. It means marketers can offer timely, personalized messages that educate and qualify leads, and sales personnel are better prepared to nurture and engage these prospects across channels. This builds stronger relationships and results in more sales.
- Repeat business – The more customers are engaged with your business and informed about your offerings, the more likely they are to come back when they are in need. Customers who are active in your customer portal or online community, for example, are more likely to take a look at your product add-ons and upsells to solve other problems they have.
The more engaged your audience, the more likely they are to spend – and that translates to higher revenue per customer. Companies that use digital outreach methods predictably have higher revenue growth than those which don’t, according to PwC. It is not hard to see why, either, as engaged customers spend about 20% to 40% more than other types of customers. That makes having a strong customer engagement marketing strategy crucial to business success.
Get help from the experts
Are you looking to build a sales team that keeps customers engaged, then leverages that engagement to achieve higher close rates? The MetaGrowth Ventures team is here to help. We guide you through the sales team building process so you get the world-class sales team you need to scale. We’ll handle hiring for you, then train your new teammates and track their progress so you can focus on the bigger picture.
Reach out to MetaGrowth Ventures today to learn more.
