Do you know how to develop a customer engagement strategy? The most effective customer engagement strategies foster retention and customer loyalty. With customers being seemingly more distracted than ever, it’s never been more important to deploy engagement strategies that create an emotional connection between your customers and your company.
Research from Gallup has found that customers freely spend on businesses that provide value and those with whom they feel a special connection. When customers do not feel a business is providing sufficient value, it doesn’t take long for them to take their money elsewhere. Ultimately, it all comes down to value creation and whether this translates into an emotional connection.
What is a customer engagement strategy?
Customer engagement is the process of making interactions with your customers through a range of different channels and fostering your relationship with them. It’s all about focusing on value creation over revenue generation. To boost customer retention, you must have strategies in place to ensure customers can build an emotional connection with your brand.
72% of businesses see improving customer experience as their top priority. A wide variety of emerging tools and resources can be leveraged by businesses to build customer loyalty. You must find solutions that can nurture customer relationships from acquisition to retention. The process of engagement is continuous and can influence the lifetime value of a customer.
Effective customer engagement strategies should be deployed early in the customer journey. The sooner you can earn the loyalty of your customers, the less likely they are to churn. To inspire customer engagement, you should leverage loyalty programs. 71% of customers say loyalty programs have enabled them to develop better relationships with brands.
Why are customer engagement strategies important?
A recent Salesforce study found that 80% of customers value experiences just as much as the products or services that a company offers. Customer engagement strategies can be critical to improving customer loyalty. Those who receive exceptional customer service and personalised experiences are likely to end up becoming highly engaged customers.
A well-defined customer engagement strategy will support you in promoting customer loyalty and increasing the lifetime value of each customer. Implementing an effective engagement strategy is the foundation for a business that relies on high levels of customer retention. With access to the right tools and resources, you can build and deploy simple strategies.
In many cases, for a customer to unlock the value in your product or service, there needs to be a certain level of engagement. When this engagement is missing, the value of your product or service may never be fully realised, potentially leading to low customer retention and high churn. This is why customer engagement strategies can influence the lifetime value of your customers.
A PwC report shows 32% of customers will stop doing business with a company after one bad experience while 48% of customers will do so after several negative experiences. With this in mind, companies must stay focused on delivering incredible customer experiences that inspire loyalty. As the report suggests, when it comes to experiences, there’s little room for error.
How can you increase customer engagement?
There’s no shortage of ways to increase customer engagement. Ultimately, the more you’re doing to improve customer engagement, the better. A comprehensive customer engagement strategy will meet the emotional and practical needs of your customers. We believe inspiring customer loyalty must be at the forefront of any effective engagement strategy.
Over 70% of customers are more likely to recommend a company if it has a good loyalty program. It’s no secret that customer loyalty programs are a powerful way to promote customer engagement. Rewarding loyal customers should be an integral part of any engagement strategy and PassKit can play a pivotal role in making this possible with digital loyalty solutions.
Customer loyalty programs no longer need to involve paper coupons or plastic membership cards. Those days are long gone. Using Apple Wallet and Google Pay, you can offer digital loyalty cards as part of an engaging customer experience. With PassKit, you can design customised loyalty cards for Apple Wallet and Google Pay.
Our solution comes with the tools and resources you need to get your customer loyalty program off the ground. PassKit gives you the ability to create, distribute and manage digital coupons for Apple Wallet and Google Pay with the support of our digital coupon campaign manager. We also have mobile wallet APIs that enable you to integrate these passes into your own applications.
Alongside loyalty programs, we would also recommend exploring the following strategies to improve customer engagement and retention:
- Deliver real-time engagement with live chat support.
- Automate aspects of your customer engagement with chatbots.
- Offer personalised one-on-one conversions with video chat.
- Collect customer feedback to improve experiences.
- Engage with customers via in-app messaging.
- Provide consistent and regular communication.
- Measure key customer engagement metrics.
How do you measure customer engagement?
You should use a range of metrics to measure and track customer engagement. Above all, we believe the most important customer engagement metric to track is customer lifetime value. This metric tells you how much revenue a typical customer brings in during their relationship with your company. The higher the lifetime value of your customer base, the better.
When your business has high customer lifetime value, this is a clear sign that your customer base is engaged and loyal. Low customer lifetime value suggests that your customer base is generally disengaged and churning quickly. This can have a significant impact on the overall sustainability of your business model. Tracking this metric to establish trends is critical.
If you’ve been trying to work out how to increase customer engagement and don’t know where to begin, we would recommend you start by implementing a digital loyalty program. With the support of PassKit’s membership and loyalty card manager, you can quickly create digital membership cards and loyalty cards for Apple Wallet and Google Pay.
Are you ready to get started with PassKit? To increase customer engagement, you can choose from one of our tailored solutions today.
