Improve Your Customer Engagement Strategy with These 6 Tips
Keeping buyers engaged throughout the entire buyer’s journey is an important part of turning buyers into customers. A customer engagement strategy makes certain buyers have an excellent experience both before and after making a purchase. From each sales interaction to the onboarding experience and beyond, creating a plan to meet each buyer’s needs and expectations helps increase conversion rates.
According to Salesforce, 54% of customers believe companies need to transform how they engage with buyers. Is your customer engagement strategy working for you? To help you improve upon your current strategy (or create one from scratch) we’ve put together a list of the top 6 tips.
What is a Customer Engagement Strategy?
A customer engagement strategy refers to the process of interacting with potential and current customers in order to create stronger relationships and increase the value of a deal. A customer engagement strategy organizes these interactions into a plan that boosts the customer experience.
This process requires:
- Digital channels to foster good communication
- The ability to measure and assess customer needs
- The right tools that allow you to collect and use customer feedback
Overall, a customer engagement strategy gives your company an advantage by improving customer relations at all stages of the buyer’s journey.
6 Ways to Boost Your Customer Engagement Strategy
A customer engagement strategy will never look the same for any two businesses. After all, you’re looking to target different customers. For example, some customers may engage more with customer reviews, while others find demos more interesting. The details will be unique to your business, but no matter your target audience, these 6 tips are key to creating a strong strategy:
1. Set Timely Goals for Your Customer Engagement Strategy
A good strategy is built off of a set goal or goals which help determine your plans. Are you looking for higher engagement during presentations? Maybe you’d like to gain more positive referrals? Setting short and long term goals and tracking KPIs is a great place to start building your customer engagement strategy.
2. Focus on Enhancing the Customer Experience
While the customer experience used to consist of just in-person interactions, it now includes everything from your website UX to customer service. 84% of companies that prioritize the customer experience report increased revenue. Offering a more personalized experience helps customers feel valued. A positive customer experience also increases the chance that customers will leave positive reviews. This is key when 92% of buyers are more likely to buy after reading a positive review.
3. Stay Conversational in Sales Meetings
When it comes to increasing customer engagement, it’s important to remain conversational. While a sales meeting is a more formal environment, you still want to remain friendly with the buyer. Be sure to engage in small talk or a simple chat about recent pop culture or how your respective days went. This light conversation creates a sense of trust between you and the buyer, making them more engaged and more likely to respond to your sales pitch.
4. Use Video to Show Your Company’s Value
From video chat meetings to embedded videos in sales decks and presentations, video content is one of the best ways to boost customer engagement. In fact, people spend 2.6 times more time on pages with video content than without. Thus, adding video to your customer engagement strategy instantly boosts engagement.
5. Create Content Based on Data
As you begin using your customer engagement strategy, look at what’s been most successful in previous sales interactions. Sales enablement software can provide you with buyer behavioral data that reveals what content a buyer has been viewing and for how long. With these insights, you’ll be able to see which content performs best. For example, if you notice buyers tend to respond well to case studies, you’ll know to provide them with more examples of user success stories.
6. Keep Consistent Messaging Throughout the Buyer’s Journey and Beyond
To be sure the value prop and messaging remain consistent throughout all stages of the buyer’s journey and after the purchase, sales and marketing must align. Inconsistent messaging on marketing and sales materials will not build trust between buyers, customers, and your company. In fact, 63% of sales reps say a consistent branding experience has an impact on deal closure. Thus, marketers need to work with sales reps to create materials that communicate the same message for each level of interaction.
Final thoughts
Building a strong customer engagement strategy helps your business keep buyers and current customers engaged with your company. This allows you to turn buyers into customers and keep current customers happy!
Enhance your customer engagement strategy with Prezentor — Get a demo to see the platform in action.