Consumer engagement is the marketing funnel’s stage where customers get emotionally connected with the brand. The higher the engagement level is, the more are chances of sales closing. 1Q Consumer Engagement Platform not only engages the prospectives but also improves the loyalty of the existing one. 

The Gallup research has proved that a business gets 23% of more than average revenue with a fully engaged customer. The consumer engagement strategy is an integral part of any marketing strategy. It is the stage to understand customers deeply, interact with them, and build a relationship. Customer engagement can be through multiple methods and various platforms. It is primarily done in a customer’s interest area that also should align with the respective business. While planning for a consumer engagement strategy, multiple activities, models, tools, and analyses are performed to reap the highest benefit. 

Seven powerful consumer engagement strategies

1. Using Analytics

Analytics has become an inseparable part of every industry, whether it is marketing, crafting a value proposition, positioning a brand, bringing out a new product in the market, or taking the business to the next level. People have understood the value of facts and figures, and logics and anecdotes. 

They have started leveraging past customer data to craft future strategies. Insights help them to make improvements and increase productivity. They measure different metrics for customer engagement. Some of them include social media metrics, email metrics, website metrics, and customer success metrics. 

Social media metrics include the engagement rate of the audience with different types of content. Email metrics define the number of customer conversions or responses to calls to action. Thirdly, website metrics include online conversion rates like content downloads or webinar bookings, bounce rates, session time, return visitors, and chatbots coming under the website only. Finally, customer success metrics include customer loyalty metrics and customer satisfaction rate. 

2. Designing interactive presence

Nowadays, consumers have myriad options, especially while purchasing something online. Meanwhile, it is imperative to give the best-ever experience to the new site visitor.

You can design your site with real-time support chatbots, which proactively start conversations to attract visitors’ attention. You can integrate face-to-face video calling or live chat support for directly connecting with your audience. The same strategy has also been counted in the list of 2021 trending digital marketing strategies. The businesses having a transparent connection with the audience are leading the industry. In this way, consumers get a chance to interact with a brand to solve their problems instead of only consuming the transactional content, leading to fewer conversions. 

Sharing content like instructional videos, live presentations, customer testimonials, and competitions is the best way to engage your leads. 

3.  Understanding customers and their buying journey

Every strategy doesn’t fit every business. It varies from customers’ interests and habits. Thereby, it is vital to develop a comprehensive understanding of potential customers and craft a strategy that lets them interact with your brand and let your brand pass the message to them.

First of all, you need to craft a customer journey that includes bottlenecks, challenges, and customers’ pain points. Thus, you would deeply understand their needs and behavior opportunities for efficiently presenting your message at the right time. 

Also, create customer profiles including all the characteristics helpful to generate content for engagement. Some important points in journey mapping can be the location and income of a prospect.

Finding out what drives your customers through feedback or surveys is another research aspect. Your survey questions with your existing customers can be

describing the experience

suggesting improvements

satisfaction level

the best thing they found and why say it best

any additional comments

4. Offering personalized service

Personalization and engagement are two sides of a coin. Every customer seeks products or services tailored to their requirements. So, you can easily apply some principles and do the same. Simple strategies can be using the name in an email or showing an ad relevant to the location scenario or local news. It can also be a pre-chat survey or live chat. There can be many more techniques using artificial intelligence, offering personalized services to your customers.  

5.  Using visual engagement tools

Visual engagement techniques are growing tremendously. As digitization is increasing, customer service interactions are also going through visual engagement tools. Companies can use annotations, co-browsing, and screen sharing to fulfill the purpose of transparency. 

Co-browsing users use it to interact in real-time with each other at times of instant support and guidance. Overall, It boosts the shopping experience.  

Visual engagement impacts profoundly on the consumer as per the customer satisfaction rates of 89.3%.  

6. Engaging across multiple channels

Agility is the big player in the engagement game. It creates an all-rounded impact. When you display the availability to react and respond on various platforms, customers find the bolstered reputation. The company’s image is set as responsive and supportive. 

You need to have accounts on your social media platforms and the availability of customer engagement technology to operate and track all communication channels. The technological management would not only assist in social media handlings but also emails and phone calls. 

7. Use reviews, testimonials, and feedback data

A single positive review can be a decision-making factor for your perspective. It is a piece of authentic information ever to be received about a company or a brand. Review can be used as a post on all social platforms in the form of tagging the author and being grateful with kind words.

Testimonials can activate your followers club as well as cold leads to ponder upon their decisions. One line of a testimonial speaks more than a thousand words in favor of the brand.   

Feedback is also an essential part of engaging with customers. It allows customers to feel special, and they build trust for a long way.  

These critical strategies are to transform the customer engagement level integrating the next level within sometime only. Meanwhile, it would help if you learned from your mistakes. Understanding unhappy customers, offering immediate solutions, accepting mistakes, apologizing for them, understanding customer journey, and applying improvements are part of a successful customer engagement strategy.