In the last few years, customer engagement marketing has evolved. Instead of sculpturing a universal path for all consumers, brands prefer tailored experiences. They capture every move of their leads to personalize interactions. Customers freely jump from one channel to another and enjoy an equally smooth experience whenever they go.

Apart from personalization and omnichannel marketing, the modern customer engagement model focuses on relationship nurturing. Companies invest in better services for their existing customers. Product availability (48%), shopping convenience (34%), and value (30%) are the main reasons why people try new brands. Hence, if you want to keep customers engaged, you must ensure decent services and relevant offers.

These customer engagement marketing strategies can help build strong customer relationships in 2022 and beyond. Learn other customer engagement solutions to use here.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement has several definitions. First of all, it’s an interaction between a brand and a customer through online or offline channels. Secondly, it’s a powerful emotional bond between the business and its consumers. It means that customers continuously choose a specific brand because they love every detail of their customer journey. The positive experience makes them return to the same company, repeat purchases, bring a friend, and recommend the services.

Quality customer engagement is essential for companies operating in competitive industries. Low prices and a nice website are no longer enough to retain buyers. There are dozens of alternative offers out there. That’s the reason you need a customer engagement strategy to build personal connections with consumers through communications, content, offers, and other interactions.

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How Has the Customer Engagement Model Evolved?’

Just like every marketing approach, customer engagement has become more complicated. Companies have to compete for consumers, process tons of data, run complex analytics, adopt advanced software, and take many other steps. Such growing demands result from profound changes in customer engagement, including:

Mass Market Communications No Longer Work

Customers don’t pay attention to cliche digital ads, emails, and social media posts. They have seen too much of it. All marketing approaches, including customer engagement solutions, have shifted from the spray and pray method to targeted communications. When you send something, you must know who receives it and why.

Customers Shape Their Journey Themselves

Despite mapping the customer journey, brands cannot predict the consumers' actions with 100% accuracy. Today there are too many channels and ways to convert. Therefore, modern consumers are the ones who guide businesses and show what interaction they expect through behavior.

Brands Follow Customers and Not Vice Versa

Earlier, consumers used to search products, bookmark their favorites, and use the only available way to place an order. Now, companies do their best to reach customers through the channel that is the most convenient to them. They send regular communications, remind consumers about viewed products through ads, and follow the leads wherever they go.

Large Data Volumes Make Customer Management More Challenging

Since brands need to track every customer action across channels, lots of data pile up. It complicates analytics and makes research impossible without automated software. Therefore, companies need to integrate multiple tools to deliver data-driven experiences and create a single customer view. Only through interoperability and automation, they can ensure truly personalized customer interactions.

Metrics to Measure Before Launching a Customer Engagement Strategy

Before adopting any customer engagement strategy for 2022, you need to know where your company stands. Customer behavior, conversion rates, and other metrics allow measuring it. Data helps you detect problems and predict how different marketing efforts can impact customer engagement.

Here are the most critical metrics to track:

• NPS score. Net promoter score is a single question asking consumers to what extent they are likely to recommend the brand to their friends. It’s a survey with icons (ranging from positive to negative) you will need to place on your website or app.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). It measures how much you spend to acquire new customers, including sales and marketing expenses, cost of equipment, etc.
• Churn rate. It shows what percentage of customers your company has lost during a specific period.
• Activity time. This indicator shows the time people spend on your website after logging in. It helps you understand whether customers find your content and offer interesting.
• Page visits. This metric is the volume of traffic coming from different sources to your website pages.
• Conversion rate. It measures the percentage of leads who have completed the required actions (e.g., purchased a product, started a subscription, created an account).

In addition to the listed indicators, you can measure customer satisfaction score, customer effort score, service quality, and accessibility. Tools for real-time customer behavior monitoring are also valuable. They allow you to see how users interact with your web resources.

5 Customer Engagement Strategies to Adopt in 2022

A customer engagement strategy is a plan designed to make existing customers more active and bond with them through constant communication. If you want to strengthen customer engagement in 2022, try these approaches.

#1. Automate Data Analytics

You won’t be able to collect and process data about customer activity manually. Hence, automated analytics is essential. Such solutions record key performance indicators and may even generate actionable recommendations.

#2. Align Online and Offline Channels

With customer engagement tools like Inkit, you can unite online and offline customer communications. Inkit supports the Send product for automated direct mail marketing. It means you can automatically send mailings when a customer completes the required action online. It also means you get a single customer profile with real-time data from all channels.

#3. Know Your Customers and Verify Their Data

To find the best way to interact with your leads, learn their preferences in addition to standard personal information. In 2022, you need to pick the right moment to interact with customers to engage them. Besides, you must verify all the details you get from customers (e.g., addresses or emails). It will make your communications more reliable and likely to reach the destination.

#4. Make All Customer Interactions Trigger-Based and Personalized

Hyper-personalization will rule in the next year and beyond. 72% of consumers state they engage only with personalized messaging. That’s why you should tailor the content of most messages you send to customers. They will appreciate it and become more loyal to your brand.

#5. Implement a Chatbot or Virtual Assistant

Automated emails, in-app messages, direct mail, and notifications only provide updates. In addition to them, you need services for two-way communication, like a chatbot or virtual assistant. Such customer engagement solutions backup your support and enable customers to solve common issues on their own. People can communicate with a chatbot or choose to contact a live support representative based on their needs. It considerably optimizes the work of support teams. Based on recent statistics, chatbots handle 68.9% of chats.

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Inkit Reach Enablement Platform (REP)

Inkit is a reach enablement platform with document automation, address verification, and direct mail automation features. Such functionality allows businesses to cover different aspects of customer engagement. They can generate personalized communications to send official documents to consumers, automate mail printing and delivery for offline campaigns, autocomplete validated addresses, and more. Since Inkit offers its products as APIs, it’s easy to integrate with your current software.

‍Start a free trial now to test Inkit’s products and bring your customer engagement strategy to a new level.