With 75% of U.S. consumers testing new shopping waters to adjust to the changing priorities, most businesses are looking for creative customer engagement ideas. They aim to retain their old customers and acquire new ones from all channels.

According to Forrester, 56% of marketing leaders believe that improving customer experience will become essential in supporting their business strategies in the coming years. Regardless of the costs, more businesses today focus on customer experience to build trust and loyalty.

This article covers a few customer engagement examples to show how savvy marketers acquire new customers, retain old ones, and ultimately increase their revenues.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is the process of building and nurturing a quality relationship between your business and your customers. It includes every piece of communication with the customer throughout the customer lifecycle. The main objectives of customer engagement include:

• Getting to know the needs of your customers
• Providing value to your customers through your products
• Strengthening the customer-business relationship
• Creating a loyal customer base

Most businesses embark on a customer engagement journey by reaching out directly to their customers. Others soften the grounds with rewards and incentives, which always work because 61% of customers will likely engage with your business if you offer surprise gifts or rewards for loyalty.

Customers tend to feel overwhelmed if businesses bombard them with offers and information they don’t need. Instead, your marketing team should provide customized offers and content that targets the customer’s needs.

Now that we’ve answered what is customer engagement, let’s discuss why it is essential for your business.

Case Study: Welcome Postcard Campaign Boosts Customer Engagement

Why is Customer Engagement Important?

Customer engagement is all about connecting with the customer personally or emotionally. Experts call this brand intimacy. Brand intimacy involves establishing a deep emotional connection between the business and the customer, affecting buying decisions.

Here are a few benefits of a client engagement strategy:

Customer Retention

A client engagement strategy helps you better meet the existing customers’ needs and keep the leads. Attracting new customers is more expensive than retaining old ones. There is a good chance that more than half your business will come from existing customers. This shows just how vital the existing customers are for your business.

Customer Loyalty

Customers like it when a business follows up on their satisfaction after purchase. This makes them feel valued and appreciated. Hence, they’ll be less likely to switch to another brand.

One way to reach out to your customers is to include social media in your client engagement strategy. Social media provides an excellent platform to provide customer support. You can also use tailored direct mail to nurture customers offline. It’s an alternative channel that creates a more personal bond than online experiences.

Increased Revenue

The more customers love your brand, the more they spend. Continuous customer engagement boosts loyalty and keeps your leads active, encouraging repeat purchases. It increases the number of sales as well as the average check.

Read 2022 Trends to Increase Customer Reach

Customer Engagement Examples and Best Practices

This section shows how other companies reach their customers. Here are some client engagement examples:

1. Adopt an Omnichannel Engagement Strategy

Since customers exist on multiple platforms, businesses adopt an omnichannel engagement strategy to capture their attention everywhere. Omnichannel marketing includes social media, physical outlets, email, direct mail, digital, and other channels to reach customers and interact with them.

Remember, each platform has its audience. Study what each audience loves and use that to reach it more effectively. Social media users will likely appreciate visual content the most, while your website visitors will prefer valuable written content.

2.   Adopt a Brand Voice

Having an authoritative brand voice gives your business a personality and instills trust in your customers.

Find opportunities to advertise your brand with a distinct voice or brand character, and maintain consistency across all channels (social, email, digital, and physical).

A good example is Coca-Cola and its marketing campaigns. This company has harnessed the power of storytelling on social media, gathering over 1.1M followers on Twitter.

How do they do this? The Coca-Cola Company promotes a feeling of family, happiness, and bringing people together, encouraging consumers to share a drink. This engagement strategy attracts new customers and maintains a solid emotional connection with existing ones.

The social media team also engages in customer dialogue, drops comments, mentions, complements, and addresses customer complaints.

3.   Reward Users

How to engage customers in a way they can’t resist? Reward them with an incentive (e.g., redeemable points) when they order. Gifts, coupons, sweet deals, store credit, and other incentives attract new customers and keep the old ones.

Also, don’t forget to add a touch of personalization to your customer engagement model. Personalized offers are different from regular ones because customers feel special. Personalization shows that the company took some time to understand the customer’s specific needs.

For example, celebrating a customer’s birthday with a personalized deal, gift card, or postcard is a great way to demonstrate that your business cares.

An example of a company that rewards its customers well is Nike.

Nike’s Plus membership functions more like a progress motivator and provides many benefits to its users, including prizes for well-done workouts, user-specific promotions, product discounts, and Apple Music exclusive playlists (for workouts.)

Nike customers can work out and earn badges for hitting specific goals with Nike’s training programs. This gives users a sense of growth, commitment, and achievements, contributing to brand loyalty.

4. Offer Personalized Services

As we mentioned, personalization makes customers feel more valued when products, services, or messages are customized to their needs.

Here is how Netflix does it:

With over 200 million subscribers, Netflix has become the world’s most extensive video-on-demand system. And its success can be traced back to its customer engagement strategy.

Here are a few of Netflix’s user engagement marketing strategies

• Netflix collects data about your favorite movies and shows
• The algorithm recommends content that is similar to your preferences
• The platform keeps updating its database with fresh content
• As more content comes on, the algorithm offers more personalized watch lists, recommendations, and suggestions

5. Build More Effective Sales Funnel

Your customer engagement strategy affects the touchpoints across the customer journey. Focus on meeting your customers’ needs at each touchpoint. For instance, customers at the awareness stage should not be met by streams of promotional emails. Instead, they need a detailed description of who you are as a company and how you can help them address their problems. Provide value to your customers and tell them why your business is the perfect fit.

How Can Inkit Help

Inkit is a reach enablement platform with tools for automating and personalizing customer communications:

• Send allows you to deliver automated offline messages at scale. It’s an API that integrates with your CRM and existing tools to automatically provide direct mail and other types of printed communications based on specific user actions or events.
• Render generates, stores, and delivers online PDF documents with custom details and formats.
• Verify works with checkout forms and websites to collect valid and deliverable addresses from your customers. After all, communication with your customers begins with correct contact details (and addresses if they opt to receive mail from you).

Are you ready to automate your customer engagement strategy? Join Inkit for free to start now.