Table of Contents
1: Boosting Your Customer Engagement Online
2: Customer Engagement – Why it is Important?
3: The KPIS and Customer Engagement Goals
4: Ways to Improve Your Audience Engagement
5: Engaging Your Audience Using Relevant Content
6: Revealed – The Secret Video Content Your
Competitors are Using to Captivate their Audience
7: 3 Advanced Ways to Enhance Customer Engagement
8: Focus on the Right Channel to Optimize Online
Customer Engagement
9: Prioritize Consumer Satisfaction by Delivering
Exactly What they Actually Needs
10: Google Example of Brand Marketing That Engages
Your Customers
11: 4 Best Ways to Engage Customer Lightning Fast
12: Does Your Content Need More Personality?
13: Enhance Customer Engagement by Creating
Integrated Communications Lifecycle
14: 5 Tips to Test Whether You Are Successfully
Engaging Your Customers
3
15: Likes and Shares – Their Value in Customer
Engagement
16: How to Engage Your Customers With Holiday
Marketing
17: Online Customer Engagement Means You Need
Insight on Your Customers
18: Case Study - How One Company Uses Viral Video to
Engage Customers at Minimal Cost?
19: Make Sure You Deliver Valued Experience for Your
Customer to Engage them Effectively
20: 3 Basic Methods to Boost Customer Engagement
Level Online
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Chapter 1: Boosting Your Customer
Engagement Online
Small businesses will often rely on their website for consumers to find
them, so this is your opportunity to make a good impression with potential
leads or returning customers.
Therefore, you want to make sure that site
keeps your visitors engaged and interested.
There are few brands that aren’t aware of the importance of being
engaging on the web, but smaller companies often don’t believe they have
the resources or time to be updating their websites on a more continuous
basis with fresh and new content.
So what many small businesses do is create a Facebook page and forgo the
website. There is no question that Facebook and other social media outlets
are an excellent place to begin but if you want to gain the trust of your
customer you need a website – it really is that important, because it shows
that you have a company that is established.
You want to make sure that your website experience will match your
customer service experience. We live in a world that is increasingly mobile
and so consumers expect the same shopping experience online as they
would get in your store.
Therefore, it is a good idea to offer a seamless
customer experience such as providing in-depth details on your
products/services, purchasing information, easy contact, and a way for
customers to quickly reach you such as live chat.
You should also personalize your site in a way that works for your
business. Enhance your customer experience by tailoring your site to their
needs. Don’t use flashy gimmicks. Use big data analytics to learn what it is your customer is looking for when they arrive at your site and then create
an experience that pleases them.
Make sure you are using social media as a tool to communicate and engage
with your customers online. Social media’s role has changed a lot in the
last few years.
Not only is it a way to share and promote your content from
your site, it can be an extension in your customer service – a quick and
easy way for your customers to contact and connect with you. You can also
reach your customers quickly and in a very cost effective way, that costs
only pennies per customer.
Engaging your customers online is no longer a novelty – something you
can think about offering.
It is what consumers want and if you aren’t
providing it, you need to expect that they will look elsewhere.
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Chapter 2: Customer Engagement – Why
it is Important?
Customer engagement focuses on you encouraging your customers to share
and interact with your company staff. It encouraged them to share their
experiences and in return, what you create from them is your brand. When
you execute this well, you will develop a solid customer engagement
strategy that will promote loyalty and growth.
Those companies that focus on customer engagement focus on value
creation rather than on extracting revenue.
These companies are well
aware of how to engage their customers online. They know how to provide
them with real value whether they offer an superior end to end experience
for their customer, exceptional content on their website, the best possible
customer support and service, what they are doing is making sure they
deliver more than just your typical sell. Incorporating these customer
engagement strategies can be healthy for your business.
Remember Happy Customers are the Life of Your Business Obsess over
your customers! It’s necessary to success! It begins with the culture you
establish for your company and making sure that your support team is at
the frontlines to make sure your customers are happy and their needs are
addressed.
Your entire company from top to bottom needs to share that
providing an amazing customer experience is necessary for the key to your
company’s success.
Think about how your company model can service your customers in the
best way possible. What is it your customers need from you and when do
your customers need you.
What hours should you be available? Do you
offer a seamless process for your customers?
Your customer experience allows you to offer you a way to increase your
customer satisfaction and loyalty, which in turn leads to them advocating
for you. Your company grows because you have happy customers.
Companies that miss this may stick around for awhile but they will
eventually falter.
It is much more difficult to continue to build new customers than it is to
keep your current customers engaged and happy, and wanting to return to
buy more products from you. Companies that actually value their
customers and work hard at engaging them are wise companies and they
are far more likely to be here a decade or two from now.
Your customer is the lifeblood of your business and it is important to
ensure that all of your employees treat the customer with the importance
that they deserve. What an interesting and engaging relationship one can
build with their employees.
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Chapter 3: The KPIS and Customer
Engagement Goals
Customer Engagement is often overlooked. Yet every company should
have their KPIS and customer engagement goals set. So what should
that look like?
ROI or return on investment is key to every business and Ro, which is the
return, is up to you. What one sees is a good return on their investment is
personal and it is defined by the company and the shareholders or by
management.
You need to make sure that you define this.
You do not need to make sure that all is directed in a commercial
direction, but it is a good idea if it ties back to your commercial venue. It is
easy to make sure that your commercial goals are linked to your marketing
KPIs or you customer engagement by simply developing your own matrix.
You can use this approach so that people from varying levels that each have
their own perspective within the company can see the value of having a
retention program or customer engagement program. For example, look at
a referral of your product to a friend vs. a customer who makes their third
and fourth purchase. Both of these matters. Both of these are linked to the
traffic on your website.
As a result, you can easily tie them both to sales.
For the repeat customer it is clearly visible that there is lifetime value just
as there is for the new customer. So when it comes to new vs. return
visitors Google Analytics is an excellent tool for marketers who are trying to
establish commercial goals and need to see if those goals have been met.
You will be able to easily see where the customer engagement takes place
and the direct relationship is built. For example, you could see that Facebook, which is generally customer orientated, is where you had your
first customer engagement.
You might have a customer group on your
website. You might have a customer form. Your goal is to find the simplest
way to judge customer engagement.
With social media usage growing at exponential rates, it is key to amplify
your message.
When you engage your customer on some level, you can
look at just how well your content/message is resonating to your audience.
Sales are your end goal; however, before the sales, the KPIs can make
things more manageable for those on the front lines and it will certainly
make it more meaningful.
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Chapter 4: Ways to Improve Your
Audience Engagement
If your goal is to improve your customer engagement online, there are a
number of things you can do. One of the main things you should consider
is how simplistic your store is.
You achieve simplicity by focusing on your
customers resources – those resources that they have the least of are what
you should be focused on. For example, for some it might be mental effort
for others it might be time, and for still others it might be the overall
shopping experience.
If you are able to simplify an existing customer routine, you are much more
likely to have them engage. In fact, if you just remove the distractions you
will have made great strides in improving the simplicity of your site and
making your customer happy and more likely to engage.
Consumers look for shortcuts to reach their goals. For your customer it is
important to discover a unique value and then to find the shortest way to
get to that unique value.
When you highlight things that help your
customer find the shortest path to get what they want, they are much more
likely to be interested in making the purchase.
You will have a very engaged
customer when you have one that sees a simple way to get what they want
from your site.
You need to be always meeting the expectations of your customer. In fact,
it’s a sure fire way to enjoy customer engagement online.
You can meet
your customers’ expectations by increasing your product/service
relevance and communication. You achieve product relevance by
providing testimonials, reviews, and complete instructions on using your
product/service.
You need to have open lines of communication with your customers so
that they can quickly get their questions answered. Online live chat is one
way to accomplish this.
You should offer as many lines as communication
as possible, including email, live chat, telephone, social media, etc. Make
it convenient for your customer to get in contact with you.
You also need to make sure that you focus on creating the right channels
with the right message at the right time, for your customer’s first step.
Because if you miss them on the first step, they become your competitions
customer not yours.
All of your customers will have their own preference.
Some will like social media, some will like email others will like a follow up
call from you. It’s a good idea to test your customer market before you
choose.
Customer engagement is key to the success of your business. Being able to
engage customers online has made it easier in many ways, but has also
complicated the situation too.
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Chapter 5: Engaging Your Audience
Using Relevant Content
Customer engagement – in the world of consumerism it makes the
world go round. So what type of content or offer do you engage in to
keep the different types of audiences happy? Good question!
Capturing data and then using that data to make sound choices is how you
are going to customize the content for your audiences. When you are able
to understand your consumers’ needs, intent, and past purchasing history,
you can leverage that information to re-engage and re-market to that
audience.
You can easily achieve this because now you really to speak to
their needs. How you do this will depend on what kind of company you are,
what resources you have available and what your budget looks like.
At the root of these strategies is useful content that is on topic and allows
you to show a continuous relevance to the consumers who are purchasing
specific products from you.
Through your consumer engagement, you
should be getting an indication of what motivates the consumer and then
you should be diligently working at helping to solve their issues.
Blogs are a good way to have all of the information centralized. If you create
a content hub and then you can repurpose that same content to Twitter,
Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, and the list goes on.
You can use as
many of these social media outlets as you feel you will benefit from. All
provide you with additional opportunities to reach your audience and reconnect.
Add scheduled email communication to your program that
promotes brand recognition.
When you offer useful information that the consumer finds valuable they
are more receptive to hearing and sharing your message.
It keeps your product on the front lines online and good branding means your product
has the potential to grow into being a household name.
This approach means that you can address the needs of the many different
audience types that you have. You can keep each engaged in something of
value for them, so there is no need to lose any of your audience.
This
approach also provides the opportunity to re-promote your
products/services the right way and at the appropriate time, which add
value. When you re-engage you re-affirm the relevance of what you have to
offer. In that way, it is right side up marketing, because it has an inbound
effect, rather than an interruptive outbound effect.
This is how you engage your different types of consumer audience and
keep them happy along with keeping your company’s bottom line
happy.
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Chapter 6: Revealed – The Secret Video
Content Your Competitors are Using to
Captivate their Audience
Typically, marketing agencies benefit by using tools that allow them to see
what the competition of their client are up to. From the results they find, they
will then create their own campaign.
It saves them time as they can use
what’s already proving to be working (or not working) within the industry.
You now can take advantage of tools available to you and find this
information out for yourself. Whether your company is small or medium in
size, you will find these tools to compare vide marketing campaigns
extremely helpful.
You can download the results into an Excel spreadsheet
for ease of use. Never has it been easier to see how your competition is
engaging customers with videos.
Rivalfox hit the market in 2013 and it offers on demand competitor
analysis using an algorithm that collects the results from hundreds of
different competitor KPIs. It collects information from all the social media
venues in real time.
You can engage in the pure statistics to measure the
success of your competitions video campaign or you can invest in user
testing to really understand what your customers are saying about the
competitions website and the videos posted. You get a 14 day trial period
and than the cost ranges from $49 to $299 depending on the number of
users.
Unruly is another software tool that you can turn to.
You will find larger
companies like Adidas, HSBC or Evian use Unruly. Clients are use analytics
from owned, earned, and paid media using Unruly Analytics. You can use
the Benchmark Edition or the Campaign Edition. With the latter, you can assess the performance of each campaign and measure the success of these
campaigns at engaging customers.
You can also look at your own videos
and KPIs along with the competitions. You create the parameters that will
measure success. You also choose if you want to bundle videos together.
You can identify trends and look at social media avenues where the biggest
effect is being seen.
Once you have the information you need to create your marketing
strategy and decide how you are going to engage your customers.
This
does not mean you should run out and copy what your competition has
done, but it does mean you can find things that work and you will be able
to emulate the success of your competition.
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Chapter 7: 3 Advanced Ways to Enhance
Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is a critical component in building a strong
customer base. 3 ways to increase your customer engagement include
clustering, content and copy. Let’s have a detailed look at each.
Clustering
Anytime you can add a dose of reality to the online shopping experience, it
is desirable. What I mean by this is being able to create the same type of
experience that your customer would get from being in your store.
When you cluster products together that you might not necessarily find
sitting together in a store or in website navigation it is a method you can
use to add a human feel to your website merchandising. A reminder, you
must never forget about cross selling.
You want to encourage people to see
wholes rather than pieces. For example, with clothing you want your
customer to see an outfit rather than an individual piece.
Content
We find that commerce and content tend to collide. What we are talking
about is the content that is in addition to the descriptions that describe your
products or services.
Your content marketing should be related to your
products/services and is often referred to as lifestyle content.
For example, food providers often will offer recipes, clothing merchants
will often provide tips on various ways to wear different pieces of
clothing, tech merchants will often provide information on website design
or content, etc.
You get the picture. You are going to first do an excellent
job of describing your products/services for sale and then you are also going to provide value added content that your customers will want to
read.
This will need to be updated on a regular basis to keep it fresh and have
your customers returning. Remember, your content can be used to
provide information on how to make the best use out of your product(s)
and thus help to increase sales.
Copy
When it comes to selling your products or services, you should always be
selling the benefits, not the features of the products.
Make sure to include
SEO benefits and to keep it light and add some fun if it is appropriate,
which it won’t always be.
It is important to know your audience and provide copy that works for them.
The better you know your audience the better you will be at doing a great
job of this and you’ll be rewarded by repeat customers to your site and an
increase in repeat sales.
Put these 3 practices into play sooner rather than later!
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Chapter 8: Focus on the Right Channel to
Optimize Online Customer Engagement
Establishing the right channel for your business to excel in online customer
engagement involves having the right message at the right time for each
customer segment.
Customers like to engage in different ways. Some prefer
social media channels like Facebook while others prefer email. Test your
market and determine what will work best for your customers. Check out
these suggestions.They’ve been known to work very well.
1.Become the authority figure for your products/services in your business.
Bring your expertise out in the open so that your customers can clearly see
you are the expert. Offer free advice through your website, social media,
or another company’s website. In today’s market the only way you can
establish that you are an authority figure is to offer something of value to
your customers.
This type of engagement increases your authority while
interaction with no value will lower your authority image.
2. Supporting a customer community is a good way to establish a group
of buyers but the best way for to you actually engage your customers online
is have open channels that flow back to your business. Provide access to
product designers, your shipping managers, your production team, etc. all
of which can offer insight into the how and why of the way things work.
This is generally deeply engaging to your customers. You can even provide
a ‘how we get things done video’ that walks customers through the steps.
This type of engagement increases customer loyalty.
3. If you can offer your customers some type of game like experience
this can be a real hit! Visitors love to compete and they like to have a
unique shopping experience. So create a contest that has a number of different milestones so the customer sticks with it. Offer a draw for
something free weekly.
There are many different consumer type games and
contests that you can offer. Whatever you come up with make sure it fits
your customer profile. This is an excellent method to engage your
customers.
The majority of customers like something that breaks them out
of the routine shopping experience and grabs their interest.
There you have it – three excellent methods that you can use to engage your
customers online in a more effective manner.
Those companies who are
successful at engaging their customers excel in their markets. You too can
be one of them!
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Chapter 9: Prioritize Consumer
Satisfaction by Delivering Exactly What
they Actually Needs
Too often, the customer makes their purchase and then the delivery is
scheduled and occurs, but there is little or no more contact with the client.
The customer experience becomes nil, nonexistent. This is not acceptable.
There must be Consistent Customer Engagement before the sale, during
the sale and after the sale.
How do you feed back the customers experience with your
product/service?
How do you make sure this happens?
You certainly have
many tools and options to choose from. The two elements you want to
proceed with to help you value just how big the opportunity was or is;
include looking at the reactive and the proactive approach.
Reactive
Many companies have made excellent use of customer reactions. Zappos
might be one of the best examples out there.
This company is obsessed
with their brand and making the consumer just as obsessed by using the
tools that are out there. Tools like Facebook and Twitter offer channels
for your customer service regardless of what the customer wants.
Tools like User Voice are becoming more commonly used, where feedback
for product development can be gathered, and where you can gather
information on what might be missing in your product.
Very valuable
information and important in customer engagement.
Proactive This is an approach that some companies are highly successful with and
Dell is one of them.
Dell listens to the entire market and then looks for the
happy and unhappy customers so that they can pro actively resolve any
problems their customers are having.
They actually have a command
center. By engaging with both happy and unhappy customers, they can
clearly see what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.
These methods are not mutually exclusive to one another. They are simply
individual processes that a company can use. One or both may be valuable
to the company. Both do require staff that are focused on customer
engagement.
These programs will not run themselves.
Customer engagement is more overlooked now than any other time in
marketing history. Ironically, right now, we have more tools available to
use than any other time, so companies should be flocking to the tools to
find out more about their customers so they can do a better job of finding
them, keeping them, marketing to them, branding their product to them
and creating a product that their customer wants.
A handful of smart
companies are doing just that. What is your company doing?
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Chapter 10: Google Example of Brand
Marketing That Engages Your Customers
When it comes to running a successful marketing campaign, it is pretty
hard to argue with what Google has to say.
They deliver the simplest form
of services. Google doesn’t just promote the spirit of its own innovation, it
also encourages its audience to participate in self discover, telling them
they have the potential to make the most out of the interne, out of the web.
Are you targeting the correct audience?
If all your marketing efforts are not
focusing on your customers, it’s a waste of money and effort. You need to
focus on your customers and you should be able to recognize your ideal
customer so that you can base your efforts on those customers.
What is the gender, age, or job profile of your customer?
What are your
customers’ abilities, interests, likes, dislikes, etc?
When you do a proper
audit, you will know your customer inside out. You are busy promoting
your brand with zeal. You might be looking to send out a message, increase
your followers, or improve your conversion rate. For each thing you want
your audience to do, you will need to have a call to action that is effective.
In fact, this call to action is a key part of promoting your brand and
engaging with your customers, yet another reason why a brand audit can be
extremely beneficial.
Let’s have a quick look at the best brand audit process.
1.Learn how your company is placing across the internet. There are many
tools you can use to see where your brand is being mentioned – Google
Search, Social Mention, Google Alerts, etc. You should be monitoring
whether your brand is doing good or bad, where it needs to be improved,what your customer base is, what their needs are, and whether you have
any bad reviews.
2. Take time to analyze your content. This can be tedious but since your
content plays such an important role in your brand becoming established, it
is worth your time to do a solid SEO audit. In fact, it’s mandatory. Check
how your pages are ranking, identify the purpose of each page, and figure
out if the information is properly targeting your audience.
3. Make sure to analyze your traffic being generated on your site. It’s
an important part of your brand audit so that you can see how your site is
attracting visitors
4. Monitor your social media channels and see what your customers
are saying. Anytime there are complaints address them immediately.
Make sure your interaction with your customers has the tone you want.
Managing your online brand and your engagement with your customers
means you need to always be focused on what’s going on.
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Chapter 11: 4 Best Ways to Engage
Customer Lightning Fast
Improving your customer engagement online is key to your overall success.
Let’s look at 4 ways you can use to improve your customer engagement.
Value Proposition
For the majority of ecommerce merchants or any store with a website,
taking advantage of value proposition can be a useful tool to engage your
customers. In fact, many of the experts believe it to be vital. Your website
design will leave your visitors with an impression about your products
and website.
Web users don’t like to read unless they must, but that said, you need to
make sure that you clearly state what your company stands for, your return
policy, history of your products, and anything else that is valuable and
important. Of course, value added content is important too, just make sure
that it is written in an easy to read format and includes plenty of lists.
Create a Product Video
Many businesses have found that adding product videos to their website
gives them a boost in their conversion rate.
What we know for all
websites is that when you add video it creates a richer, more impactful
product page that is going to engage and interest your customer much
better than straight text.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words
and that has been proven true time and time again online. If you can’t
create a product video than at least make sure that you add pictures that
are relevant to what you are talking about.
Personal Customer Reviews Customer reviews are very powerful, which is why they are so popular.
They can take many different forms but it seems the most powerful
customer review has a picture of the face of the person making the review.
So encourage your customers to post their pic when they write a review.
Create New Categories
You want to make sure that you don’t confuse your visitors but you should
still constantly tweak your categories and your filters to ensure that your
visitors have the best possible navigation.
The navigation on your website
can engage your customer or have them hitting the back button in two
seconds flat. So, make it user friendly. Also, add categories for special
events or holidays that apply to your products or services.
You might also
add a sales page or a promotion category. Don’t be afraid to play a little
here. It’s good to keep things alive.
These 4 things are sure to help you do a better job of engaging your
customer,
why not plan on implementing them today?
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Chapter 12: Does Your Content Need
More Personality?
We all know that there is a need for relevant and targeted content for your
audience. But do we have to stick to the corporate image or can we show
who we are personally and perhaps even add some humor.
That depends.
Many companies tend to play it safe and show no personality while others
are much lighter and share more of the personality of those responsible for
their posts as long as it aligns with their tone of voice and brand. Once
content is shared, it never goes away so before you post it is important to
know your market.
Then you can decide if your content could use some
personality.
The Top Emotions We Invoice In Social Media Content
Buzzsumoanalyzed more than 10,000 of the most shareable articles for
topic and tone.
What they found is that the top three emotions invoked
were laughter, awe, and amusement.
When you publish for content marketing, it engages a psychological
contract, which is why it is so important for you to comprehend how you
can call upon the correct emotions to make the online connection a
positive one.
We understand that people sometimes become angry and this
can cause damage to your brand, which in turn can cause a loss of sales.
But can we still be controversial if we are not being political or personal?
It is important to balance engaging, positive content that is sharable –
there is no question that this can be a challenge. Although is some market
sectors like B2B it can be easier.
The question becomes should you play it
safe or should you take the chance and push your boundaries by including content that is entertaining and thought provoking and that may not be
agreed upon by all.
According to the experts the benefits of sharing entertaining positive
content far exceed the risks (at least in most cases) because it is this kind
of content that is likely to be shared for its value.
Your visitors are likely to
share this type of content with others who may not be currently following
you and this can lead to a growth in followers and potential customers. An
interesting topic can be an excellent ice breaker, and when you add a little
personality it can take you from zero to one hundred in no time – at least
when it comes to sharing your content and that’s the goal here right?
It’s important to not be worried about showing personality but rather to
ensure you have set boundaries around that personality so none of your
followers or visitors are negatively affected and you do not negatively affect
your brand.
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Chapter 13: Enhance Customer
Engagement by Creating Integrated
Communications Lifecycle
If you want to keep your customers connected, you need to create some
type of communication lifecycle. You can’t just sell to them and forget
about them. In fact, you might call this the Holy Grail in engaging
customers and keeping them connected to your company and your brand.
You can take advantage of marketing automation to accomplish this task.
There are a number of marketing automation tools on the market.
Be sure
to check them out and find one that works for you. This is an area that is
in its infancy but it is being developed by some of the best in the
integrated marketing automation industry like Eloqua or EDialog. Smaller
companies are making this kind of technology available to smaller
companies. Marketo, Office Autopilot and Genius are three of them.
Marketing automation is very large and there are a number of different
platforms, each with their own strengths and focuses. Marketing
automation will include the gathering of information, analytics, auto lead
generation, lead conversion, and cross department flow.
This is going to
save a great deal of time and it is going to make it much easier to stay
connected with existing customers and potential customers.
The best starting point is a lead from a B2B marketer, who focuses on the
automation of lead generation and conversion. Focusing on email that is
outbound is the simplest example of automated marketing. From there it
grows and grows.
It is complex and has so much to offer. Information is
constantly being added, changed and updated and at the end of the day,
you have an incredible amount of knowledge to help you to keep and grow
your customer database.
The power is in having the ability to layer on the purchasing intentions
through web forms and click through behavior, and then to turn
up/down the intensity of promotions and to strengthen the offers that are
applicable to the consumer.
You need to integrate your email communication, SMS, direct mail, etc. and
it is completely doable using these platforms because you will design your
own communication sequence for each of the segments and sub-segments.
Your communication with your customer needs to begin before the sale and
carry through long after the sale. Your communication needs to complete a
lifecycle so that consumers are engaged from the beginning to the end and
beyond.
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Chapter 14: 5 Tips to Test Whether You
Are Successfully Engaging Your
Customers
You create a marketing campaign, but do you know if it actually working or
do you just go on a wing and a prayer and hope for the best. Here are 5 tips
you can use to test whether you are successfully engaging your customer.
1.Test the audience – You need to ensure that your Twitter followers,
LinkedIn network, Facebook followers, Google+ followers, etc. are actually
the people that you need following your business and that they are the
people you plan to be doing business with. If you are not posting the best
content to engage your customers, it will be a waste of time and you will not
reap the benefits. The same applies if you are not targeting the right people.
2. Test the content – Once you have identified who the target audience,
it is time to test your content on your social media sites. You need to know
what content is getting the most comments, likes, shares, etc. Take notes
and post content that is similar in the future to keep enjoying the benefits.
3. Test the depth of your content – You might get plenty of
comments, tons of shares or likes, but do you actually know why you are
getting them? Find out if it is your content that motivates them to
actually respond. This helps you to understand the issues at hand.
4. Test what the best time of day is – Whether you schedule your posts
or manually post them, you should be checking to see what time in the
day your posts are getting the most engagement from your customers.
Once you have a good idea of what content is working best, then you can
figure out what time is working best.
5. Test each site individually – You have limited time so it is better if
you do your checks one social media network at a time. By doing so, you
will not be taking on more than you can handle at a time. You need to make
sure that you look at each of the sites that you are marketing to your
customers on.
That’s it in a nutshell. Five tips that when you put into practice can help
you to ensure that you are engaging your customer is the best possible
way and that you are maximizing your marketing to your existing clients
and potential clients.
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Chapter 15: Likes and Shares – Their
Value in Customer Engagement
Engaging your customers online is an important undertaking of every
business and one of those ways is to engage them through social media.
The social response is a way for your customers and potential customers to
weigh in on what is being said on social media.
When a follower likes your content it generally means they have read it
and they found it interesting or agreed with it. For the most part if a
person, likes something it means it didn’t offend them. A like is similar to
a ‘thumbs up.’ If they share your content then generally it means that they
see it as having some value to others.
If you earn a comment, you need to realize this takes the most amount of
effort so it is apparent that you have successfully achieved a high level of
engagement and that is what your goal should be. To know that you are
engaging with your customers online in an effective manner, you want to
see them leaving comments on your posts.
If day after day your posts get
little engagement then you need to consider what you can do to change
the situation, because it is apparent that you are not successfully
engaging.
Of course, results you can measure relate to why you are on social media to
begin with.
If you are there just to raise your brand’s awareness than you
will likely have to accept getting likes and shares and little more.
However,
if you are there to engage with your followers or connections then you will
want to create a two way conversation as much as possible.
You need to recognize that the more you can create these two way
conversations and engage with your customers and followers the more interested they will be in visiting your pages and seeing what’s new and
exciting in your company world and what new products/services you might
have to offer.
Generating this kind of interest is good for business. It takes
little effort to click a like button and really not even read what’s in front of
you. It takes much more effort to engage on a post and that means your
followers are actually paying attention to what you have to say and they
find it valuable enough to have a conversation about. That’s true customer
engagement online and that’s what is going to grow your business and
improve brand recognition.
Chapter 16: How to Engage Your
Customers With Holiday Marketing
It seems there’s always a holiday around the corner. When it comes to
online marketing no longer, do we wait for Black Friday to send our
online marketing into overdrive?
Instead, we now address the holidays as
they arrive. In fact, smart businesses think about starting their marketing
kick offs earlier rather than late.
At one point, we recognized the main holidays like Christmas, New Years,
Easter, etc. Now we recognize many holiday (as far as marketing goes)
including Black Friday, Halloween, Martin Luther King Day, etc.
It seems
retailers from all walks have learned that holiday marketing can be
extremely beneficial to them.
Let’s look at Halloween as an example. When you are planning your
Halloween campaign consider this, 71.5 percent of all adults plan to
celebrate or participate in some kind of Halloween activity.
There is no
specific demographic that is more likely to participate than another. This
would indicate that no matter what demographic you serve you can
benefit from running a marketing campaign through Halloween.
This is one example of how knowing the stats for a particular holiday can
be beneficial in helping you decide whether to run a campaign.
Generally
speaking, if you ignore a holiday you will be missing out on a marketing
opportunity and a way to engage your customers.
How to Engage Your Customers With Holidays
1.Have a loyalty program where holidays build additional bonus points.
You can even run a separate loyalty program from just holidays if you want. Always test the waters first. See how receptive your customers are
to a loyalty program.
Try to design one specific to your brand and your
customer needs. Your options truly are endless.
2. Offer free giveaways with purchases on holidays or create mystery
packs that you sell on holidays. You can use this in many ways to
participate in the festivities of the holiday season. Don’t be afraid to be
extremely creative with your giveaways and try to tie them to the holiday.
3. A holiday is an excellent time to give your site a facelift. Work with
your website designer to make small holiday related changes to your pages.
You can have a lot of fun to this! You might even be able to make the
changes yourself depending on your skills or how much access you have to
your site.
4. This is an excellent time to reach out to your customers and
engage them. You can combine your marketing for that period with the
holiday. Include social media and email campaigns. Let your customers
know that you love to celebrate these special times.
Learning how to engage your customers by incorporating holiday
celebrations is a skill you won’t want to miss out on.
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Chapter 17: Online Customer
Engagement Means You Need Insight on
Your Customers
If you think about it, the customers that have purchased from you are
special. You have their money - they liked what you had to say and offer
and so they made a purchase.
These customers now have their own unique
perspective on customer engagement with your company, from finding
your company online, to comparing you to the competition, and deciding
to buy from you.
What happens after that? Your company might reward
them, simply re-sell to them, or maybe even ignore them.
The first thing you need to understand is how they see you based on their
experience with your company.
This means you need to harness the
insights you have on your existing customers and these insights could help
you do a much better job of generating sales.
There are numerous ways that you can generate customer insight.
However, you should incorporate some of it into the day-to-day operation
of your business.
Other components can be carried out during key periods
throughout the year. It’s a good idea to ask questions around their
satisfaction with their purchase, how their online customer experience
was, what it was like to deal with your company from an outside
perspective, did you meet your customers requirements and expectations,
etc.
Here are some ways that you can use to gather this information:
If you don’t have a steady stream of data and prefer to ad-hoc, emailing out
a survey works great. For example, once a year, you can send out a large questioning based on your database.
It is the most common way to gather
insights and it can be done last minute when you feel like things are sliding.
However, it is better if you use your email survey to capture insight on your
marketing and sales process.
You can gather data from the masses who do nothing on your site using
tools like Kampyle or 4Q – these have low commitments. In addition to
learning about your customers, it is important that you learn about those
who visit and leave without making a purchase.
It is better not ask all the questions at once. You can overwhelm your
customers by doing so. Tyr to build ways to capture relevant data at
different stages of the customer engagement so that you learn about your
potential consumer, as they get closer to making their purchase.
Feedback and insights are an important part of understanding your
customer engagement and determining whether it is effective or whether
it has weak areas that should be addressed. Make sure that you make use
of it.
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Chapter 18: Case Study - How One
Company Uses
Viral Video to Engage
Customers at Minimal Cost?
Every year there a number of digital conferences that occur, sharing how
they have enjoyed brand success as well as the obstacles they have
overcome. Recently at one of those digital conferences, Tesco shared their
international marketing campaign and we think it’s worth sharing further.
The challenge that Tesco was facing in their international marketing is that
while they were a household name throughout the UK, they were entering
new markets, which included their online grocery delivery service.
This did
not have much awareness – in fact, Tesco would call it poor. So it’s goal
was to raise the awareness of this service with a younger generation who
generally was watching less television than previous generations.
Part of Tesco’s solution to this was their lighthearted, funny, videos that
aired on YouTube. These videos went viral in Poland in no time at all. This
is an excellent example of how a marketing campaign can use
entertainment to create a message that is appealing to different cultures. It
is an excellent example of how you can engage your customers and
potential customers on a low budget and enjoy great success.
Tesco began this trial in Poland and YouTube videos reached more than
740,000 views in just a few months, peaking at a more than 1 ½ million
views. The cost – only a few thousand dollars for each of the videos. The
benefits far exceeded the cost of producing and airing these videos. In fact,
it exceeded their own expectations.
It’s time to back away from promotion driven videos that are very
expensive to produce and instead think about creating marketing videos on
a low budget that will engage and interest your customers.
It’s time to look
at how your company could produce a video that was entertaining and that
your market wanted to watch, without spending a huge amount of money.
You may not have even considered videos as a marketing tool you can
take advantage of. You should! More and more companies are
recognizing the value of videos.
YouTube remains the most popular mode
of distribution but there are others such as Vimeo. Don’t be afraid to
explore the various channels.
In addition, to creating and sharing these videos to engage your
customers don’t forget to share them through your social media networks
such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. – there are many!
Take advantage of a fun and interesting way to engage your customers!
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Chapter 19: Make Sure You Deliver
Valued Experience for Your Customer to
Engage them Effectively
Your customers are important to you.
In fact, they are your business. So
how do you make sure you engage your customer and give them a
valued experience? Good question!
You need to layer your customer’s
experience, but how do you do that? The best way is to build social
objects that create a sense of community that operates like a hub. You
have a center point and then everything flows out from there. This is a
great way to re-affirm your brand relevance. Why?
There are two reasons.
You connect consumers with other customers
and create a deeper more meaningful experience on your brand and
related subjects. In doing that, you are able to re-sell. Two powerful
reasons! This hopefully helps to make it clearer for you.
A platform for sharing – One of the most powerful methods to stay
valuable in the consumers eyes is to allow consumers to connect and share
amongst themselves with other like minded people. This creates the
‘perfect storm,’ because like minded people are flocking together so you
can deliver ongoing information and insight about your brand to one solid
platform.
Here discussion can take place and these people can share with
others. You are directly engaging with your existing customers, which is so
important and they enjoy a value added experience.
Tons of discussion can
go on here. A blog on your website is the perfect central point and from
there it can branch out to social media networks that are relevant such as
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, etc.
You can post one new blog a week that will carry you through the week. Of course, more is better, but
the point is this is what you can get away with.
Interactive tools – Make use of the many interactive tools that are available
to help make it easier to engage with your customers and potential
customers.
There are Q&A tools the help you make decisions, there are
analytical tools that help you see where your audience is coming from and
whether you are on target, there are tools that can …
well the list goes on.
Take advantage of any of the tools that can make your life easier. Google
Analytics is a must.
Engaging with existing customers not only helps to keep them as an active
customer, it helps you to learn more about this customer and how you can
continue to offer them products/services under your brand.
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Chapter 20: 3 Basic Methods to Boost
Customer Engagement Level Online
Engaging your customers online is an important part of your business
success. To do so takes some work and planning on your part. Here are 3 key
ways that are guaranteed to help you engage better with your customers
online.
1. Social Media
Social media a very broad arena. It includes many things such as crowd
sourced imagery, simple embedded tweets, social sign-in for
comments, incentives against content, trending items, share
imperatives and much more.
Social media is a tool that should never be overlooked. Because there
are so many social media, networks to choose from you need to know
your customer well and then choose what social media avenues would
work best for your business. Use as many social media outlets as you
feel will be beneficial to engaging with your customers.
2. Site search
Make your site search as simple and as useful as possible. For example,
ToysRUs has their search setup to auto complete. It also shows the SKUs
for each term the user types in. Take this example and use it on your
website, even on a smaller scale.
The accuracy of your results is very important so focus on that as your
number one priority. Then make things simple for your visitor to use.
Make the search as functional as possible and the easier it makes your
visitors ability to find what they want the better.
3 Live chat
The call to action is important on every ecommerce site, and live chat can
play an important role in achieving your call to action. It is a valuable
feature it has so many uses.
You can have live chat to solve customer
complaints, answer questions, provide inventory lists, etc. and it can
include a call to action. Live chat provides instant gratification for the
customer and an excellent way for you to engage your customer online.
However, it is important not to frustrate your customer by claiming you
have live chat and then having it seldom actually available, instead
answered by a computer.
No live chat is better than this method. Clearly
state the hours when live chat will be available.
Make use of these 3 key ways to engage your customer online and keep
them happy. Your customers are the key to your success, so make sure
that you give engaging with them the attention it deserves.
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