Business owners are aware that their customers are at the core of their business. And for that reason, engaging with them is very important. Brands engage with their customers, but many focus on throwing sales pitches instead. This misses the mark because true engagement fosters trust and loyalty.
Successful companies that engage with their customers know what people want – learning something valuable and interacting with others. Luckily, thanks to tech advancement, these two are very easy to achieve.
If you’re still looking for effective ways to engage with your customers, check these 5 strategies out.
1. Use Video
Videos are the most engaging form of content. More than 65% of people are visual learners, which means they are more likely to retain information that is presented to them via images and video than by plain text.
There are many ways to utilize video to boost customer engagement:
- Turn to YouTube. Businesses are turning to YouTube to share their message, but instead of posting ads, they’re posting stories.
- Include it in your emails. According to statistics, including the term “video” in an email subject line can increase the open rates by nearly 20% and reduce the number of email unsubscribers by more than 25%
- Take it to Instagram. With over 400 million monthly active users, Instagram is a powerful marketing tool that allows social media-savvy brands to tell their stories and engage customers.
Videos are a great way to engage customers but they also take a lot of space and bandwidth. Uploading videos directly to your website might slow it down and create a poor user experience. For this reason, you should consider using a video hosting site. Video hosting sites have more server resources to serve video files, so you won’t have to worry about your website’s performance. Moreover, they automatically adjust video quality in order to provide a better viewing experience.
2. Use Email
Email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing tools for businesses of all sizes and industries. Studies have shown that more than 75% of consumers prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications via email.
When it comes to using email to boost customer engagement, you need to pay attention to consistency and apply best practices in messaging, such as:
- Using powerful subject lines to draw the consumer to open your email
- Creating high-quality, dynamic content
- Personalizing your emails
- Segmenting your email lists
However, sending personalized messages to each subscriber on a regular basis is impossible to do manually. In order to be able to send out targeted email campaigns and measure their effectiveness, you need to have a reliable email marketing automation tool. Marketing automation tools allow you to implement workflows and send out consistent and timely emails that are relevant to your subscribers. These tools handle different aspects of your marketing campaigns such as mail merge with Google spreadsheets, sending follow-ups, tracking clicks and opens, and providing powerful analytics to show you what is working and what isn’t.
3. Create Educational Content
If you want to make your content more engaging, then you need to focus on educating your customers via how-to blog posts and tutorials. Most likely, customers come to your website when they need to learn how to do something. By solving their problems, you establish yourself as an expert they can turn to over and over again.
Here’s how to ensure your content offers true value:
- Create content that focuses on specific subjects, preferably ones that haven’t already been covered by everyone else in the industry. Try to find out what your customers want to read about by collecting feedback or analyzing the search terms they use on your website.
- Your content should also be actionable. Bear in mind that people’s time is valuable and they want to read or watch something that brings real value to their lives, teaches them something new, or enables them to do things they couldn’t do before.
- Finally, make sure your content is entertaining. It’s hard to engage customers if you’re serving boring content. Consider tossing an occasional meme in your posts, or insert a joke. Or instead of writing just for SEO purposes, try writing shorter headlines and using simpler language.
4. Build a Community
Online communities and forums have been around for a long time and it seems like they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Their main upside is that they enable you to engage with your customers directly by having relevant discussions, answering their questions, sharing information that they are looking for or find valuable, and keeping them updated.
Of course, nowadays, social platforms like Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Groups can be used for the same purpose, which is an added bonus since your customers are probably already on these channels.
5. Start a Conversation
What better way to figure out what your customers want than by starting a conversation?
Asking questions gives you a chance to pick the brains of your customers, and considering the fact that it takes only a few seconds to tack on a question to a social post or email, this is a tactic that requires low effort and has the potential for big returns. The feedback you receive is not only a fast way to engage customers but also provides a direct insight into which direction you should take your business.
Have you run out of content ideas? Or maybe you’re thinking of launching a new product? Why rack your brain when you can simply ask your customers what they want? Here are a few more examples of questions you could ask your customers:
- Challenges and pain points they are facing
- Services or products they wish existed
- Personal success stories
- Tips they would give others in their industry
- Tools they use
Final Thoughts
Don’t forget that your customers are not just data points – they are real people. And in today’s digital era, engaging with those people should be your top priority.
Instead of looking for a single way to communicate with your customers, take these 5 strategies as a starting point for your engagement strategy.
