Digital marketing. Real-time customer engagement strategies

Customer engagement is one of the most significant parts of digital marketing strategies. Most business owners aim for the same thing while keeping customers satisfied and loyal. However, today’s world is shaped by digital transformation, and customer expectations are rapidly evolving.

Customers want to have a meaningful relationship with the brand. Unfortunately, this means businesses need to work even harder to keep customers happy, content and engaged.

Statistics indicate that improving the way businesses interact and communicate with their customers has long-term and short-term impacts on the company.

What is a customer engagement strategy?

Customer engagement strategies can engage the customers through efficient communication and interaction. This enables customers to know your brand values better and act positively towards your business. In addition, higher customer involvement enhances their trust and reliability in the brand.

In a nutshell, businesses that focus on customer engagement concentrate on value creation rather than revenue extraction. In addition, they are providing people with something more meaningful and beneficial that is beyond a sales pitch.

It consists of excellent content, an efficient end-to-end customer experience, and real-time and interactive customer support. This strategy can foster sales growth and customer loyalty.

So, are you engaging with your customers in real-time? If not, the following strategies will help you enhance your business sales.

1.??????Creating great customer experiences

Excellent customer experience results in exceptional customer engagement, and this makes sense.

Once in life, we have bad experiences with companies that make us swear never to buy again! Similarly, waiting too long on hold for you to get the answers to your query is frustrating! These factors impact company’s sales negatively.

So, how about focusing on excellent customer experiences?

It is noticed that companies that focus on customer experience have increased revenue via this strategy.

Customer experience can be enhanced by using technology to create breakthrough customer experiences, improve customer service, and adopt a top-down approach.

2.??????Live streaming videos

Companies desiring to succeed in the current omnichannel world and engage customers online should go for live streaming videos in a real-time customer engagement strategy.

Furthermore, Live streaming videos enable you to interact with your value proposition, thereby building relationships with the customers and giving your brand a story. According to recent statistics, companies gain a 30% conversion rate and 157% more organic traffic via live video streaming.

Research by HubSpot illustrates that including a video on your landing page boosts your conversion rate by 80%. Also, 64% of consumers tend to buy after viewing the video.

3.??????Social Media Presence

One of the best ways to engage your customers is by having a solid social media presence. It is reported that about 65% of marketers have increased their social media presence in 2019. Consequently, they have harnessed the benefits of social media marketing. These platforms are powerful tools for customer engagement. Most people use and search for their preferences on social media. Therefore, creating business pages on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to reach potential customers in real-time is beneficial in this regard.

This can be done by posting photos of your newest product and brand details, answering questions on these pages and uploading attractive offers. You can start this by ‘liking’ and responding to customer comments on your feed, and highlighting valuable feedback.

Furthermore, engaging with your customers and prospects on social media make them feel appreciated and valued.

4.??????Offer Live Chat

It’s frustrating for customers to call a business to inquire about something and be set on hold for 20 minutes. A live chat is a great option to grab customers’ attention. In addition, they find it easier to leave a text regarding their query and receive the answer within a few minutes.

This way, the customer can save time and attain a higher satisfaction rate. Therefore, Live chat is an excellent option for allowing customers to interact with your company seamlessly for getting the desired information.

Research reveals about 63% higher probability of consumers returning to a website with a live chat. Moreover, the conversion rate can be increased from 8 to 20% via live chat. Besides, it frees up support’s time to clear customer’s ambiguity within no time.

5.??????Creating a Digital Community

For customer engagement, you should provide them with a platform. This can be done by creating a digital community for your offerings, brand, and industry. This is an excellent opportunity to start promoting your business.

The effective digital platform enables their customers to create content, get the answers to their queries, and become ambassadors for your services and products.

So by creating a digital community, your company provides a forum to share and discuss your problems and ideas for establishing a community of users with a shared internet. In this way, a loyal customer base is built.

6.??????Hosting events for Customers

Besides using technologies for real-time customer engagement, it is significant to have platforms for in-person communication. Therefore, Hosting events is an excellent way to engage with customers in-person.

In this way, trust is built, and a community of loyal customers is created.

Customers also tend to connect emotionally with your company through events. AdWeek reports that customers who are emotionally attached to a company are more prone to buying than those who don’t!

7.??????Making your brand relatable and meaningful

Successful customer engagement helps one to create a brand personality that customers love. It helps them to know about the business and get engaged. This is how brand awareness comes into existence. Before customer engagement, it is essential to equip your customers with all the relevant details about the brand.

Businesses must create a sense of connection and meaning with their customer. Your customer should get the answers to questions like What is your brand about? And why choose your brand? Besides, you need to facilitate customer engagement opportunities and attract their attention. According to the research, 86% of people say that brand authenticity is the key to deciding which brands they prefer while buying.

Brands regularly communicate this sense of authenticity and consider it a rampart of business strategies.

Brand awareness can be enhanced by giving your brand a personality and adding influencing factors to your business. Moreover, creating referral programs and content marketing can be helpful in this regard.

8.??????Use Push notification

Customer engagement also includes reminding them regularly about what services you offer. Push notifications are a great option in this regard. These are short messages that “pop up” on your desktop or user’s mobile, outside the browser. They can notify customers about special events, offers, or news.

For this purpose, customers need to subscribe to receive push notifications, thereby choosing to engage with the brand they opt to subscribe to. The next challenge is to craft push notifications with a compelling message or offer that will excite the customers enough to click on them and attract further customers.

9.???24/7 availability

Digital marketing is transforming and becoming more sophisticated. Besides, customer expectations are getting higher. The concept of 9 to 5 stores is no more relevant in this regard. Instead, customers expect to connect with brands and businesses whenever and wherever it suits them.

If a customer buys a product online at midnight, and a problem occurs with the payment process, they want to deal with it as soon as possible. So, 24/7 availability ensures customer engagement.

10. Focusing on retention

As a great marketing strategy, retaining customers is much more critical in terms of cost-effectiveness than acquiring new ones. Existing customers often spend more and recommend the product or brand to friends and family, who also converted to customers.

Notably, a customer tends to return to a business or a brand if they have good experiences. Therefore, a consistent series of reliable, positive, and fruitful interactions with a company will help keep customers satisfied and engaged and make sure they return.

Customers engage with companies repeatedly when they feel appreciated, looked after, and excited by new and original offers. Moreover, customer retention is a synonym of customer engagement. You can’t have one while ignoring the other. Therefore, a solid customer engagement strategy will need to include procedures for retention.

11. Sharpening your social media marketing

Being active on social media is a no-brainer for business in this digital world. Every brand owner and marketer know the significance of social media presence, but the question is, how to engage customers efficiently?

Social media networks are places with great competition and are full of products and brands. For this reason, your marketing and customer engagement strategy should be unique.

How to measure customer engagement?

While considering marketing strategy, measuring and keeping track of customer engagement is essential. You can keep track of customer engagement by considering the following three metrics that most marketers prefer:

·????????Conversion rates

·????????Time on page

·????????Video view completion

Wrapping up

There are many strategies to engage your customers. This indicates a lot of opportunities for brands to capture customer attention, thereby enabling them to compete with other brands.

Brands must actively connect and interact with customers at every possible opportunity to boost consumer engagement. Moreover, try your best to give your customers an exceptional and consistent experience, resulting in customer engagement, loyalty, and trust.