What do you know about your customers? And what do they know about your brand? If you find it hard to answer these questions, it is high time you altered your digital marketing strategy. Your interaction with customers should not be limited by the act of sale and purchase. In case you want to enhance your brand strategy, it’s high time you tried customer engagement marketing.
In this article, you will learn what is customer engagement and the value of engaging with customers. Apart from this, you will find out top 7 practices of how to approach and engage with customers in Magento.
Table of contents:
What is customer engagement?
Strategy #1: Develop emotional connections
Strategy #2: Convey the same idea consistently
Strategy #3: Ask your customers questions
Strategy #4: Create educational content
Strategy #5: Host an event
Strategy #6: Use social media wisely
Strategy #7: Personalize Customer Communications
What is customer engagement?
What is customer engagement marketing? Why is it so valued right now? Customer engagement can be defined as the activity of encouraging your current or potential audience to interact with your Magento brand or business. Paul Greenberg, a renowned CRM expert, gives it the following definition – “the ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.” In a nutshell, this is a long-term marketing strategy, aimed at securing strong, authentic connections with customers.
Businesses who choose to pursue the customer engagement strategy realize that it will not generate profit directly. Instead, when planned and executed correctly, it will bring them the intangible values, like brand loyalty and better customer retention. It is hard to put a price on such criteria, but over the long run, it may prove to be as effective a method as direct sales or SEO.
Who can you call an engaged customer? These are the customer engagement examples that demonstrate what it is in real-life analytics metrics:
- Visitors returning to your website,
- Low bounce-off rate,
- Visitors who like, share and comment your content,
- Customers sharing your brand reviews and testimonials,
- Low level of unopened and clicked-through emails.
As you can see, any of these touchpoints have the potential to transform into sales conversions. The main thing here is to nurture your Magento brand customer engagement mindfully and consistently.
Below, you will find top 7 Magento customer engagement tactics that will bring value to your brand.
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As a store owner, you must realize that your business exists for the customers and thanks to them. In the modern world, where the competition is so tight and customer attention span is shorter than ever, building genuine connections and interacting with the audience is your solution to keep them loyal to your brand.
Want to try our customer engagement marketing for your business? Looking for inspiration? These are the 7 best customer engagement tactics, solid and time-proven.
Strategy #1: Develop emotional connections
To buy from a company with no distinct personality will trigger no positive emotions from the customer. However, it is emotions that will make your brand stand out among the sea of competing producers. Show the human side of your brand and give it a name and a personality that speaks to people’s hearts, and you can begin building emotional connections with your current and potential audience.
What does it mean to humanize your brand in the context of Magento ecommerce? There is indeed a wide number of techniques you can achieve this, yet it will be wise to begin with the introduction of your brand on social media or sending out emails to your loyal customers. Then, you can introduce people who work for your brand and share with the audience the photos of your working process and corporate gatherings.
No doubt, to humanize a brand with emotions is much easier for a producer of consumer goods, like Adidas and Coca Cola, and much harder for a B2B brand, but do not forget that people run the businesses you aim at. With enough creativity and effort, it is possible to create a brand personality that potential clients can connect to.
Strategy #2: Convey the same idea consistently
Do you remember that old fundamental truth that a customer needs to see the product ad seven times to make a purchase? More often than not, customers become annoyed with the continuous repetition of the same. So, how to convey your message effectively?
Instead of pestering your customers with the same offer of sale, choose a well-rounded, more consistent strategy. For example, devise an email marketing campaign with a thread of letters. Begin with a simple introduction of your company and continue with emails containing useful tips and tricks the receiver will be genuinely interested in. Entertain or educate your customers, make them grow accustomed to the value you bring, and you will engage them slowly, but steadily.
The same approach can be applied to posting on social media – the main principle here is to plan your communication carefully and craft posts that will be different in form and content.
Strategy #3: Ask your customers questions
As you have introduced your brand and showed it to the audience, it is time to analyze the audience and get their feedback. Why is it important to analyze your audience? The data you gather will be vital for proper planning and correlating your further customer interactions. There is no better way to get to know the answer than asking the question.
You can pick the brains of your customers by asking them a question a day in the form of a vote on Twitter, encourage them to share their opinion under your Facebook post, offer to pass a quick survey when they are at your Magento webstore or run a wholesome email campaign and send detailed questionnaires – the choice is yours. Whenever you feel like you need your customer’s opinion – about the newly released products, content ideas, offers to change policy – just ask them.
What are the questions to ask your customers? Below you will find the examples of questions you can never go wrong with.
- What challenges and troubles do you face?
- What products do you think our brand is lacking?
- What aspects of customer service need improvement?
- How do you use our product?
- How does our product make you better / make your life easier?
Strategy #4: Create educational content
Confucius said: “Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.” This applies to the content you create for your customers. The engaging power of educational content will be much higher because it will provide your customers with answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. For example, BelVG’s blog is dedicated to sharing our Magento development expertise and knowledge as free educational content, and it allows us to secure our reputation within the community.
What does your content should be to generate value?
- Specific – instead of dwelling on vague and abstract topics, offer customer-centred content that will teach how to do certain things or solve problems.
- Enabling – value your customer’s time and do not offer them solutions that are hard to realize in real life.
- Entertaining – it is possible for education not to be boring, and you can prove this!
Strategy #5: Host an event
How to strengthen your Magento online store community and secure the connection between you and the customers? Holding an exciting and educational event for your community is the best solution. A conference or a meetup will be an excellent opportunity to engage with your customers personally, educate them directly, exchange the experience. and learn their true emotions and opinions. Event marketing is a common practice nowadays among large ecommerce enterprises and even middle ones, so finding event marketing examples in your industry on the Internet won’t be hard. The exemplary even for Magento community is Magento Imagine – a conference that gathers thousands of developers, merchants and agencies from around the world.
Strategy #6: Use social media wisely
Social media global popularity, as well as its conversational format, is a perfect place to interact with your customers. Nowadays, the majority of brands and companies have Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, yet they use it as media channel to advertise, make announcements or talk about themselves. Social media engagement means including the customer into the conversation and making him the center of it.
The rules are quite simple – social media engagement posts should be published on a regular basis and encourage the customer to communicate, either to share their opinion or story, review your product, express their opinion on the industry events. It is crucial not to leave any comment unattended, even if it is a negative one. Yes, unfortunately, it is much easier for the customers to express their negative opinion about your Magento online store that can harm your reputation, that is why the situations like this, if they occur, should be dealt with calmly and politely.
Strategy #7: Personalize customer communications
It is common knowledge among marketing specialists that the more personal will be the message you send out, the higher the probability that it will be taken to consideration and responded to. Having basic demographic data about your online store customers on hand, you can personalize marketing communication with your audience.
How do you personalize a message communication? Start with small but effective things like using first names in the marketing emails and order forms and granting discounts for birthdays and other holidays significant for a person. With the information from cookies, you can trace customers journey at your website and send them remarketing letters to remind about the products they spend time looking on your Magento webstore. A more advanced level is personalizing the products you sell, like training programs or dietary plans, using customer data.
Wrapping it up
We hope that this blog post convinced Magento store owners that customer engagement is a valuable aspect of digital marketing strategy. We also believe that you will try to implement at least one of the customer engagement strategies we described above.
Turn to BelVG for Magento custom development and we will create the online store you want.
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