Proven Ways to Increase Customer Engagement

By Nick Rojas

For this week, ISM will feature a Guest Blog Post from Nick Rojas concerning proven methods of increasing customer engagement

Customer engagement is very important to a business’s overall success. As a business owner, it is paramount to have your customers engaged with your brand as much as possible. This is because the more engaged that they are, the higher the chances that they buy from you, and promote your brand amongst their peers. According to Gallup research, a fully-engaged customer represents 23% more revenue than an average customer. Most business owners understand the importance of customer engagement, and as a result, are always looking for ways to increase theirs. According to the market research company Forrester, 72% of businesses say that improving customer experience is their top priority.

However, even though most businesses are always looking to increase their customer engagement, many do not know how to do it properly.

In this article, I will be discussing three excellent ways in which you can effectively increase your customer engagement.

Provide Useful Content to Educate Customers

Using content to educate customers is a relatively new tactic to increase customer engagement, but it is one that definitely works. There are a few ways in which you can go about providing useful content to educate your customers, but the best way to do it is by providing instructional videos. According to a Google study, 48% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from companies whose mobile sites provide instructional video content. By providing useful content to your customers, you are enhancing their customer experience, and increasing their overall satisfaction with your brand. Both of these things inevitably will increase your customer engagement.

Implement APIs on Your Webpage

APIs are a set of operations that you can implement on your webpage that allows you to create applications. They also allow many different segments of the internet to communicate with each other simultaneously. Allowing multiple components of the internet to communicate with each other at the same time enables businesses to quickly access information faster than normal. APIs are extremely important to have in order to improve and increase customer engagement because they allow businesses to answer customer questions and concerns quickly and accurately. Answering customers questions or concerns quickly and accurately will make them want to engage with your brand more. There are many different types of APIs that you can implement on your webpage, and I would recommend implementing as many as possible. However, the types that I would prioritize the most are RESTful APIs because they are more customer orientated than the others.

Be Active on Social Media

Social media is an excellent tool to use in order to increase customer engagement because it allows you to communicate with your customers quickly and provides a free platform for you to promote your products. However, you need to be active on social media and careful with what you say, or else it can negatively impact your customer engagement. If you have social media accounts but are not active on them, then you run the risk of frustrating your customers. For example, if a customer directly asks you a question or voices concern on social media and you don’t respond to it, the customer may get annoyed and not want to purchase your product or service anymore. That is why it is important to stay active on social media and try to answer as many comments and concerns from customers as possible.

Aside from being active, you also have to make sure that you think twice about what you say. Saying things that can be deemed as controversial is never a good idea because that can potentially isolate some of your customers. As long as you are active on social media and never say anything controversial, you will find that social media is a great way to increase your customer engagement.

Conclusion

In summary, many businesses top priority is to increase their customer engagement. This is because businesses know that if they increase their customer engagement, their profits will increase as well. Although a majority of business owners understand this concept, many of them do not know how to properly increase it. Luckily, all you have to do is follow the three steps in this article and you will see your customer engagement numbers increase in no time.

– – – – – – – — – – – – – –

Nick Rojas is a small business consultant and business journalist, currently splitting time between Southern California and Chicago. He is a guest contributor to ISM’s blog. Please visit Nick’s twitter account: @NickARojas