Use These Great Customer Engagement Ideas to Increase Retention
Engagement is key to retention and referrals. Here are seven great customer engagement ideas you can easily put into practice. We’ll show you how to multiply opportunities for engagement through strategies such as personalization, in-app messaging, customized promotions and loyalty programs. We’ll also show you how technology can help you automate your engagement strategy. By combining technology with best practices, you can maximize interaction with your clients and build brand loyalty.
1. Incorporate Personalization into Automated Messaging
Make your automated messages more engaging by incorporating personalization. The most basic way to do this is to address customers by name, a technique familiar with email marketing. However, today’s technology allows you to go much further with personalization by incorporating data about your customer’s profile and behavior. If you have a good 360-degree view of data on your customers and the ability to segment customers based on your data, you can engage clients in highly personalized ways.
For example, you can set up Totango Spark’s SuccessBLOC modules to trigger automated messages based on specific customer behaviors. Let’s say a customer made a purchase a week ago but they still haven’t completed their onboarding process. You can set up the Onboard New Customers SuccessBLOC to reach out to customers proactively offering tips or assistance. You can apply this strategy to automated messages throughout your customer journey.
2. Get Users’ Attention with In-product Messaging
In-app messages provide another opportunity for personalized engagement. What your customer does when they’re using your app helps determine whether or not they renew their subscription to your product. Delivering them relevant messages increases the value they get out of the time they spend in your app.
You can base in-app messages on your customer’s history or on the feature they’re currently using. For instance, if a customer is using a new feature for the first time, you might set up your software to provide a tutorial link. Or if a customer has not used an important feature yet, you can remind them about it with in-product messaging or by providing an NPS survey. The Increase Customer Adoption SuccessBLOC can be configured to provide relevant prompts based on specific behaviors.
3. Cater Promotions to Client Needs
Another way to apply personalization to engagement is to offer customers promotions based on their history, needs and behaviors. By tying your cross-sell and upsell offers into your customers’ actual use of your product, you not only increase engagement, but you increase the attractiveness of your offers, helping boost your revenue.
Use your customer journey map to plan events that trigger customized offers. Spark’s Upsell and Expand Customers module can help you deploy this strategy by automatically detecting upsell opportunities and extending relevant offers.
4. Reward Customer Loyalty
Offering loyalty rewards is another strategy for personally engaging customers. Loyalty rewards engage and incentivize customers based on their personal history with your brand. This encourages greater loyalty, higher customer retention and more enthusiastic brand ambassadorship.
Offering loyalty rewards can be as simple as offering a discount at renewal time. You can also offer other types of loyalty rewards, such as incentives for referrals, early-bird discounts and exclusive bonuses. Rewards will differ from B2B to B2C customers. For example, a B2C hotel chain might offer points to book rooms whereas a B2B SaaS company may offer a free month of service for an early renewal.
5. Ask for Customer Feedback
Asking for feedback is a simple yet effective way to boost engagement. Customers like to share their opinions and desires, and they like to know that you value their input.
You can elicit feedback at strategic points in your customer journey from surveys such as NPS, CSAT, CES, or even a custom survey. These include after purchase, after onboarding, after a business review, and before renewal. You can also elicit feedback after customers achieve customized benchmarks. This serves both to engage and to remind customers of the value they’re getting from using your product.
6. Create Content Which Answers Customers Most Urgent Questions
Customer support provides an excellent opportunity to engage customers. Customers who are experiencing problems are already engaged enough to be struggling with difficulties. You can turn this into a positive by delivering a satisfying customer service experience.
One simple but powerful way to do this is by providing content that answers frequently asked questions. This engages customers with exactly what they need to solve problems they’re experiencing without wasting their time on support tickets. This type of content is called enablement content. For best results, proactively reach out to customers with tips and in-app messages alerting them to your support content’s availability. You can set up your app to suggest support content when customers exhibit specific behaviors indicative of common support issues.
7. Continually Improve Your Customer Support
In addition to providing content that addresses support questions, you can increase engagement by taking other steps to improve support. For example, you can use chatbots and interactive voice responses to provide quick solutions to routine issues while routing tickets that require human help to available agents.
Another way to use automation to improve your support is to proactively monitor customer behavior and reach out to customers who are showing signs of experiencing difficulties. Spark’s See a 360 View of Your Customers SuccessBLOC lets you track KPIs measuring customer health and automatically reach out to customers who are frustrated and at risk of churn.
Deploy These Great Customer Engagement Ideas to Grow Your Business
Engagement opportunities are everywhere throughout your customer journey. Automated and in-app messages create occasions to address your customers by their name and speak to their needs. Customized promotions and rewards for loyalty let customers know you appreciate their business. Asking for customer feedback, answering their questions with informative content, and continually improving your support engages customers by addressing their practical concerns. Automation improves the efficiency and effectiveness of these strategies by helping you consistently implement best practices in situations that call for specific types of engagement.
Totango Spark’s platform provides out-of-the-box templates and toolkits to help you automate engagement through each stage of your customer journey, maximizing retention and referrals. Try it free to experience how easy it can be to increase customer engagement.
