Introduction
Driving engagement with your loyal customers channelizes your customer-centricity towards customer retention & building brand loyalty. What does customer engagement mean today? It’s drawing their attention, creating meaningful experiences for them, establishing emotional connect, & finding a place in their heart. Being in the customer loyalty management field & having led many customer retention programs for a while now, we can guide you on too many innovative techniques to engage customers through omnichannel experience.
From social media to digital loyalty management apps & from online shops to in-store interactions you can boost engagement with your customers to ensure they are having a pleasant brand experience. According to an in-depth research by Salesforce, 75% customers desire consistent & seamless omnichannel engagement. This stat suggests enterprises must turn towards cutting-edge, highly-intuitive platforms to automate, streamline, & make more effective things like personalization & engagement to build & solidify brand-customer relation. Here we are presenting to you a five-step customer engagement model.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Real time identification of customers after conversion | Monitor & analyze customer behaviour in real time | Offer guidance, advice & support | Provide up-sell, cross-sell, & next-sell items | Close & analyze sales |
PROFILING | FILTERING DYNAMICALLY | ENGAGEMENT OPPORTUNITY | ENGAGEMENT SOLUTION | BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE |
Here are the top 5 ways to increase engagement with your loyal customers—
Light up with surprise & delight
We all love to be pleasantly surprised, customers are no exception. Instead of waiting for the customers to reach milestones in their journey, why not throw in surprise gifts to them when they are least expecting it. These gestures, straight from customer loyalty schemes, suggest that you value your customers, you care about their happiness, & you will walk the extra mile to keep them happy. These actions draw traction & keep loyal customers on your side. If you ‘surprise & delight’ your customers, it indicates you value their emotions, it helps in brand reinforcement, & gives you opportunity for customer engagement. Sending surprises to your customers will create a positive memory about the brand in their mind, they will associate it with good news & it will give you the opportunity of further engagement.
Track & deliver on important milestones
Since you implemented the customer relationship management (CRM) system in your organization, you must have been keeping track of important milestones in customer journey. If you are looking for ways to enhance engagement with your loyal customers, you should consider every milestone in the customer’s journey to touch base with them to boost up their experience. So, you must not let go of birthdays, anniversaries, the anniversary of their signing up for your customer rewards program, or their 10th purchase. You must make your customers feel special on these days. Even if you just send a simple greeting on these occasions it will definitely score, but our suggestion would be to make the day even more special by providing some freebies or loyalty points.
Count on personalization
In this day & age, personalization matters. You need to create tailored responses & customer rewards offer for your customers, any generic message will be simply ignored. For solid customer engagement, you will have to know your customers inside out. But how will you do that? Though there are many ways of doing it, for example, simply asking them, the most effective & unobtrusive way of doing it is through a digital loyalty program. Data collected from such programs can easily throw light on information such as What are your customers purchasing? How frequently are they purchasing? What is the composition of their purchase basket? When do they make the purchase? What is their shopping medium? – online or offline? & many others. The more they indulge in your digital rewards program through customer loyalty tools, the more you will learn about them & the more you will engage with them creating a personalized experience.
Offer relevant & achievable reward
The rewards have to be relevant & niche. What about a baby diaper? It may sound like a waste to a 40-year-old unmarried man but may be really enticing for a new mom of the same age. A grandma & a teenager are not going to like the same reward. The bottom line is look at what you are offering to whom & tailor it as far as you can – go easily up to the ‘colour choice’, maybe you can go even further. But how will you do it? You may have a customer base which comes from all walks of life, how to find out in such a situation who wants what. One suggestion is segmentation. You are through your digital loyalty program, so you must have customer data at your place captured by customer loyalty application, do some slicing & dicing to categorize it & decide the rewards for each segment. You can provide a few choices & leave the final decisions on the customers themselves. Talking about relevancy, why not partner with businesses with similar customer base, for example, airlines & hotels can come together, & create an overarching loyalty program through customer loyalty management system which has takers in both industries.
Provide a seamless omnichannel experience
Customers will engage with you only if they like you. Assuming that other things are pretty much under your control, providing a seamless experience across channels will further make them like you. Imagine this scenario – a person orders a shirt through an e-commerce website on his laptop & makes the payment there, realizing that he needs a different colour shirt, he calls customer care number through his mobile & then proceeds to alter the order on mobile app, upon receiving the order he gives feedback through a link received in his inbox, & finally shares the news of his purchase on social media channels. Can you imagine how many communication channels & devices are involved in this single scenario? This is what you need to do, provide a seamless omnichannel, omni-device experience. Thus, by utilizing state-of-the-art loyalty management solutions which integrate well with the current technological ecosystem you can create consistent communication across all touchpoints on the customer journey.
Conclusion
One thumb rule which trumps others in loyalty rewards management is always keep scrutinizing & evolving your marketing strategy to changing market conditions. Today, the tips mentioned in this blog are fully capable of helping boost engagement with your loyal customers, but tomorrow you may need to finetune them. Keep a close eye on the emerging trends & technologies in the market as that will really help you. One more thing, we have also talked about digital loyalty programs in this blog – to manage one, we are suggesting you OKEN- a SaaS platform that can power an android and iOS app, a technological trailblazer which is drawing admiration globally. The OKEN platform can give you the benefits of lifetime.
