14 Customer Engagement Strategies for Small Businesses
Quick tips for small business owners to improve customer engagement rates
Customer engagement is essential for businesses of all sizes! By engaging with your customers, you can create a community of loyal followers who are more likely to stick around and recommend your business to others.
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement is about getting customers to interact with your brand. It could be as simple as getting them to follow you on social media, or as involved as buying your product based on close interactions you’ve had with them.
Let’s look at 14 of the most creative and powerful customer engagement strategies for small businesses.
1. Be a good listener
- Engage your customers by listening to their queries and problems and show them that you care. Happy customers tend to buy more.
- Respond to customer queries on social media platforms quickly and politely.
2. Offer incentives to loyal customers
- Surprise your customers with unadvertised discounts.
- Implement a customer loyalty program to increase brand awareness.
3. Use gamification
- Gamification is the process of embedding game mechanics into existing business processes to motivate users’ participation and engagement.
- Offer rewards to new referrals for customer satisfaction and better ROI.
4. Use social media
- Social media helps you build a rapport with customers on a personal level.
- Customers often express their pain points on social media, so make good use of that.
5. Connect with customers via mobile apps
- Your app can act as a loyalty card with a points system that sits on a user’s phone.
- To further improve your reach, you can incentivize new app users for any referrals.
- The mobile app of your brand should support push notifications, because they’re great for interacting with customers.
6. Offer personalization
- Customers are actually willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized offers and discounts.
- You can use their location, gender, interests, past purchases, etc., to send personalized offers and messages.
7. Convert free trial users to paid ones
- Use a CRM tool to monitor your customers’ journey.
- Engage with all free trial users to know their pain points and try resolving them.
8. Generate interactive content
- Use new tech like Augmented Reality (AR) to give users an immersive walk-through of your products.
- Interactive content helps generate more leads and drive more sales.
9. Implement in-product messaging
- In-product messages are messages placed directly on the product and are used to nudge customers to complete an already started action.
- Encourage free-trial users to opt for premium features and send them personalized discounts through in-product messaging.
10. Take surveys and polls
- Surveys or polls are a great way to gather information about your customers and their interests.
- Ask your customers to fill up feedback forms so that you can improve your product or service.
- You can solicit survey participation over email or social media.
11. Take an omnichannel approach
- Engage with customers through various channels, including the website, social pages, email, etc.
- Use a marketing automation software like EngageBay to get a complete 360-degree view of every interaction you’ve ever had with your customers.
12. Use live chat
- Live chat enables you to interact with your customers in real-time. It offers excellent conversion rates.
- Use live chat to resolve customer queries at the earliest and build strong relationships.
- CRM tools like EngageBay offer a free live chat program.
13. Maintain regular communication
- Even after sales are achieved, you need to keep delighting your customers to promote repeat buying.
- Stick with customers with regular communication throughout the customer journey, offering related-product recommendations, post-purchase support, and loyalty programs.
- Ask for customer feedback and improve your customer experience accordingly.
14. Measure your user engagement
- Keep track of active users, retention rates, and core user actions.
- Redesign your customer engagement strategies based on changes in customer behavior.
This article was first published in a more detailed version on the EngageBay blog.
