Customer Engagement Marketing

What is customer engagement marketing? 

Customer engagement marketing is a strategy that focuses on building and maintaining meaningful relationships between businesses and their customers. This involves creating interactive and personalized experiences that encourage customers to engage with a brand and become loyal advocates.

Utilizing different channels such as social media, email marketing, and customer support can help businesses increase trust, loyalty, and, thus, repeat purchases. To ensure successful customer engagement marketing, businesses must understand customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. Then, they need to use relevant information to tailor experiences that meet their customers’ expectations.

Why is customer engagement marketing important? 

Customer engagement marketing is crucial for businesses to thrive in today's highly competitive market. Here are some reasons why:

Builds brand loyalty & advocacy

Customer engagement marketing strengthens brand loyalty and advocacy as it creates positive experiences and builds strong relationships with customers. It addresses customers’ needs, emotions, and preferences to get customers to feel more connected to the brand. Here are some ways in which customer engagement marketing contributes to brand loyalty and advocacy: 

Personalization: Brands can show they value and understand their customers by providing personalized experiences tailored for the individual customer. As a result, customers feel a sense of familiarity and trust, which may get them to remain loyal or recommend the brand to others.

Two-way communication: Engaging with customers in two-way communication makes them feel heard and valued. In return, it allows brands to focus on any concerns or issues to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Moreover, engaged customers tend to become advocates for the brand and talk about their positive experiences with others. 

Relevant content: One way to keep customers engaged and involved is by offering beneficial, informative, or entertaining content. Customers connect more with the brand as they consume relevant content and keep interacting with the brand. Thus, brands must offer content that is relevant to the needs and preferences of the customer. This can result in increased loyalty and a greater likelihood for customers to recommend the brand. 

Omni-channel approach: Customers interact with brands more easily when they get a consistent, seamless experience across all channels, which improves customer satisfaction. As an example, QR codes in offline stores that direct to customer reviews can offer a seamless, omnichannel experience. And consistency can bolster positive connections with the brand, thereby contributing to increased loyalty and advocacy. 

Emotional connections: Brands can deepen relations with their customers if they build an emotional bond through unmissable and effective storytelling and shared values. Also, showing that brands understand their customers’ needs strengthens emotional bonds. Emotionally connected customers tend to be loyal and act as advocates of the brands within their own networks.

Exceptional customer service: Negative experiences can be turned into positive ones if the customer is provided with timely and effective customer service, which in turn improves customer loyalty. Satisfied customers are more likely to talk about their experiences and advocate for the brand. 

Enhances brand awareness

Customer engagement marketing supports active involvement and strong connections between the brand and its consumers, which raises brand awareness. It encourages customers to share their positive experiences and thoughts about the company within their personal networks. As an example, providing personalized experiences, insightful material, and seamless communication across platforms can help achieve that. Since consumers are more likely to trust recommendations from friends and family than from traditional advertising, this organic word-of-mouth promotion successfully improves brand awareness and credibility.

Increases customer lifetime value

Customer engagement marketing cultivates long-term relationships with customers, which increases customer lifetime value. It improves consumer satisfaction and loyalty by offering tailored experiences, relevant content, and efficient communication.  Customers who are satisfied with their experience tend to make repeat purchases, remain loyal to the brand, and spend more over time. This increased retention and spending lead to a greater customer lifetime value, which contributes to overall growth and profitability.

Gives insights into your customers

As customer engagement marketing supports two-way communication and closely follows customer interactions, it provides insights into your customers. Monitoring customer behavior, preferences, and feedback can help brands gather significant data to better understand their customers. After analyzing data, brands can determine trends, preferences, and pain points in order to inform and improve their marketing strategies, and products and eventually enhance the customer experience.

Improves customer satisfaction

Businesses can improve customer satisfaction by offering personalized experiences that cater to customers’ needs and preferences. This can make customers leave positive reviews, increase customer lifetime value and establish a better reputation for the brand. 

Drives revenue

In the end, customer engagement marketing can drive revenue through increased customer loyalty, retention, and advocacy. By establishing strong connections with customers, businesses can ensure a sustainable and profitable customer base. 

Builds trust

Businesses can gain the trust of their customers by providing personalized, beneficial experiences. Customers are more inclined to trust a company and stick with it if they believe that it understands their needs and is concerned about their experience.

Challenges to customer engagement marketing

Measuring ROI

‍If the results are not directly evident, measuring the return on investment (ROI) for customer engagement marketing can be challenging. Due to this, it may be difficult to justify the time and resources invested in these campaigns to key stakeholders.

Yet, there is a great example of translating customer engagement marketing initiatives into measurable results. Decathlon, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, added a new dimension to their app with Stories. And Decathlon marketers created interactive, personalized, full-screen experiences right in the app. Whether it’s a tent setup demo, a trail bike unboxing, or a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the design process, Stories not only entertain Decathlon’s in-app audience but provide their customers with the information they need to feel good about their purchasing decisions. Decathlon has seen an exciting increase in user engagement, product discovery, and conversion with a 31% click-through rate of Stories. Moreover, about 1% of Decathlon’s revenue can be tracked to user interaction with Stories. Read their success story to learn more. 

Keeping up with ever-evolving customer behaviors

‍It can be challenging to follow the changes in customer behavior and preferences that change very quickly. Because of this, developing a marketing strategy that will be effective in the long run might be difficult.

Data privacy

Concerns about data privacy grow as consumers want their data to be secure online against any data breaches. Since consumers want to be safe and secure, brands need to phase out third-party data. However, at the same time, consumers increasingly demand personalized experiences from brands. In fact, a McKinsey report stated that 71% of consumers expect brands to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when it doesn’t happen. Consequently, brands that formerly relied on third-party data now face increasing pressure on privacy which makes them seek out other alternative ways to collect data for personalization. Other means of collecting data for personalization include utilizing zero-party data, which consumers willingly provide to businesses. And Storyly Stories provide an excellent way to gather zero-party data while engaging app users and website visitors. Using Storyly Stories, brands can create surveys, polls, or quizzes to incentivize consumers to voluntarily share information about their experiences of preferences. In return, brands can use these responses to segment audiences and tailor personalized campaigns to consumers effectively. ‍

Ensuring the quality of engagement

Maintaining a high quality of interaction with customers gets more challenging as engagement increases. Therefore, businesses need to make sure that their customer service and support teams can handle the increased demand and sustain a high level of quality. 

Best strategies for customer engagement marketing

Here are some of the best strategies for customer engagement marketing

1. Use personalization: Tailor interactions and experiences based on individual customer preferences, behavior, and history to make them feel valued and understood.

2. Offer relevant content: Create and share informative, entertaining, and valuable content that caters to your customer's needs and interests, building trust and credibility.‍
3. Two-way communication: Encourage customers to share feedback and engage in conversations through various channels such as social media, email, and chatbots, fostering a sense of connection and dialogue.‍
4. Omni-channel approach: Provide a seamless and consistent experience across all customer touchpoints, both online and offline, to enhance the overall customer experience.‍
5. Emotional connections: Tap into customers' emotions through storytelling, shared values, and memorable experiences, forging deeper relationships and loyalty.
6. ‍Exceptional customer service: Deliver prompt, empathetic, and effective customer service to address issues and concerns, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
7. ‍User-generated content: Encourage customers to create and share content related to your brand, such as testimonials, reviews, or social media posts, leveraging their enthusiasm and amplifying brand reach.
8. ‍Loyalty programs: Implement loyalty programs that reward customers for their repeat business, promoting customer retention and encouraging them to advocate for the brand.
9. ‍Social media engagement: Actively participate in conversations on social media platforms, respond to comments, and share user-generated content to foster a sense of community and connection.
10. ‍Data-driven approach: Collect and analyze customer data to identify patterns, preferences, and areas for improvement, enabling you to refine your marketing strategies and enhance the customer experience.

Successful customer engagement marketing example

Swisscom

Swisscom, a leading communication brand in Switzerland, uses Stories to help its users get the most out of the app. They offer useful content in an accessible format using Storie by promoting their most useful content. This inspires users to spend more time in the app and supports the company’s larger engagement goals by increasing the number of monthly active users. Apart from increasing engagement in the app through valuable

content, Swisscom also drives traffic to their customer interaction forum where customers can get their questions answered. In general, the app has seen an increase in user engagement and session duration, while 79% of users expressed that they were interested in the content they saw through Stories. Explore Swisscom’s success story to learn more and be inspired.