10 customer engagement strategies to boost conversions in 2023
Optimizing customer engagement is key to generating high-quality leads and driving conversions for your organization. However, there’s a multitude of different customer engagement strategies available, not all of which may be a good fit for your business.
The question is, which customer engagement strategy — or combination of strategies — will deliver impactful results for your organization?
In this list of top customer engagement strategies to use in 2023 to boost conversions, we’ll examine 10 winning approaches you can incorporate into your sales and marketing plan. Specifically, this post will discuss:
What is a customer engagement strategy?
A customer engagement strategy is a cohesive plan designed to capture the attention of prospective and existing customers using curated interactions. The plan helps ensure that your customers have a positive brand experience before, during, and after they make a purchase or sign up for your services.
Customer engagement typically takes place over multiple channels, including your website, social media, search engine results pages (SERPs), third-party sites (such as review platforms), and email.
A successful customer engagement strategy is measurable and responsive to customer needs. It should feature personalized experiences that nurture feelings of loyalty toward your brand, increase purchasing intent, and push prospective customers deeper into the sales funnel.
10 customer engagement strategies
There’s a wide variety of customer engagement strategies you can use to generate leads and boost sales in 2023. An effective customer engagement plan will incorporate several of these approaches, enabling you to interact with audience members across multiple channels and at various points in their respective journeys.
The customer engagement strategies we recommend incorporating into your overarching sales and marketing plan include the following:
1. Personalized service
Modern consumers crave personalized experiences. To deliver them, you’ll need to use customer data to make messages and content unique to each individual audience member. A prime example involves making product recommendations based on a customer’s purchase history.
With so much competition out there, you need a definitive way to stand out. Personalization is a great way to make customers feel special, which will also help them feel a sense of connection to your brand. Delivering personalized service can also nurture feelings of loyalty. In doing so, it can increase the average customer lifetime value and enable you to keep your customer acquisition costs (CAC) low.
Use key insights to focus on customer preferences to create personalized experiences. However, don’t force it and make people suspicious of the data you’re collecting. Overstepping your boundaries can lead to privacy concerns and erode previously healthy customer relationships.
Collecting too much data or misusing the information you gather can also lead to violations of regulatory frameworks like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). If you run afoul of the entities responsible for ensuring compliance with these frameworks, you could find yourself in hot water.
2. Use a chatbot
Chatbots are tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can analyze customer queries and speak with users or website visitors. A chatbot should greet a user as soon as they navigate to particular pages on your website, such as a landing or service page. Advanced bots can engage in basic conversation, answer mildly complex customer questions, and even make product recommendations to returning customers.
To use chatbots effectively, you must first set up appropriate triggers to ensure that the software steps in when users need support.
Incorporating chatbots into your website streamlines the delivery of support, removing friction from customer journeys and enhancing the overall experience. Additionally, chatbots can answer consumer questions outside your normal business hours, which can minimize customer frustration when they encounter a product or service issue.
To maximize the benefits of chatbots, make it a point to use them in conjunction with human agents. Your team will need to follow up on the preliminary information they gather and at times take over conversations when customers begin asking for assistance with complicated or hard-to-resolve issues.
3. Conversational marketing
Conversational marketing switches the focus from interactions to more personable conversations with customers. Instead of immediately addressing purchase inquiries or systematically working to resolve support tickets, focus instead on building a strong relationship with consumers.
Shifting from a purely business interaction to a more relaxed conversational exchange can remove friction from the customer journey and reduce feelings of frustration.
Moreover, conversational marketing gives your team an opportunity to better understand its audience so you can deliver better service. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, a conversational approach builds lasting relationships and will benefit both your brand and the customer.
To engage in conversational marketing, you must implement a system for tracking interaction history across channels. Such a solution will ensure that every team member is aware of the context of past conversations, regardless of which channels the customer has used previously. Providing agents with this context prevents the customer from having to restate their problem and streamlines the delivery of support.
4. Active listening
Active listening involves paying attention to what your customers are saying across channels. This means making it easy for your customers to provide feedback. To facilitate this, consider adding a feedback form to your website. You must also ensure that your team promptly responds to any feedback you receive, especially if it’s negative.
Incorporating active listening into your customer engagement strategy gives you insight into how your brand or company is viewed.
For instance, you can determine whether customers are comparing your brand to a competitor, discussing their experiences with support, or sharing positive feedback about your products and services. In short, active listening provides you with meaningful insights into the perspectives of your customer base.
To engage in active listening, you need a means of tracking what customers are saying across all channels, including third-party review platforms, social media sites, and your website. Once you’ve listened to the talk and picked up on the general tenor of each customer’s remarks, be responsive to their concerns and feedback (within reason).
5. Social media marketing
Social media channels are as important as old standbys, such as email or paid search.
Using social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter allows you to interact with your audience in a less formal way. These channels are also great tools for gathering feedback from consumers and finding out how they truly feel about your products and services.
One of the key benefits of social media marketing is that it allows you to respond directly to consumers and their concerns. Engaging with followers on threads or in the comments section of posts demonstrates that your brand cares about its customers.
With that in mind, get in the habit of responding to customer complaints on social media — doing so can turn negative engagement into positive interactions. Also, post frequently to give customers and followers the opportunity to engage with your brand. When it comes to social media marketing, consistency is key.
6. Offer useful content
Offering unique and useful content keeps customers engaged with your brand and encourages them to return to your channels.
This long-term strategy delivers value to customers without requiring them to make a purchase. Generating a steady flow of useful content will also help you establish a strong SEO presence and achieve a high ranking on SERPs.
Providing customers with access to useful content builds trust and establishes your site as an authoritative source of reliable information. From a marketing perspective, publishing content will help generate quality organic traffic to your site, some of which will turn into leads.
An effective content-generation strategy includes multiple formats, like videos, eBooks, blogs, and more. Maintain brand consistency across all channels and formats and offer easy follow-up actions by strategically including calls to action (CTAs) and linked buttons throughout each webpage.
7. Listen to and act on feedback
Listening to customer feedback is a good way to understand what they like — and what they’d like to be different. You can learn about their preferences, which aspects of your customer engagement strategy are working, and what you should do differently to provide a better experience.
Taking time to listen to your customers can help you tailor your marketing efforts to align with your target audience’s unique needs.
Gathering and applying feedback is also a valuable part of continuous improvement. You can use customer insights to refine products and service offerings, optimize your content, and streamline your sales funnel.
Actively gather feedback by sending requests following interactions with customers. After a customer makes a purchase or signs up for a service, for instance, solicit feedback via a survey or questionnaire. Also, pay attention to comments on social media, as consumers tend to express their raw feelings on these platforms.
8. Start a customer loyalty program
Customer loyalty programs offer incentives and rewards to customers who continue to engage with your brand. Your program could include promotions, a point system, or thank-you gifts.
Launching a loyalty program strengthens relationships with existing customers and encourages them to keep buying from you. A well-constructed program will also gamify the purchasing experience, prompting members to buy more so they can reach the next goal or points milestone.
Creating a points system is an easy way to get started. Just make sure the program is easy to understand and use.
Offering holiday and special occasion rewards for newsletter subscribers is another simple approach. For example, you could send newsletter subscribers discount codes or coupons on their birthdays.
9. Know your customer journey
Knowing your consumer journey isn’t a standalone customer engagement strategy. However, familiarizing yourself with your target audience and the path they take from awareness to purchase will help you more effectively apply these other strategies.
To get to know your customers better, conduct extensive research, gather feedback from past clients, and analyze existing demographic data. The goal is to learn more about your ideal customer and refine your operational profile of their wants, needs, preferences, and expectations.
Getting to know your customers on a deeper level will help you deliver more personalized experiences. With enough insight, you can create curated content that speaks to each audience segment, leading to better ROI and a streamlined journey for consumers.
If you want to increase your understanding of the customer journey, you need the right tools in place. Consider investing in robust marketing and experience personalization tools that include analytics capabilities. Such a platform will help you measure what matters and implement effective customer engagement strategies that boost sales.
10. Capture hearts and minds with video
Video content is a marketing powerhouse that can captivate audiences, preserve existing customers, and draw viewers deep into the sales funnel.
In addition to being highly effective, video content is also extremely versatile. You can intrigue prospects with short video clips, educate loyal customers using long-form content, or even go live on your preferred social media channel and interact directly with consumers.
Video content is highly engaging, making it a great tool for enhancing various stages of the customer journey. If you’re a talented storyteller, you can put video to work for your brand.
When incorporating video into your customer engagement strategy, always start with a great premise. You only have a few seconds to capture your audience’s attention, so make sure you’re presenting an on-brand, relevant, and entertaining message.
Increase customer engagement with Marketo Engage
Taking a customer-focused approach to sales and marketing will build relationships that naturally turn into conversions. However, if you want to put these customer engagement strategies to use and progress toward organizational growth goals, you need agile sales and marketing software.
If your current platform can’t effectively manage the customer engagement strategies you want to pursue, consider replacing it with Adobe Marketo Engage, the platform that can set your pipeline on fire.
With Marketo Engage, you can create a customer engagement strategy that aligns with your ideal audience’s unique preferences and attributes. It includes the tools, integrations, and functionalities you need to deliver truly personalized experiences that engage leads and drive conversions.
To learn more, watch the informative Adobe Marketo Engage overview video or schedule an interactive tour.