• Home
• /
• eCommerce
• /
• Easy Steps to Increase Sales and Customer Engagement

Easy Steps to Increase Sales and Customer Engagement

In the modern business world, customer engagement seems to be the buzzword among marketers.

Put simply, promotion is the main reason marketing exists. But unless you have someone to promote to, all of your efforts will simply be in vain.

Luckily, customer engagement enables marketers to build relationships with their audience, thus ensuring that they end up the ones being picked over their competitors.

Aside from this, customer engagement – if done right – will also encourage your audience to keep coming back for more and even share their experience with their friends and family.

Needless to say, such a strong relationship is not a one-way street. That’s why marketers need to find a way to truly connect with their audience. It’s no longer enough to simply rely on catchy slogans and celebrity endorsements.

Instead, businesses need to take a more proactive approach and actively participate in engaging their customers wherever and whenever possible.

Now, even though this may sound somewhat overwhelming at first, boosting sales with customer engagement is actually quite easy.

However, you will need to ensure that you target the right audience and provide enough compelling reasons for customers to engage with your business in the first place.

 

What is customer engagement?

Before we dive deep into exploring how to engage your customers, let’s first see what customer engagement actually is.

As the name itself suggests, customer engagement is an umbrella term describing all the ways in which you interact with your audience. This applies to both online and offline interactions, and its main goal is to make customers feel and act positively towards your business.

A couple of good examples of customer engagement:

• You hire one of the top AdWords agencies to boost the visibility of your product. A customer comes across your ad and decides to check your website out.
• You upload a behind-the-scenes video of your product being made, so that all of your interested customers can have a look.

Since there are endless examples of customer engagement, we really don’t need to spend time listing them. The bottom line is that businesses that are focused on customer engagement provide value and meaning to their audience and not just a simple sales pitch.

When done right, customer engagement will- in and of itself – lead to sales growth, customer loyalty and overall business growth.

 

How to increase customer engagement

As mentioned earlier, there are numerous ways businesses can improve customer engagement and thus boost sales. Here are just some of the examples:

 

Create great customer experiences

When customers have negative experiences with a business, they are not really likely to go back to that business. Instead, they will take their efforts elsewhere. However, if they had a positive one, they are more than likely to come back for more.

Not only that, but customers that have a great customer experience when interacting with a brand will most likely share their experiences with their acquaintances, thus promoting the business further through word-of-mouth marketing.

So, in order to ensure you offer your customers only positive experiences, make sure you first map out all the ways you interact with them and vice versa. This will enable you to identify all the areas that you need to pay special attention to and do your best to improve them.

 

Make your brand relatable and meaningful

Another important aspect of customer engagement is the relationships you build with them. Of course, one of the easiest ways to build a relationship with your audience is to create a strong and relatable brand persona.

But aside from your brand persona, you also need to take a look at your brand awareness. Before your customers are able to come to your door, they first need to be aware of your business.

Not only that, but they will also research your business to see if it really has something of value to offer.

Therefore, when presenting your brand, make sure you’re authentic and relatable. This will provide a fertile ground for building a relationship with your audience. Not only will they be able to relate to your brand easier, but it will be significantly easier for them to trust your brand if you don’t give them any reason for doubt.

 

Use push notifications

Sometimes, the easiest way to engage with your customers is by reminding them that you exist and you have something to offer. That’s where push notifications can prove to be invaluable.

These short, pop-up messages can be used as a great way to notify your customers about anything and everything related to your business. For example, you can send notifications to alert them about upcoming sales, special deals and promotions.

In order to be able to send the notifications, however, customers must first opt-in to receive them. And the ones that do will already be taking the first step towards interacting with your brand. The only thing that’s left for you to do then is to engage them.

But be careful not to overwhelm your customers with notifications, which can easily deter them from your brand. Instead, find the right time to send the notifications and the right number of notifications to send to avoid coming off as annoying or pushy.

 

Take advantage of conversational marketing

Since we’re living in the digital age, the concept of a 9-to-5 store no longer works. Instead, customers expect to be able to interact with a brand whenever and wherever they feel like it.

So, if a customer ends up purchasing a product at 2 AM, and they seem to come across an issue, they will naturally want to resolve that issue right then and there.

Of course, it’s not always possible to offer this type of support, so what you can do instead is look into chatbots, for instance. They can enable you to offer your customers at least some sort of assistance and possibly guide them to the solution of their problem.

Since chatbots are based on artificial intelligence, they can easily mimic human conversational patterns and thus offer engagement to your audience that will feel as natural as possible.

And even though the customers are usually aware that they’re not talking to a human representative, they won’t really care as long as they’re being attended to.

 

Focus on retention

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, really, that retaining a customer is far more cost-effective than obtaining a new one. With the existing customers, you’ve already established a relationship, which leads to them being ready to spend more, recommend your brand and even help you attract new customers.

And as mentioned earlier, only a satisfied customer will feel inclined to come back and do repeat business with your brand. In most cases, what motivates customers to come back to a brand is when they feel appreciated, looked after and excited about new and original offers.

All of this being said, it becomes quite obvious that customer retention and customer engagement go hand in hand. Therefore, any solid customer engagement strategy will need to include strategies for retention as well.

 

Improve your social media marketing

Nowadays, every single person in the world browses some social media platform on a daily basis. And with so many people being present on them, there’s no reason for your business not to be.

As you probably already know, social media marketing presents a great way to reach out to your audience and expand the visibility and reach of your business.

But social media also offers a great opportunity to connect and engage with your audience.

Keep in mind, however, that social media platforms are crowded and full of brands competing for customer attention. For this reason, you need to make sure that your customer engagement activities are very focused and targeted at the right audience.

 

How to engage your customers on social media

• Respond to customer comments in a professional and timely manner
• Address negative comments and complaints respectfully
• Post regular content and encourage your audience to interact with it
• Encourage your customers to provide feedback
• Start conversations instead of just talking to your customers
• Inspire participation with interactive content, like polls, contests and quizzes

 

Final thoughts

Luckily, nowadays, there are more ways than ever to engage with your customers.

Customer engagement provides a great opportunity to connect with your audience, build strong relationships with them and encourage them to interact with your brand – aside from just purchasing products.

Engaged customers will be more likely to come back and do repeat business with you and even recommend your business to others, which will have a positive effect on your sales.

Besides, the more engaged and satisfied your customers are, the more likely they will be to interact with your business on various platforms. This will result in increased exposure, greater visibility, more repeat business and – therefore – better and improved sales.

So, what are you waiting for? Look for ways you can increase your customer engagement and help your business reach new levels of success.