Simple Ways to Engage Your Customers

Technology today affords us the opportunity to initiate contact with a lot of potential customers online, but many businesses fall short of actually converting these customers because they fail to truly engage them. The days when large companies could just blanket the airwaves with their sales pitches and actually expect a return from such advertising are gone. People are tired of being sold to. They want companies to

listen to them and slowly gain their trust over time before they’ll open their wallet to them.

Once initial contact is made with a potential customer online, someone has to engage that customer by providing relevant and useful information in a personable manner to build trust. It’s hard to create loyal customers if they aren’t paying attention to you. Outlined below are tips that can help you engage with your customers on a day-to-day basis:

 1. Be Sociable Online

Have you leveraged the power of the Internet to engage your customers in their homes or on their smartphones? Social media makes it easy to develop one-on-one connections easily. Take these actions to be more sociable:

Listen – Monitor the conversations going on online, especially on your social media profiles and use them as free market research.

Create Two-Way Communication – Comment and like other people’s posts and updates to show that there is an actual human being behind your company profile.

Address Negative Reviews – Make an effort to convert hecklers into fans. It can be as simple as offering an apology or finding new solutions to problems you weren’t aware of until someone brought them up.

The quickest way to get customers to ignore you is to not stand for anything. A study by the Corporate Executive Board that included 7,000 consumers from across the U.S. found that of those consumers who said they had a strong relationship with a brand, 64 percent cited shared values as the primary reason. If you want loyal customers, you need them to care about you. So what do YOU stand for?

2. Give Customers a Say

By giving your customers a say, you not only show that their opinions are important to you, but that you are a business that listens and takes action. Here are two tips how to give customers a say:

Let Your Customers Design Your Products – Use surveys, online polls or email to solicit opinions about what should be included as new product features to an existing line or what the next offering should be. This way you can find out what your customers exact needs are and play to those strengths.

Take Pre-orders – Put up a registration site for those who want to pre-order a product that is under development and establish a channel through which they can supply feedback. If you notice your product isn’t getting enough interest, you will be able to make necessary adjustments on time.

3. Create Contests and Giveaways

There is nothing like a contest or a giveaway to create excitement for an event or a product line. Contests can be a great way to show all the capabilities of a new product, if you include the usage of it as part of the contest rules.

Giveaways have less to do with talent and more with product promotion and anyone can be a part of the fun. Here are a few examples of good contests and giveaways to try:

Social Media Contests – These can be done online on Facebook, Instagram, or most any other social media site. They will require some sort of contest management application to manage the voting and keep fraud out. You may want to give points for comments, sharing, and likes. Add easy buttons for the major social network sites to your contest content and social media profiles to make it easy to share your contest.

Talent Contests – This type of contest also requires that the entrant creates something, like a photo or a video, showing creative ways to use your product. Have them tag your business name with the entry. Give points for tagging and sharing.

Easy Giveaways – If you’re trying to involve as many people as possible in your customer engagement, then nothing beats a simple giveaway. You can give away a discount coupon to everyone who registers their email address, either through an online form or in-store. You can later use acquired addresses to send updates and product promotions.

 4. Reward Loyalty

There is a saying: “Membership has its perks.” You want to encourage your customers to become part of an exclusive group of people who will be rewarded for their loyalty. Here are a few different ways how you can do it:

Create a Loyalty Card – This is fairly easy to do these days with many online businesses offering a service to track loyalty points on a card for you. Whether you are selling lattes or T-shirts, you can offer perks to volume buyers based on a points system. The more they buy, the more points they earn, and eventually they get a freebie.

Publish Exclusive Content to Members Only – If you want to create loyalty on an email list, make sure your emails contain information that is not available on your website. Try sending out results of a case study or a special coupon promotion only to your newsletter subscribers.

Reward Your Biggest Fans – There will always be a few voices that will stand out in a crowd. These are your mega-supporters. Make sure to reach out to them personally and reward them for their loyalty. You may even want to thank them publicly by honoring them with a title ‘Customer of the month’.

Use the words they love to hear.

Not all words are created equal. Certain persuasive words encourage customers to buy more than others, in particular: free, new, and instantly. When customers hear these words (and the promises they imply are backed up), they’ll enjoy their purchases more than they would have otherwise. keep your customers coming back: Go above and beyond for customers and get rewarded with repeat business. You can’t create a tribe of loyal customers without an exceptional customer service experience that keeps them coming back.

5. Build Community

As much as it is important to engage people in a personal, one-on-one, manner, it is as equally important to work on building a brand community that will foster a sense of belonging. There are several great ways to build an online community to more effectively interact and engage with your customers. Forums have been available for years and are still a widely used method of engaging with customers and allowing customers to engage with each other. Forums will likely still be around for the foreseeable future, but many companies are now finding it more advantageous to connect with customers on various social networks. Customers are already on these social networks every day, so instead of relying on customers to regularly visit your forum to interact and engage with you, why not bring the conversation to them on their social networks of choice?

Google+ Communities, Facebook Groups, and LinkedIn Groups are just a few of the many social networking sites that allow individuals and companies the ability to set up topic or brand communities. Here are some ideas how to do it:

Create a Membership Site – Having a membership site will not only help you build a community, but it will also establish an easy way to reward loyalty. You can publish information there that only members can see, comment on and share.

Host Online Events – Online events like webinars are a great way to connect with existing and prospective customers. They go a long way in reaching a wide audience and at the same time maintain a personal touch as participants can communicate with the host via chat and have their questions answered during the session.

Attend Offline Events – If you decide not to deal with the expenses of organizing an event, your business can still make an appearance at local or industry events. Once you’re there, make sure to mingle with customers and promote all the channels through which your business can be reached – your brick-and-mortar location, official business website and social network profiles.

Despite what we often say, most people like things that resemble them in some way. This cognitive bias is called implicit egotism, and is an important thing to keep in mind when communicating with customers. In order to attract the sort of customers you want, you need to identify your target customers down to the last detail and then craft a brand message that perfectly matches their pains, goals and aspirations. It’s easier to fill this existing demand than to create one.

Provide Useful Information through All Channels

These days, there is a steady demand for content through all possible communication channels, like social media, websites, and traditional advertising. To keep up with the crush, it’s easy to just fill these channels with content that serves your promotional goals but doesn’t meet potential or current customers’ needs. But customers will only pay attention to what you say (including the occasional promotion) if you first provide them with information that aligns with their concerns, job role, and stage in the buying cycle.

 Be an Assertive, not Aggressive Communicator

There are three primary styles of communication. Aggressive communicators have trouble listening, aren’t empathic, and can lead to customer frustration.

Assertive communicators listen well, then build off what they’ve heard to proactively understand and solve problems customers come with. Be the latter.

Why One-on-One Engagement is Crucial

The time and attention put into building closer bonds with customers are long-term investments into customer retention, which has perhaps the highest impact on a business’s bottom line. It’s also a convenient strategy by means of which businesses can obtain input on how to market their offerings in a way that will appeal to customers and meet their needs. This way they can reduce the potential for failures and at the same time work towards building a loyal band of buyers who can support their business year after year.