What you need to know about engaging your customers online

The key to getting customers is bringing them in. Keeping those same customers is even more important. Here’s where customer engagement comes in.

Engagement is about building real relationships with your audience. You use all kinds of communications before, during, and after the sale. If you have different messages or a misaligned tone across all channels, it can be disastrous.

You need a strategy for engaging your customers.

How do you engage your customers?

Like your growth strategy, customer engagement is all about increasing satisfaction and conversions. Customer engagement strategies that work try to meet them where they are. By using their favorite channels and proactively reaching out to them.

Digital communication is more important than ever. 

The 7 best ways to engage online customers 

The benefits and challenges of online communication are both there. Tracking engagement is much easier, but without a clear method in mind, the learning curve can be frustrating. The following 7 strategies will help you engage your audience.

1.Get involved in a group or community

You can interact and engage with your customers more effectively by building an online community. For years, forums have been a popular way to interact with customers and let them engage with each other. Even though forums will probably still be around for a while, many companies are now leveraging social groups more. 

Instead of relying on customers to regularly visit your forum to interact and engage with you, why not take the conversation to them on their favorite social networks?

Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Groups are just a couple of the many social networking sites that let you set up topic or brand communities.

2.Organize a webinar 

Webinars are another great way to connect with your customers. Using these platforms, you can reach a big audience on an interactive and user-friendly platform. There’s nothing like a live webinar with a presenter, slides, graphics, or other interactive options. 

Using webinars lets you connect with your customers in a very personal way. Presenting a webinar gives you the opportunity to be more passionate, entertaining, and engaging than just writing a blog post or short e-book.

Encourage more interaction with your audience by letting them tweet or email you their questions or comments during or after the webinar.

3.Work together

Do you want to release an e-book, redesign your website, or launch a new product? Talk to your customers about co-creating something or at least getting their feedback. 

While this wouldn’t be a good idea in all situations, getting your customers’ input can really help you build a stronger relationship. If they were part of the process and effort that made your product better, they’ll feel proud.

Don’t forget to reward the people whose ideas and input you implemented when you encourage customer participation. Try turning it into a contest and recognizing the people who helped. You can reward key contributors with a prize, but sometimes recognition alone is enough.

4.Get together and celebrate

You just got 5,000 registered users? Were you able to get 25,000 new visitors last month?  Celebrate milestones like these with your customers and make them feel like they’re a part of your success.

It’s because some people feel like they’re literally a part of their favorite team that they’re so passionate about sports. They win when the team wins. Cowboys fans say “We played a great game last night” instead of “The Cowboys played a great game last night.” That’s the mentality you need to cultivate with your customers—make them feel like part of your winning team, and thank them for helping your site succeed.

5.Create exclusive content

Content that’s not available to everyone – content that’s so special and exclusive, only members can see it. Login is required to access this area. It doesn’t have to be a fee, but users should at least go through a registration process to get access. It’ll make them feel special and like they’re part of something special.

There might also be some special discounts and pricing for this group. Your customers will also love a members-only forum where they can discuss industry-related topics

6.Follow up on feedback 

Take the time to listen to your customers if you want to engage with them. It’s not enough to just have a conversation, you need to show you care about their thoughts. In online communication, where most of your interactions are visible to other customers, this is especially important.

Make sure you keep your online presence active and respond to both positive and negative feedback. Comments and reviews on social media can also be included, as well as email and direct messages. Be sure to shout out the user that presented the idea if you happen to make any changes based on customer feedback.

Showing you’re listening to more than just one person is a great way to show you’re paying attention. This idea gets even stronger when you acknowledge the changes you make.

7.Make it easy for people to engage

You have to be flexible when you’re working with customers online. It doesn’t just mean giving people more channels to engage, it means allowing them to switch between them. 

Imagine a customer question starts as a comment on your Facebook post. Now that you’ve reviewed, you realize you’ll need to ask about potentially sensitive information. You send a direct message instead of keeping the conversation public. 

Give the customer the best option by listing an email address or phone number. It’s important to be consistent across platforms. Make sure your messaging, follow-through, and timeliness stay the same.

This flexibility will be perceived as positive engagement as long as you don’t lose track of your conversations.

Choosing the right engagement strategy takes time

Today, you can engage and interact with your customers online in so many ways. You can better engage and interact with your customers by taking advantage of all the free tools and resources available today. 

Know that it might take a while to find the strategy and channels that work for your customers. Decide what success looks like, be ready to pivot when engagement isn’t working, and listen to your customers. 

You can design your own website. The easiest way to make sure your website can accomplish all of these goals is to hire a pro. You’ll have more time to run and grow your business.

Please download your brochure for your business plan below – Myinvestorchoice is ranked the number 1 Agency on Upwork for preparing business plans.

You can design your own website. The easiest way to make sure your website can accomplish all of these goals is to hire a pro. You’ll have more time to run and grow your business.

Please download your brochure for your business plan below – Myinvestorchoice is ranked the number 1 Agency on Upwork for preparing business plans