More than just a trendy concept, it's THE challenge for every company! What is customer engagement and how can we boost it? How do you ensure engaged customers who come back on their own? Online or offline, it can take as many forms as you have points of contact with your customers... From engagement to loyalty: discover the most effective forms of customer engagement and 6 foolproof techniques for boosting it tenfold!
Customer engagement is defined as developing the relationship between a company and its customers in such a way that it is actively maintained by both parties. This fosters loyalty, brand awareness and a host of other sales-boosting marketing concepts. This commitment materializes in many ways, both online and offline.
Commitment is encouraged by the company, but requires voluntary action on the part of the customer. The customer is more an active participant than a recipient.
For Nicolas Samir, founder of Hey Pongo: "Behind this big word 'customer engagement', there's simply the fact of succeeding in creating a lasting relationship between your business and each customer. And like any relationship, it's about capturing attention, getting a point of contact and weaving lasting interactions with the customer."
Engagement follows customer acquisition. In general, it follows the transaction, but it's even possible to develop it even before the act of purchase, by engaging your prospects. Engaged prospects are much easier to convert into customers.
Customer engagement is based on every conceivable contact point. These include online channels (social networks, web content, SMS marketing, emails...), but also offline: IRL events, physical stores, word of mouth, sponsorship, direct communication...
Customer engagement is by nature multiform. Its definition can vary according to the sector of activity, the service culture, the marketing levers to be favored, etc. That's why it's interesting to look at how other SaaS define customer engagement. In common, they place engagement within the scope of an in-depth relationship between a brand and its customers, which can evolve towards loyalty and personalization of the experience.
For Smile.io, customer engagement means shaping and cultivating a relationship between a company and its customers. It takes place before and after a transaction, often on online media.
For Qualtrics, "the extent of the relationship a customer has with a brand can be strengthened, or diminished, with each interaction. By making a purchase, writing a review on the web and joining a loyalty program, the depth of customer engagement increases and becomes more mutually beneficial."
Our tools turn every transaction into an opportunity to understand your customer, personalize their experience and obtain more data to deepen future interactions.
A loyalty program rewards customers for their commitment. It involves awarding points for each transaction, but also for each engagement action, while collecting contact data that multiplies touchpoints. In this way, you can re-engage your customers by calling them back, and generate repeat business.
Every transaction and every point of contact is an opportunity to collect data. By segmenting your customers according to this data, you can engage them via SMS marketing according to their profiles below (thanks to a CRM like Hey Pongo). Personalized content is the key to engaging many more e-commerce customers.
Customer reviews are a highly rewarding signal of engagement. Engaged customers are more likely to leave a review, whether on Google, Trustpilot, Avis Vérifiés or other sites. What's more, customer reviews have the advantage of reassuring hesitant customers and giving you greater visibility on Google.
To boost its customer reviews, 900.care set up a gift wheel with Hey Pongo, inviting each participating customer to leave a review of their purchase. The e-commerce brand collected 150 reviews in 3 days!
E-commerce enables in-depth customer engagement, but you can go even further by extending the experience to physical channels. That's why many brands born online are moving towards an omnichannel strategy, opening boutiques, corners or ephemeral stores. By diversifying their distribution channels, they can find new offline touchpoints that deepen customer engagement. 48% ofdirect-to-consumer(DTC) brands born online are now present in physical stores.
For Nicolas Samir of Hey Pongo, customer engagement is a response to the challenge of building loyalty: "Customers are increasingly volatile, and the range of products and services on offer has multiplied in virtually every sector of activity. Creating engagement with customers lays the foundations for a sustainable business, as it is less vulnerable to the volatility of its best customers.
Engagement is the cornerstone of any e-commerce strategy, complementing acquisition. In addition to generating repeat purchases, it has many other positive effects for an e-commerce site!
Customer engagement helps to create a positive experience for consumers, which in turn helps to improve the brand experience.
By engaging with customers and building a relationship with them, companies can increase their loyalty and confidence in their products.
As Bill Gates once said, "your most dissatisfied customer is your greatest source of inspiration". Customer engagement provides companies with invaluable information on the behavior, needs and expectations of customers with regard to their products and services.
Engaged customers are more likely to recommend a brand to others, which helps attract new customers.
Engaged customers will give you lots of information through engagement signals. These signals allow you to interpret consumer needs both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Customer engagement that deploys strong, proactive customer service and actively monitors customer feedback enables the company to better understand customer behavior, needs and expectations.
Is customer engagement a fuzzy concept? With or without CRM, the KPIs below will help you find out objectively how engaged your customers are.
Here's the easiest way to measure your customers' transactional engagement. How many transactions do they make on average? If it's close to 1, it's high time to develop engagement strategies! Calculating the number of transactions per customer is easy:
Transaction rate per customer = [Number of transactions] / [Number of customers].
What percentage of your customers make more than one purchase? Here's an excellent indicator of your loyalty, and therefore your commitment. To calculate the repeat purchase rate, here's the formula:
Repeat purchase rate = [Number of customers making more than one purchase] / [Number of customers].
With NPS, we look at customer engagement from the angle of customer satisfaction. Or, more precisely, from the angle of your customers' likelihood of recommending you to others. A high NPS (over 50) correlates with high customer engagement with your brand.
This is "customer lifetime value", an extremely important indicator for websites. Better than just the average basket, lifetime value tells you how much a customer spends on average throughout their relationship with you. This indicator reveals the total value a customer will bring to your business over the long term. As well as revealing the strength of your commitment, it shows you how much you can spend on customer acquisition and still remain profitable.
Finally, engagement on social networks is an excellent indicator. It can be calculated according to the platforms on which you're active. From one platform to another, the indicators remain more or less the same: number of followers, views, likes, shares and comments.
The best strategy for developing customer commitment is a loyalty program with rewards. It meets all the challenges of customer engagement, whether for points of sale or e-commerce sites.
An online loyalty system allows you to :
Whether in e-commerce or at the point of sale, how can you show customers that you value their investment in you? With a loyalty program that rewards every transaction and every signal of commitment.
The basic principle is the accumulation of points with each transaction. With €1 spent = 1 point earned, the mechanism encourages both an increase in the average shopping basket and repeat purchases. Just like coupons and vouchers offered at checkout, but with a much more significant commitment. Unlike checkout coupons, a loyalty program is a long-term commitment. Customers feel more invested thanks to long-term rewards, and can check their points each time they visit a webapp that pops up on their computer or phone (on an e-commerce site, in-store via a QRcode, etc.). Rewards can include coupons, but also engaging rewards.
In addition to transactions, the loyalty program rewards all the engagement signals your customers make. For example, you can award loyalty points for every like on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok...
Here are the engagement signals you can incentivize with loyalty points:
The loyalty points mechanism enables you to multiply all your engagement channels, online and offline, tenfold, for truly engaged customers.
To keep customers engaged, you can also follow up at the right moment. The Hey Pongo loyalty program collects telephone numbers and consent to receive SMS messages.
With SMS marketing, you can relaunch your customers at just the right time:
With campaigns, you can create engagement on key dates: Black Friday, sales, Valentine's Day, etc...
Read the article: 10 examples of SMS campaigns to boost sales
The loyalty program is at the heart of the customer experience. It allows you to personalize customer engagement across all your touchpoints.
In particular, you can personalize the content you send out, via newsletters or lead nurturing by email/SMS/Whatsapp/etc...
You can also segment your customer base to send targeted SMS messages (based on favorite color, for example!). Personalized content is much more engaging than a generic, irrelevant email.
It's impossible not to talk about social networks when it comes to customer engagement! It's the ideal medium for capturing customers' attention and engaging them between transactions.
Are you already creating content on social networking platforms, but seeing few signals of interaction? Encourage them with targeted marketing actions.
Encourage your best customers to recommend you through a referral program! It's essential to have such a program to make it easier for customers to recommend you to their friends and family. You can earn them rewards: loyalty points, discount coupons, gift cards, etc. By rewarding both the sponsor and the referral, the commitment is no longer confined between you and your customers, but spreads virally!
