7 Essentials for a Successful Customer Engagement Plans
Yosef | Nov 29, 2024
Yosef | Nov 29, 2024
Every brand wants a loyal base of diehard fans, but they don’t just materialize out of nowhere—neither do the positive experiences that inspire customer loyalty. Brands that build a dedicated following always find ways to go above and beyond to engage their customers and make them feel valued.
Only 45% of customers feel “very satisfied” with their customer experiences, meaning there is loads of room for improvement. Take the opportunity to scrub up your existing strategies and develop an even better customer engagement plan. Engaging and holding on to these customers means you can never take them for granted—you have to stay relevant and maintain their attention.
Engaging customers effectively can be a complicated endeavor that has to account for diverse target audiences and an ever-expanding list of content channels. Drafting a comprehensive customer engagement plan beforehand can help you organize and prioritize the elements of this critical strategy, and these tips can give you the best chance to succeed.
What Is A Customer Engagement Plan?
A customer engagement plan is a roadmap for the interactions your brand will have with customers before and after the purchase. Interactions include social media conversations, surveys, feedback forms, email outreach, and live or virtual events across the customer journey. Creating a customer engagement plan aims to provide the best possible experience, solve problems faster, and improve overall satisfaction.
A good plan will connect your customers’ needs and wants to specific interactions that deliver relevant content through their preferred channels, including video and email. It should ensure a consistent experience with personalized messaging that builds trust and drives further engagement.
How a Customer Engagement Plan Can Help You Boost Customer Lifetime Value
One of the biggest benefits of a customer engagement plan is that it can boost the average revenue each customer brings in for the entire duration of your relationship. Here’s how making a plan can help you maximize customer lifetime value.
Engaging your customers keeps your brand front of mind and makes them more likely to make repeat purchases. Regularly interacting with buyers (including from a customer service perspective) enables you to create loyal, satisfied customers who stick with you and recommend you to their friends.
Create Opportunities to Cross-sell and Upsell
The more you engage with your customers, the better your chances of convincing them to upgrade future purchases or buy complementary items. Making an active attempt to upsell and cross-sell can increase a company’s revenues by as much as 30%, and engaged customers will be far more receptive to any offers or recommendations you provide late in the sales cycle.
Streamline Purchase Cycles
Your engagement efforts can shorten the time customers spend researching products and weighing their options. If you can anticipate their preferences and behaviors, you can direct their journey by providing the right content at the right time to help accelerate sales velocity.
3 Real-World Examples of Cool Customer Engagement Plans
There’s nothing wrong with traditional marketing outreach methods, but a creative, original approach can have a big impact if you pull it off well. These three brands provide an excellent example of how it’s done.
1. Slack Updates
Slack is an indispensable messaging app for many businesses, and it has many avenues to push direct messages to its customers. However, one of its most memorable engagement methods was to use the “update notes” space in the app store to share a positive, encouraging message without any self-promotion or CTA.
2. Carhartt Chats
True to its nature as a work apparel company, Carhartt’s engagement method is direct and pragmatic. When an online customer’s behavior suggests they’re having trouble finalizing a purchase, a window will pop up asking if they want to chat with a sales expert. While it can be challenging to scale without the right tools, personalized outreach can have a dramatically positive effect on conversion rates. In fact, 73% of customers expect brands to deliver personalized experiences using new technology.
3. IKEA’s Augmented Reality
The global furniture chain IKEA engages with customers by bringing the brick-and-mortar shopping experience to them. Its apps, videos, and augmented reality features help shoppers visualize their home design plans in virtual spaces.
7 Essentials for a Successful Customer Engagement Plan
1. Define Your Goals
Structure your plan around specific business objectives, and your goals should be achievable within a realistic timeframe. They can include things like growing sales, increasing customer retention, improving your brand image, encouraging customer advocacy, or speeding up customer service response times.
2. Know Your Customers Well
You’re going to have a hard time engaging customers if you don’t know who they are and what they like. By conducting market research and surveys, gathering information about your customers, and analyzing the data, you can uncover valuable insights into their mindset. Using this information, you can create detailed customer personas that will help you craft exactly the kind of content that captures their attention and builds trust. Accurate and detailed customer data is also necessary for creating optimal personalized content.
3. Map the Customer Journey
From the moment a customer first learns about your brand to the final order in their purchase history, the customer journey includes numerous touchpoints where brands and customers can connect.
The customer journey is often divided into five stages: awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy or loyalty. Different stages of the journey call for different types and delivery of content. Creating a detailed and comprehensive plan can make a huge difference in taking advantage of every opportunity to meet customers with the right message at the right time.
Sometimes, even the best-laid plans underperform, but this is much less of a problem if you catch it and correct the course early on. This is only possible if you’re tracking the key performance indicators that tell you whether or not your customer engagement strategy is helping you meet the goals you set for it.
The right metrics will depend on the specific goals, but some commonly used customer engagement metrics are net promoter score, conversion rate, churn rate, retention rate, and customer lifetime value.
Remember that your customer engagement plan is an outline for a live process, not a binding contract. If the numbers aren’t where they should be, don’t be afraid to make changes on the fly.
5. Develop a Content Strategy
After mapping out the customer journey, you might have a pretty good idea about where and when your customers will be receptive to the right message—so you’d better show up with something good. A content marketing strategy ensures that you’ll have entertaining, polished, valuable content to share with your customers, optimized to deliver a carefully chosen message that addresses your audience’s top concerns at that moment and points the way toward continued engagement.
6. Implement a Feedback Loop
Building trust and sustaining lasting relationships requires more than abstract strategies. One of the most important parts of a customer engagement strategy involves actively seeking feedback, listening to what your customers are saying (directly to you or on social media), and responding to their concerns and requests to the best of your ability.
Whenever a customer shares their honest opinion about what you’re doing and how they feel about it, they’re doing you a big favor. Never miss an opportunity to look for ways to turn constructive feedback into real change.
7. Create Personalized and Interactive Videos
Video is by far the preferred content media for most consumers, and personalization has proven to be highly effective at capturing and holding a viewer’s attention. Combining these two elements is a great way to reach audiences who are already familiar with watching short videos on platforms like TikTok and Instagram every day.
Personalized videos can include the customer’s name, previous purchases, loyalty program rewards, and live events or sales countdowns. You can also incorporate interactive features that allow viewers to click and browse within the video, engage in two-way chats, create unique video journeys through business logic, and explore other options that encourage deeper engagement and additional purchases.
Going All-in On Engagement With Blings
Long-term customer engagement can yield substantial benefits, but it keeps getting more challenging. In an online environment where consumer attention is pursued from every angle, coming in hot with the most compelling content you can create is the winning move.
Personalized videos are extremely effective at boosting engagement, with Blings videos increasing engagement rates by 2.5x in our case studies. Blings’ platform makes it possible to create hyper-personalized videos for every touchpoint in the customer journey, elevating the customer experience with AI-optimized content they can interact with in real time.
Want to learn more about how Blings can engage your customer base—no matter how large and diverse it is—with video content that speaks directly to your audience? Set up a meeting today to see what this lightweight, high-quality technology can do.
