7 Strategies to Boost Meaningful Customer Engagement on Your Website

Sales and profits are the two most important goals for any business. Nobody’s ever wanted to run a company that has no chance of becoming cost-effective. However, you may end up in a dead-end street if you strictly limit your goals to increasing sales and profits, without paying attention to the factors that influence them in one way or the other.

In the world of the internet, you must pay attention to these decisive factors because they can heavily influence your web presentation and customer engagement. Fruitful engagement is what leads to social shares, an increased number of page views, and higher sales. Plus, it encourages customer loyalty!

If you’re still wondering why online engagement is central to every successful business strategy, hold tight – according to the Engager model, more than 60% of profits may rely on meaningful customer engagement.

If this made you reconsider the way you manage the customer engagement strategy for your business, let us help you out in garnering some purposeful engagement. Stay with us and check out the seven simple yet essential engagement tactics that will boost your sales.

1. Give Engagement a Purpose

Firstly, you should know that there’s no meaning of garnering engagement until you know what you want to do with it. You may have thousands of social followers or millions of website visitors but if you don’t know how to propel them further down the funnel, it won’t mean much. To make sure you’re not stuck in this situation, you should answer some fundamental questions.

To begin with, you should find out the extent to which current customer engagement on your website brings value – if it does, at all. Next, you should figure out how you can use this engagement to contribute to your business goals.

Finally, think about the ways of increasing it, keeping in mind your target audience, the available budget, and the most efficient ways of engaging them (social media campaigns, website promotions, etc.)

Good Practice Example: Take a cue from the inspiring online movement that Dove has created. To create a bond with women using their cosmetic products, they’ve introduced the #speakbeautiful hashtag on social media to encourage women to improve their self-esteem, making them purposefully engage with the brand.

2. Be Your Buyer

Before we go through this one, just imagine the following situation:

You’re a 50-year-old business owner who’s trying to sell a service to millennials. From your point of view, promoting your business is all about using a mailbox, printing flyers, etc. But can you really imagine kids nowadays enthusiastically reading the content of an averagely designed leaflet?

Yeah, neither can we. Unless we’re talking about something that adds value.

No matter who your target audience is, you should be aware of their needs, preferences, and pain points. For a day, just put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and answer the following questions – ‘Who are these people?’ ‘What do they like?’ ‘Which social media channel do they use?’ ‘What type of content would they like to see?’ ‘How does your service fit into that picture?’

This information can be useful when deciding the best way to approach them, effectively promote your business and turn them into customers.

3. Personalize Content

According to Boston Retail Partners POS/Customer Engagement Survey, customer personalization was a priority for 70% of US retailers last year, and there’s no wonder why. The importance of personalization lies in the fact that you’ll make your customers feel more pleasant when they’re interacting with you.

What can you personalize? Emails, deliveries, manuals, birthday gift cards, support system – practically whatever comes to your mind.

Good Practice Example: An amazing example of the effective use of personalized content comes from the world’s most famous beverage producer – Coca-Cola. Remember that awesome campaign based on bottle personalization? Labeling bottles across the planet with customers’ names was not only an incredible marketing idea but also a great way of making customers feel special.

4. Personify Your Brand

Brand personification has become a real deal these days. All major brands are hiring influencers and leveraging their network to create a buzz on TV, radio, social media, billboards, and basically everywhere. This strategy has become the simplest way to engage customers and grow sales for almost every business that can afford it.

However, what about the businesses not ready to spend much money and hire someone super famous? Who will bring them an enormous number of potential customers? Well, you still can take some baby steps. For instance, hire an aspiring yet not-so-famous blogger or YouTube content creator. That way, you can give them promotional space and let them grow while they help you make a meaningful connection with your customers.

Good Practice Example: One of the oldest yet adorable examples of brand personification comes from Ferrero Brands. They have been using kids’ pics on their chocolate packages to make a connection with their target audience, way before bloggers, youtubers and other types of influencers started to appear.

5. Calm Your Robots

Yes, we know that using chatbots and automated live support chat may save you time and money. However, it may radically influence the willingness of your customers to stay loyal to your online business.

If you want to succeed in establishing meaningful communication, you should get real people to talk to your prospects. With the popularity of live chat software at an all-time high, there are numerous ways in which you can develop a friendly connection with your prospects.

Pro Tip: Have a look at this article on comparing Live chat solutions by AccuWeb Hosting.

You can choose between hiring a proactive silly agent who will use gifs and emojis or an unobtrusive, pleasant formal operator. The point is, that people will come back to your business only if they feel understood. And no robot can understand humans as much as a compassionate human.

Good Practice Example: Tesco’s customer care became viral after dealing with the problem of a customer who had found a worm in a cucumber bought from Tesco. Even though they obviously couldn’t do anything about that specific cucumber, the support, and compassion escalated to organizing a funeral for the poor worm. How incredibly hilarious is that?!

6. Have an Unconventional Social Media Strategy

If you want your online business to grow, you may have to put in additional effort to make it stand out. One of the most efficient ways of doing so is developing a unique social marketing strategy that represents your business ideas, goals, and visions.

By introducing fun, sassy, inspiring multimedia content it will be easier for you to reach your followers and get instant reactions. Accordingly, you’ll make them want to communicate with your business and reply to the messages you send out to them. And that’s exactly what you need.

Good Practice Example: Starbucks introduced the concept of ‘My Starbucks Idea’ on Twitter to make a stronger relationship with customers by letting them express their ideas for the improvement of Starbucks. This way, they not only provoke instant reactions and increase visibility on social media but also valuable feedback.

7. Provide Additional Value

Finally, numerous studies have confirmed the importance of educational content when it comes to establishing a meaningful business–customer relationship.

A study performed by Google says that 48% of smartphone users tend to create a long-term relationships with companies that offer useful instructional and educational content. This particularly refers to videos, multimedia content, and interactive manuals that can be accessed from mobile devices.

Bonus Tip: Interactive is Imperative

No matter if you decide to implement one or several of the listed strategies, there is one thing you should know – adding a dash of interactivity can make them more effective.

A well-developed interactive content strategy will certainly make your customers feel more curious about your brand, engage them better and, make them want to know more about your business. And what are the best ways of introducing interactive marketing? Well, for starters, you can try out:

– creating quizzes about different concepts that impact your target audience in one way or the other (like they do at Hubspot and the NYT)
– gamifying prospects’ education process (like they do at BBVA)
– creating interactive maps and articles (like they do at The Guardian)
– creating dynamic online environment based on the usage of purposeful gifs (like they do at Instapage)

Meaningful Engagement = Meaningful Business

Now that we’ve gone through all the useful strategies you may want to implement, let’s briefly summarize what you should do to keep your customers happy while growing your business.

Decide the use of your customer engagement strategy
1. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
2. Personalize your content as much as you can
3. Give your brand a voice and face
4. Stop making robots out of your live chat support or call center agents
5. Use social media in unconventional ways that will provoke engagement
6. Supply your customers with useful and practical content that they can’t find somewhere else
7. Make the interactive marketing content an obligatory part of your strategy

As you can see, none of the strategies require extremely heavy financial investments. Instead, they show how the core focus of a successful business should be far beyond profits and investments. On the contrary, it should be about connecting with customers, making them feel comfortable communicating with you, and therefore, turning them into your long-term allies.

About the Author

Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in knowledge management and various Knowledge base tools. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.