This post was a collaboration and may contain affiliate links. Businesses live or die by their ability to keep existing customers coming back and finding new ones. For this reason, customers and clients should be the focus of most everything a business does. An important part of this process is staying viable and interesting. Depending on your market and type of business, this can be a little tricky. Don’t worry, with a little creativity and perseverance, you can better engage your customers!
Better Engage Your Customers #1: Make Emotional Connections
Your first important task to engage your customers is to get and keep their attention. How do you do this? Well, there are several creative ways to market your goods and services but are you really connecting? When it comes to engaging your customers, try to foster emotional connections by understanding their needs. This requires some research and time on your part. I have often found that conducting short surveys helps me to glean important information. Keeping in touch via email and social media pages is also an easy way to emotionally connect with your customer base.
Better Engage Your Customers #2: Keep Up To Date On Marketing Trends
You may also want to watch the marketing trends of your industry. By doing so, your business will attain attention once your campaigns reach your desired market. At that point, you have secured an initial contact but do continue to innovate and create new ways to keep them looking at your business. Though some trends are worthy of your attention, don’t be afraid to try new and exciting things to get you out of your own box.
Better Engage Your Customers #3: Reward Loyalty
Offer your customers rewards for their loyalty, such as cash back options or free items after so many purchases. Customers appreciate the respect and a thank you for their continual patronage. This need not be some huge expense for your business either. Though you could get extravagant with gifts, I recommend keeping it small, simple, and frequent. It is much more expensive to win customers than it is to keep them, so seeking to keep instead of always seeking to attract can benefit your business’s wallet too.
Better Engage Your Customers #4: Keep In Touch
Another way to better engage your customers is to respond to them in a timely and grateful manner. One area to pay attention to is any company reviews you get on your website, social media, or email. When you receive a review — whether it be positive or negative — always respond within 72 hours if possible. If you have an outstanding number of correspondences and reviews coming in, you may need some help with this. Consider using a company that offers review monitoring, performs sentiment analysis as well as other aspects of review management. If brand management and analytics always trip you up, learn more from Chatmeter about how to streamline these tasks.
As a business owner, do everything you can to engage new and existing customers and forge relationships with them. Ultimately, be yourself and use your unique skills to set you apart in your industry. Showing who you are as a businesswoman creates a bond with customers and clients not easily broken.