Customer engagement is about building an emotional connection with your customers. More than half of merchants (54%) said that customer experience is their most important area of focus, according to Adobe.
The more engaged a customer feels, the more likely they will spend more, visit more, and refer your business to their friends.
In this post, we’ll explore 5 ways you can engage your customers and increase your revenue and ROI.
1. Capture customer data
In order to engage your customers in a personalized way, you should know who they are. Use a customer engagement platform that captures important data points like visit frequency, average spend and lifetime value. The more you know about your customers, the more you’ll understand what’s most important to them so you can engage them with messages and offers that will pay off.
You’ll also discover the customers that add the most value to your business- your VIPs. These are the customers that visit and spend the most. Your VIPs are also likely the customers who feel the most loyal toward your brand. Getting these customers to visit 1-2 more times or spend a bit more is much easier than trying to get an infrequent customer to come back.
Take a look at the image below. With Thanx, you can see how your customer Alicia interacts with your business. In fact, we capture over 40 different customer attributes to provide a powerful snapshot of each customer’s behavior.
Alicia is a big spender since she spends 73% more than your average loyalty member. She also has a high visit frequency rate, enjoys her experience at your business, and is a loyal customer. Now, let’s explore what you can do with this data to improve overall engagement.
2. Send targeted rewards
Once you’ve used Thanx to capture customer data and identify your VIPs, you can begin rewarding your best customers in a targeted way. Send personalized offers to your best customers based on their past purchases and behavior.
For example, let’s say that one of your best customers, Philip, visits your pizzeria every weekend with his family, but he never stops in during the week. You can send Philip a personalized 20% off reward for a Thursday evening to bring him through the door an extra time that week.
Accenture found that in 2018, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations. The more personalized you are with your rewards and outreach, the more engaged your customers will be.
3. Collect and respond to customer feedback
One of the best ways to collect and respond to feedback is by sending NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys. Customer feedback is one of the most valuable tools a merchant can use to measure and promote customer engagement. The score reveals how likely a customer would recommend your business to someone else. These surveys usually include one question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [business] to a friend?” You can include follow-up questions as well to get more insight into why they ranked your business the way they did.
Platforms like Thanx automate NPS surveys so that you can measure your NPS and see which customers you should target and when. If a customer leaves negative feedback, you can personally respond to them by asking what went wrong, and sending them an offer to come back Addressing any issues right away and directly with the customer, will help you keep your customers engaged and help reveal areas in which you can improve.
4. Engage, re-engage and winback
Sometimes your best customers need some extra motivation to visit again. Capturing customer data with the right platform will reveal when your best customers stop visiting your business and are about to churn. Identifying these gaps in customer behavior will help you winback customers at scale. You can generate 6X your ROI by winning back lost customers.
At Thanx, we use AI to streamline the process by automatically showing you when you need to reach out to win back your best customers. When we detect a lapse in visit frequency, your program will automatically reach out to the customer with a special offer to win them back. These targeted offers encourage customers to visit again and resume their normal visiting patterns.
Winback is proven to drive 49% of lapsed customers back to your business and is one of the best ways to re-engage your customers.
5. Implement a customer engagement platform
In order to achieve all of the best practices in this guide, you need to have the right customer engagement platform in place. The right platform will enable you to capture high-quality customer data, send personalized and targeted offers, collect and respond to feedback, as well as winback your VIP customers.
Having an automated customer engagement platform like Thanx will enable you to engage your best customers at scale, ensure their satisfaction, and increase your revenue. The more you are able to know about your customers and personalize every interaction, the more you will be able to drive meaningful results while growing a loyal customer base.
Wrap up
Customer engagement can seem challenging, but when done right, it can transform your business. Use the right customer engagement platform to capture critical data and begin engaging with your best customers in a way that will grow your business, increase revenue and result in positive ROI. That’s customer engagement for the win.
To learn more, get our free Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement.
