Customer engagement is crucial for growing businesses looking to building meaningful, personal relationships with their customers to retain them and keep them coming back again and again.

We’ve shared customer engagement strategies and tips before, but today, we’ve partnered with the experts from the Customer Success team at Thanx to share their favorite customer engagement strategies with you.

Hyper-target customers with location-based campaigns

Kendra Burnett, Senior Customer Success Manager

Communicating with all of your customers is highly effective and casts a wide net, but what if you just want to communicate with a segment of your customers about an event or offer that is only applicable for one location?

It’s incredibly advantageous to send messages to the right customer at the right place at the right time. Targeting customers based on where they transact most often and most recently is a makes a ton of sense. Here are a few reasons why:

• Do you want to test out a new product, before releasing it to your general audience? Limit this to a location and send only to customers that it applies to.
• Have locations in different parts of the country? Send unique messages that tie into the local culture of your locations to make your messages more personalized and relevant.
• Have a number of locations within a short distance of each other? Drive traffic from one location to the other to increase your foot traffic.
• Is there a special event happening at one location? Make sure customers closest to that location receive the information.

In this day and age, customers want to receive relevant information to their needs. What’s more relevant than where you typically go? By showing customers you care about the information they receive, it engages them and strengthens their connection with your business.

Learn more about how to use a targeted offer to announce a new store opening or a store relocation.

Use Reputation Management to leverage customer relationships

Nell Malone, Customer Success Manager

I recommend Reputation Manager to every merchant I work with. Our feedback tool in Thanx is so powerful because it allows merchants to engage with customer feedback directly and privately, plus it captures customer sentiment at the moment right after they make a purchase. And while it’s powerful to have that one-on-one engagement with your customers, many merchants have been asking for ways to share the glowing feedback that customers leave publicly.

Reputation Manager simplifies that process for merchants and customers alike by automatically reaching out to customers that have left exceptional feedback and asking them to share their glowing review on the merchant’s Google page. It’s amazing to be able to see not only the open rates and click-through rates of those email campaigns but to actually be able to correlate new Google reviews from your customers in Thanx.

Reputation Manager helps merchants leverage their customer relationships in a streamlined way. Since enabling the feature, many merchants have seen engagement rates as high as 20%! And all of those good reviews help strengthen the relationships with existing customers and drive new customers into your business.

Engage lapsed customers with Winback campaigns

Lindie Martin, Customer Success Manager

One of my favorite customer engagement campaigns also happens to be one of the easiest, and most powerful types called Winback campaigns.

Winback is an automated campaign that smartly engages customers that are at risk of being lost or are deviating from their consumer behavior pattern. Winback campaigns offer crucial insight into customer behavior and allow you to drive 6x ROI for your business. Winback is proven to drive 49% of churning customers back, using data to drive an ROI that powers real business growth.

An excellent example of this is a pizza merchant, who used the Winback campaign to drive over 100K in revenue with a 60% customer redemption rate. Additionally, most of the customers that received the campaign returned over 3 times after redeeming their reward with the campaign.

Another powerful example is a car wash merchant that used Winback campaigns and gained 143K in additional revenue from lost or at-risk customers.

The takeaway here is more and more of today’s merchants are realizing that churn no longer has to be a fear or threat to their business. Winback campaigns not only increase ROI but help merchants re-engage and build a loyal customer base.

Learn how Pacific Catch retains more customers and increases revenue.

Change customer behavior with day-part and week-part campaigns

Daniel Phillips, Customer Success Manager

Day-part and week-part offers are awesome for merchants looking to shift or drive traffic to off-peak times in the day or week. Merchants can quickly and easily see the patterns of visit traffic in their Thanx dashboard insights. At a glance, you can see when where you have spikes and dips in traffic and use that actionable data to target a segment of customers (we prebuild the segment for you) of customers you’d like to motivate to visit at a different time or day.

As an example, after looking at their week-part data in Thanx, Elephants Deli noticed that the majority of their traffic was during the weekdays. So, Elephants Deli ran a 20% off Weekend Brunch at a specific location to get their daily weekday breakfast and lunch customers to visit on the weekend. They wanted to change customer behavior to visit on the weekend and promote brunch at their Corbett Ave. location.

This campaign resulted in a spike in their weekend brunch traffic at the Corbett Ave. location, increasing it overall by 43% versus the previous month. They also saw a 50% increase in their Thanx customer loyalty member sign-ups.

After the success of this campaign, Elephants planned a 20% off breakfast at certain times to continue driving in customers to visit their locations for breakfast.

Learn more about how Elephant’s Deli shifted traffic from the weekdays to the weekend and saw a double-digit increase in their traffic.

Wrap up

Using targeted and relevant messages and offers to change customer behavior and increase revenue is the name of the customer engagement game.  By using these strategies and tips from the Thanx Customer Success team pros you’ll be well on your way to engaging your customers and seeing the results in no time.