Although there are best practices about how to engage with your customers, the truth is, building relationships is a personal process. Targeting the right customers and sending out the right messages is crucial to customer engagement, but if your best customers don’t feel valued, heard or understood, it can be hard to build loyalty and trust.

The key to customer engagement is personalization and speaking to the right people in the right way at the right time, and understanding that not every customer is created equal. What works for one customer may not work for another, and the way you approach each one should be different.

In this post, we’ll discuss why personalized and targeted customer engagement is key to growing your business and provide you actionable tips to get started.

Who are your best customers?

While all customers are important, focusing on your best can drastically increase your ROI and revenue. It makes sense as your best customers visit most often and typically spend the most. Getting them to visit a few more times or spend a little more is a lot easier than trying to ignite that same action in a promiscuous, discount-driven customer who visits infrequently and spends the minimum. The customers who feel the most loyal to your business are more likely to continuously engage with it. It’s important to identify who your best customers are and send them the right messages at the right time.

Most businesses have a small percentage of customers who drive a disproportionately large amount of revenue: your VIP customers. However, what most businesses fail to do is to implement programs that proactively retain these high-impact guests.

Thanx enables you to pinpoint your VIP customers so you can send them personalized and targeted messages to encourage them to visit more often, spend more, and invite their friends to join.  

What makes your best customers different?

Even your best customers are different from one another. People are dynamic and what appeals to one customer, may be irrelevant to another. Segmenting lists of your customers and their interests will help you personalize all messaging and drive engagement. For example, you can create a list of “VIPs” or “people who only visit during the week.” Once you’ve identified who your customers are, and what segment they fall under, you can send them engaging content through emails, social media, mobile messages, offers etc. to bring them back through the door. For example, if you have a list of customers who only visit your cafe during the week for their morning coffee, you can send them a targeted offer for a free coffee or pastry on a Saturday. This data can also enable you to timeshift business to less busy times of the day or week driving additional foot traffic and incremental revenue you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

With Thanx, you can automatically measure the activity of each customer, with our customer segmentation engine and engage with customers based on over 40 attributes like lifetime spend, visit frequency, average spend, day or time preference, demographics, and much more.

In the example, you can see that Alicia is a big spender with a high visit frequency rate and has had positive experiences lately. This data will help you build segmented lists based on different customer categories and send Alicia and others like her, content that will be highly personalized and targeted.

Segmentation is the way to break out of the one-size-fits-all messaging that has dominated email marketing and customer engagement in the past and move to a truly personalized experience that will help grow your business.

The more segmented your lists get, the more personalized you can be, and the more engaged your customers will feel. Customer engagement is not a one-size-fits-all. When a customer receives a message from you that uniquely applies to them, they will feel heard, appreciated, and motivated to come back for more. On the contrary, when you send the same message to everyone, you risk reaching no one.

How do you reach your best customers?

Once you’ve identified who your best customers are and have your segmented lists, you can be strategic with how you communicate with them. Forming a relationship with your customers in-person is a huge advantage that brick-and-mortar stores have over e-commerce companies, however, it’s important to also stay engaged when they aren’t in front of you.

First, ask yourselves where your customers are. If they are primarily on mobile, which most people are today, sending a text, or a message through a customer loyalty mobile app, is a great way to get in touch with them in real-time.

Sending targeted emails and posting relevant messages on social media are other ways of engaging with your customers. Hosting events and partnering with organizations in your community, are other ways of engaging with your customers offline.

There are many ways to get in touch and it’s important that when you do send your customers a message or offer, it’s personalized based on their interests, behavior, and needs.

How do you measure customer engagement?

You’ve mapped out who your best customers are and develop a plan to engage them, but how will you measure your success? Implementing a customer engagement technology like Thanx, will enable you to capture robust customer data, seamlessly and automatically engage your best customers, and measure your results in real revenue generated, not just opens and clicks and other KPIs that don’t grow your business.

When choosing a technology to manage and measure engagement, make sure to choose one with robust analytics that will not only tell you how often your customers visit and how much they spend, but will also reveal how satisfied they are with your business, and more data that provides insights into who they are.

Having a platform that automates this process will enable you to engage with your customers in a personalized and targeted way, and keep track of who your best customers are across all of your locations. Capturing the right data is powerful — it’s the power that results in increased revenue and ROI and grows your business.

Wrap up

Sending email blasts and treating each customer the same no longer cuts it when it comes to customer engagement. As customer behavior changes, it’s important for merchants to keep up with the trends and know who their VIP customers are and how they behave.

Even your best customers are not created the same. To engage with your customers personally, you need to find your best ones, use segmentation to target them effectively, send personalized messages across different channels, and use a powerful, yet easy-to-understand technology to manage and measure the process.

To learn more, get our free Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement and request a demo today!