If you want to succeed in business, one of the many things you need to get right is how you treat your customers, and how much they engage with you - and it might not come as too much of a surprise to find that these things are connected. After all, if you treat your customers well, they’re going to engage with you more.

However, you also need to know how to engage with your customers so that they want to buy from you and feel well-treated - that’s a little more tricky to get right. Engagement isn’t just about selling a product or service to someone and calling it a day; it’s about building relationships and creating meaningful interactions, and if that’s done well, you can almost (almost) guarantee success. Successful businesses understand their customers and how important it is to engage with them in the right way - ideally in a personalized way.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some great customer engagement strategies that have been proven to work time and time again.

Personalized Service

We did mention that personalization was important above, so let’s take a better look at that and what it means so you can ensure it’s taking place in your business - it really is the most important element to a lot of people, so it’s a great place to start when you want to develop some customer engagement strategies that work. In the end, a personalized service means you’re not just making customers feel like another number; it’s about understanding your customers’ needs and preferences and tailoring your interactions in the right way to ensure those needs and preferences are taken into account in everything you do.

One way to do that is to recommend products to them that are based on their past purchases, for example, or taking the time to come up with personalized solutions to whatever problems it is they might have. Even just using their name as much as you can might make a difference, and that’s the easiest thing to do of all. When you take the time to actually do this and personalize their experience with you, you’ll be able to properly show your customers that you value them as a person, rather than just looking for their money, and that’s going to make them feel better about buying from you.

Not only are you going to have happier customers if you make things more personal, but you’ll show them that they’ve got every right to be loyal to you and your brand - in other words, they’ll come back for more, and that’s going to lead to a stronger, more successful business, which is what you’re looking for at the end of the day.

Use A Chatbot

You might not think that using a chatbot for website is something that’s going to engage your customers, but in fact, it’s the opposite - it really can boost engagement in a positive way that helps your business overall (not to mention helping your customers). When you add a chatbot to your customer engagement strategy (and yes, you really do need to come up with a real and well-thought-out strategy rather than just leaving things to chance!), you can change everything for the better, and it could be absolutely the ideal thing to change things around and make your business much more popular.

The thing with chatbots is that they use AI, which means your team - and you - no longer have to spend quite so much time dealing with simple queries from your customers, but those simple queries can still be answered satisfactorily, so it’s a win-win for everyone.

A chatbot can make your customer service systems a lot better and more positive, and it can even guide your customers through the buying process to ensure they make a purchase by the end. That’s because with a chatbot, you’re giving your customers answers immediately so they don’t have to wait until you’re awake or you’ve got to their particular question after dealing with other important business matters, for example - customer satisfaction is bound to go up if that’s the case, and purchases will go up too.

Chatbots are there to handle routine queries, offer personalized recommendations, and even make buying easier, and that leaves the humans to focus on more complex things, so there’s time given to both, and no one gets missed out. However, although that’s the main reason for having them, they’ve got other uses too - they can gather customer data, for example, which you can then use to do your marketing and understand your customers better - even if you only used a chatbot for that reason, it would be worth it!

A chatbot is definitely something to think about, and since it can be used with plenty of other things on this list (or even make the things on this list easier), it’s got to be something you add to your to-do list sooner rather than later.

Conversational Marketing

Marketing is good - all business owners know that (or should!) and all business owners should have a marketing plan and budget in place so they can really get to every potential customer possible. But the thing is, there’s a big difference between marketing and good marketing, which is why your marketing strategy isn’t just something you can do without thinking, and it’s not something you can just hope works - you have to have a plan and you have to know you’re going to get a return on your investment. That’s where conversational marketing comes in.

Use that, and it could turn things around massively and really make a difference when it comes to positive customer engagement. So just what is conversational marketing? Really, it’s all about making proper, real-time connections with your target market, which could be live conversations, chatbots, social media messaging, SMS, and more; when you’re able to strike up a conversation, you’ll be able to help people there and then in a really honest and personal way, answering their questions and giving them advice.

There are a number of great reasons to use conversational marketing where and when you can, but one that stands out is that it makes your business much more human and much less corporate, and that’s going to be something a lot of people are interested in - there’s a big shift to working with and buying from smaller businesses these days, and if you can show your small business has a real human at the helm, that’s excellent.

Plus, once again there’s more to conversational marketing than meets the eye. Yes, you can show you’re a human, yes, you can have meaningful interactions that lead to loyal customers, and yes, you can prove you’re credible and know what you’re talking about, but what you can also do is gather more data, and that’s going to make your marketing (not just your conversational marketing, but everything else you do as well) so much more effective - it can even help you find the right new products to sell.

It makes sense to get your marketing right immediately and not run the risk of making a mistake (mistakes are so hard to put right when first impressions count for so much, as they do in business), so take your time to put the best strategy in place before you launch, and you’ll have a lot more success and, of course, a lot more customer engagement.
Social Media Marketing
Now, could there be any better way to really engage with customers than using social media for your marketing (or one of your marketing methods - you need to do a few different things)? Probably not!

Social media platforms can give you the perfect way to really connect with your target market on a much deeper and more personal level, and as long as you’ve got the right content, that’s sure to happen. It is all about content when it comes to social media marketing because unless you’re sharing interesting, useful, fun content, who’s going to look at it? Who’s going to share it? Who’s going to act on it? No one, that’s who.

But if you can find the right things to post and/or share, you’re going to get a lot more interaction and a lot more engagement automatically, not to mention the shares, which bring your business to a much wider audience without you even having to do anything about it - could there be a more perfect way to market your business?

The great thing about social media is that as long as you know who your target market is, you can tailor your advertising directly to them and that means there’s much more chance of making a sale.

Plus you can show what your business is all about and showcase your products, offers, and more, for a very small amount of money, or even no money at all (if you can create a viral post, all the marketing will be done for you by your audience!), and that’s got to be something any good business owner is going to be interested in.