Why Customer Engagement Matters
If you ask a number of different people what customer engagement means, you’ll likely get plenty of different responses. Because of this, customer engagement certainly has no shortage of definitions.
We define customer engagement as the way you develop an emotional connection with your customers to create a relationship through various channels of communication.
Examples of these customer engagement channels include direct mail, email and SMS campaigns. It’s necessary that these channels and interactions are tailored to best serve your customers’ needs.
For some brands the customer relationship can begin the moment a person visits a website. Regardless of your approach, customer relationships require management and nurturing to keep them around. Customer engagement drives loyalty and grows the lifetime value of each customer.
Whether your organisation is small, medium, or large, every business has something to gain from an appropriate customer engagement strategy.
Why is Customer Engagement Strategy Important?
Customers that are highly engaged with your brand tend to buy more, promote more, and continue to display brand loyalty. Being able to provide a high-quality customer experience is a key component in your customer engagement strategy. To achieve a meaningful relationship with your customers, your customer experience must be faster, more efficient and more memorable.
Living in a digital world means one-sided conversations between brands and customers are no longer adequate. Modern brands are expected to promote two-way conversions to exceed customer expectations.
Emerging technologies and constant changing consumer expectations are leading firms to adopt a more customer-centric approach. Customers wish to be heard, have their questions answered and want their problems solved.
Throughout the customer journey, customers want to be engaged and feel as though they’re truly valued. Successfully executed customer engagement strategies can help reduce churn rates and increase retention. In turn, this has an overall positive impact on performance of a business.
Because customer engagement has such a large impact on your business, there isn’t a single customer engagement strategy that works across every industry. Without an appropriate and tailored customer engagement strategy your brand could be missing out on opportunities.
These include appropriate interactions with customers and relationship building. Another major opportunity includes encouraging customers engaging with each other.
For many brands standing out from the crowd with customer engagement strategies will be a challenge. For others however, this presents ample opportunity.
How are Irish Businesses interacting with Customer Engagement?
Customer experience, and in turn customer engagement is being referred to as the new battlefront by marketing leaders. For Dataconversion, gathering real life insights into the attitudes of leaders across different industries in Ireland was a priority.
Partnering with Amárach Research in 2018, Dataconversion released the customer engagement benchmarking research report. The report assessed the views of marketing and customer engagement leaders across all major industries on the changes that they will face throughout 2019.
Brands in Ireland are understanding the importance of customer engagement. 97% of brands believe that customer engagement is an important component of their strategy. 96% of these consider it to be a priority over the next 12 months.
To contrast how important they believe customer engagement to be, just over half of the firms surveyed have a dedicated customer engagement budget. These budgets vary greatly between less than €10k to more than €200k.
This suggests that many brands simply don’t have the resources in place to utilise the potential of appropriate customer engagement strategies.
Budgeting isn’t the only hurdle to an appropriate strategy. Getting customers to engage, along with GDPR are the two main challenges facing businesses over the next year.
As mentioned earlier, a ‘one size fits all’ solution for every company isn’t viable to tackle these challenges. To overcome these issues, we can provide the tools that ensure your customers have an exceptional experience at every touchpoint.
The Customer Engagement Benchmarking Report
Be sure to give the full free Customer Engagement Benchmarking Report 2018: Ireland a read! The report gives insight into the state of customer engagement in the Irish market, examining, trends, challenges and the Single Customer View.
Should you be interested in finding out more regarding customer engagement or the customer engagement research report, feel free to contact us on +353 1 8041298!
