Customer engagement is the depth of the relationship between customer and brand, describing a connection between the two that can encourage awareness and brand loyalty. In an increasingly competitive business environment, improving customer engagement can become the defining characteristic of a successful retail or hospitality company. A fully engaged customer is more profitable to a company than the average customer.
Why engage existing customers instead of gaining new ones?
Improving relationships with existing customers is often a lower-priority metric than acquiring new customers. Traditionally, companies have focused their marketing efforts on expanding reach and awareness of a brand using new customers as a key metric, overlooking the value of investing in improving the engagement of existing customers as a measure of success.
However, today’s businesses are learning more about the value of retaining existing customers, and how improving relationships with those customers can drive tangible results.
Focusing on customer retention can increase enterprise revenue by a big leap! Infact, according to Makinblog, increasing customer retention by 5% increases profits by 25-95%! It is also much cheaper than acquisition.
How Can You Drive Customer Engagement?
Personalization – One of the best methods of improving customer engagement metrics is by creating a personalized experience. 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience!
Personalization also meets the expectations of an increasingly sophisticated audience, as most of the customers engage with a brand and activate a coupon or offer if the promotion is directly tied to previous brand interactions.
Exclusive Offers – Exclusive offers rely on the scarcity principle to pique a customer’s interest, while tapping into the positive effects of belonging and feeling important, to reinforce positive brand experiences. For example, a discount available only to VIP members underlines the fact that the individual belongs to the VIP group while boosting the importance of belonging to that group with special savings just for them. Customers are more than twice as likely to view personalized offers as important than unimportant.
Additionally, consumers are four to five times more likely to purchase if you offer free shipping!
Which customer engagement tools should retail and hospitality brands consider?
- POS integrations that keeps track of customer purchase behavior and motivates them to come back and increase spend with automated personalized incentives.
- Targeting tools to distribute offers to customers based on many factors: purchase frequency, geographical location, and loyalty program membership; or store-related factors that may include moving overstock, or driving foot traffic during a slow time of day.
- Business intelligence and data analytics that can gather granular and accumulated data from a variety of sources, and use that data for actionable insights to apply to strategic business objectives.
- A variety of integrated channels for communicating with customers, including email, text, mobile app, web (via a dedicated portal) and in-store communications (via POS) to reinforce the relationship between customer and brand in an omnichannel experience.
- Como helps your business generate growth with a set of data-driven customer engagement tools that do all of this, and more.
Improving customer engagement can have a positive effect on an enterprise: from increasing retention and referrals to developing brand awareness and reach, as well as growing sales, revenues, and the ROI and impact of marketing efforts.
Como, the most innovative customer engagement toolset on the market, already integrates with 80+ POS systems worldwide. Start gathering actionable customer insights to help you bring them back while increasing their spend.
Contact Como to find out more about data-driven campaigns and loyalty activities that can help your business grow.
