Customer engagement strategies for small businesses

Creating genuine customer engagement can be challenging for small businesses. In the beginning, it can be exhausting trying to establish your brand in the market and gain consumer interest. As a small business, competing against large companies and enterprises requires strategy and confidence in your product. But just because you've refined your unique selling proposition, it doesn't mean customers will engage with your small business or return in the future. As you work to manage incoming and outgoing communication with customers, try these customer engagement strategies to increase customer loyalty and boost sales.

What is customer engagement strategy?

Relationships are more important to businesses than ever before. Consumers are becoming more aware of inauthentic marketing, and many use ad blockers to prevent unwanted advertisements. Many people are also choosing to support small businesses that hold similar values. Over 46% of consumers are concerned with a business's social responsibility efforts. Customers also expect businesses to respond quickly to messages sent via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Social media and email marketing have made it easy to reach people anywhere in the world. Customer engagement strategy is the process of building relationships with these consumers, communicating in an authentic voice and providing value and solutions to their inquiries. Customer engagement is increased through positive omnichannel interaction.  By focusing on this, you can increase referrals and gain a customer base that keeps returning to your business.

Top customer engagement strategies

The best way to improve customer engagement is to simply engage. This means streamlining your communication efforts so your team never misses a message or comment. Utilizing customer engagement software that allows you to easily respond to social media comments and answer phone calls and texts can help you keep customers happy.

Another way to improve customer engagement is to spotlight customers who regularly engage. Whether it's a discount for a product or a simple repost, customers are likely to re-share to their audience. Some software solutions will allow you to communicate in near real time, helping to drive customer engagement.

Customer engagement tracking

Metrics can help your small business determine if your strategy is leading to a more engaged customer base.

There are several ways to track consumer engagement. One way is to monitor engagement across social media pages. For this to be effective, however, you'll need to make sure your followers are composed of ideal customers. While likes and comments can be a great vanity metric, they're not useful if no one who engages is interested in or can afford to buy what you're selling.

If your fan base is made up of potential customers and you're receiving more likes and comments on content you're posting, it means your engagement is increasing. However, make sure to set up systems to differentiate between social engagement that's the result of organic efforts versus paid marketing. Customer engagement tracking can also be measured by tracking new sales and customer reviews on Facebook or Google.

To measure customer happiness, consider sending customer surveys to people who've repeatedly purchased your products and services. By doing this, you can get an idea of ways to serve your existing customer base. Loyal customers are important to the referral process, and word of mouth is important to every small business.

At 8x8, we offer several products and services developed to improve customer relationship management. Learn more about our omnichannel systems that help you and your team increase customer engagement. Contact us today to learn more about our innovative customer engagement solutions designed for contact center managers just like you.