5 Customer Engagement Strategies to Boost Your Brand

Customer engagement strategies are essential to creating a positive customer experience, increasing brand loyalty, and generating repeat revenue. At Brierley, our customer engagement experts have identified five top strategies to jump-start your company’s growth and improve your brand’s customer engagement.

Before making your deck to recommend engagement strategies to company leadership and stakeholders, let’s look at some helpful basics of customer engagement and the customer experience. Understanding these basics allows you to present or implement these customer engagement strategies confidently.

Customer Engagement and Customer Experience

What’s the difference between customer engagement and customer experience? It’s simple: customer engagement is the ride, and the customer experience is how the ride makes the customer feel.

All your creativity, innovation, intention, and engineering should go into designing an extraordinary customer engagement ride for your consumers. How they feel, act, and talk about that engagement you created is the customer experience.

Why are customer engagement strategies important?

Customer engagement strategies are important for business growth. The five strategies in this article are intended to drive growth for your company in the gap between your major marketing efforts and your regular, scheduled brand promotions. This engagement gap has activities often overlooked by brands, including consumer-to-consumer brand conversations, cohort mission trip motivations, and the feelings your brand experience evokes in your customers.

Strategies to improve customer engagement are important for the following reasons:

• Brands with better engagement are more profitable. Hall and Partners developed a model explaining that two-thirds of the difference between brands’ profits resulted from better customer engagement: “Creating and stimulating customer engagement should now be accepted as a critical imperative.”
• Brands that connect emotionally with their customers drive more revenue. Gallup’s research suggests that these emotional connections with fully engaged customers net an additional 23% of revenue.
• Brands that put the customer at their strategic center drive higher profits. Creating an authentic relationship with your consumers is highly profitable. According to the study, Brierley and others have found that customer-centric brands are more profitable than those that are not, as much as 60% more profitable.

So instead of hawking short-lived revenue boosts, we have curated five engagement strategies designed to create sustainable revenue growth by solving customer pain points, humanizing your brand, and earning brand consideration.

Customer Engagement vs Promotions & Brand Advertising

Over our 35+ years of helping global brands with their loyalty member engagement, we’ve learned these strategies are equally important. Notice we didn’t say more important. Sales promotions and brand advertising are important parts of the marketing mix. Brands often overlook activities in the engagement gap, but they are a source of long-term growth and, therefore, equally important.

In summary, these strategies are focused on driving growth through customer engagement. From decades of experience, Brierley knows better customer engagement drives higher revenues and profits.

Five Engagement Strategies to Jump-Start Growth

Here are the top five customer engagement strategies you should pour all your creativity, innovation, and engineering into to create positive, growth-driving customer experiences.

1. Solve a major customer pain point in your brand experience

To solve a major customer pain point in your brand experience, you need to know the pain point. To discover the most common customer pain points, contact your customer care team, ask for the biggest issue customers complain about, and check every feedback channel, including email, phone, social, app reviews, etc. Pick a challenging customer pain point and fix it.

While this sounds self-evident, many brands rationalize that the ‘number’ of people complaining is low, and therefore, mending the complaint wouldn’t be a ‘major’ improvement. Brands would rather focus on some new feature or service. However, there are two problems with this thinking:

1. Most customers won’t complain; they’ll just leave.
2. When the customer is at the center of your strategic focus, then every relationship is precious.

Brierley’s findings align with a PwC report which shows that 73% of customers cite experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, after price and quality. When brands simplify and improve customer engagement, they create positive experiences that improve customer lifetime value.

2. Ensure your employees feel the love

We’ve found that consumers will actively punish companies that don’t respect their employees. Two-thirds of consumers cited they were drawn to brands with purpose, who were transparent about their materials sourcing, and how they treated their employees.

Fight for your front-line associates; listen to their needs and align policies or changes around your brand purpose. Take care of your employees, and they’ll handle sales for you.

3. Test your own brand’s customer experience to see how human it feels

If you feel it’s odd to expect that an experience with a business should feel human, then we need to adjust that misperception first. Consumers are changing. Brierley has seen this trend away from one-size-fits-all transactional experiences — retention and customer lifetime value are falling off for brands that have not shifted to higher states of personalization where consumers feel recognized and remembered and their offers feel relevant.

A survey published by Accenture Interactive found nearly all consumers — 91% — are more likely to shop with brands that provide personal ‘humanized’ digital experiences. Take a day to test your brand’s engagement for yourself, for example, by:

• Become a new loyalty member
• Sign up for email communication
• Call customer care
• Try to adjust an order after it’s been placed

There’s likely an opportunity to adjust messaging, process, policy, training, or digital features to engineer an engagement that feels more human: clear, compassionate, understanding, and helpful.

“Brands must personalize the engagement for each member in real-time and in a more targeted, relevant way across the customer’s preferred channel.” —Rod Dillehay, Senior Business Development Executive

4. Every touchpoint should have a clear call to action

Creating and testing an engagement loop for your customers is important to increase revenue by cementing repeat transactions.

What is an engagement loop? An engagement loop is the set of behaviors you hope your customers will repeat, including repeat transactions and regular loyalty program use. A major part of testing each step of a cohort’s journey in the engagement loop. Testing your engagement loop and ensuring it has a strong call to action (CTA) is important. Your call to action should drive your customers towards ideal, beneficial behaviors for your business and your customers.

For example, your first welcome email should have a clear call-to-action for the customer to consider a relevant product. These call-to-actions should be as personalized as possible. You can personalize your call-to-actions for your customers using the information you should know, such as:

• first name
• gender
• age
• time of day/season
• site dwell time
• items viewed
• device
• location

Even better, your call-to-action could be an entire onboarding gamified experience where customers earn a perk or reward if they are willing to step through a few tasks or behaviors. Examples include liking some products, answering quizzes, opt-in to SMS, wish lists, etc.

“Use your call-to-actions to collect the zero-party data that, to me, is the biggest piece of low-hanging fruit. In the face of the ‘crumbling cookie’ [web tracking] brands should be incentivizing customers to populate wish lists or liking/disliking video content, and then let’s start targeting off of it.” —Don Smith, Chief Strategy & Analytics Officer

You can’t expect your customers to engage with your brand if you’re unclear about what behaviors your brand will reward. The call to action should be persuasive, benefit-laden, clear, relevant, and valuable. A well-crafted, tested call-to-action has increased click-throughs and conversions by 50% to as high as 300%.

5. Anticipate which customers are ‘close to’ or ‘past due’

Ideally, you will anticipate which customers are ‘close to’ or ‘past due’ as part of a larger strategy of anticipating each customer or cohort’s next best engagement. For now, we’ll focus on identifying which customers should be coming up on a next visit or purchase and which are overdue. You can spend a good amount of cycle time modeling this (and you should), but for now, let’s just compare the average days between a visit and the date of their last purchase.

Once you’ve got these two groups, it’s time to engineer a customer engagement strategy for them. You should test ideas to see which works best for your customers. Here are two example ideas:

• Try an authentic, emotional appeal to explain why you miss seeing them. Convey that you hope they’ll stop in to look at the personalized product being promoted. Give your customer care contact info if there’s anything you could do to help.
• Provide a personalized and contextually relevant (time, weather, season, mission trip, cohort) lookbook for them to consume. You can include bonus points for video or additional seasonal content. If you’re able, consider testing some offers based on the cohort’s price elasticity.

“Clients are increasingly asking how they can move the needle through the next best action. Getting to a client’s ideal personalization end-state may be way down the road, but the next best action is an immediate step to drive incremental spend.” —Elisabeth Keller, Senior Vice President, Client Success

Use Experts to Improve Your Customer Engagement

At Brierley, we’re different than other digital or experience agencies. We’ve spent over 35 years generating customer loyalty for global brands, including Hertz, 7-Eleven, Express, Sapporo, and others. We’ve always focused on growing emotionally connected relationships between the brand and its customers.

The unique relationship between a customer and the brand determines where and what strategies are needed. It might mean adjustments to in-store, offline, online, customer care, promotions, loyalty program, etc. Our analysts follow the data to uncover the needs and desires of the customer.

Our mission at Brierley is to bring brands to life and life to brands. For us, every customer-to-brand relationship is a new story we help brands craft. To learn more, visit our contact page to reach out to us or use the buttons below.