Even though feelings are difficult to define and measure, marketing professionals have been able to create a strategy based on them called customer engagement.
A company’s success is heavily reliant on its ability to engage customers. This includes sales, branding, loyalty, and retention. Without a professional approach to customer engagement, it will be difficult to compete with other companies.
What Is Customer Engagement?
Engagement with a brand can be emotional. Here are some examples of customer engagement:
- When customers like your brand, they are likely to buy or sign up.
- When customers love your brand, they are likely to continue buying or renewing subscriptions.
- When customers enjoy your brand, they are likely to recommend it to others.
- When customers relate to your brand, they are likely to give valuable customer feedback.
Fully engaged customers are more profitable, spend more, and stay with a company longer than average customers, according to Gallup.
Measuring and improving customer relationships is a way to retain clients and their loyalty. Engaging customers throughout all touchpoints can build and enhance the “human-to-human” connection, thus working beyond transactional relationships, and the traditional CRM approach.
**Interacting** with clients offers the potential to build trust and improve customer satisfaction. This includes **signing up**, participating in a loyalty program, filling out a survey, receiving an email, writing reviews, and more.
Interacting with customers can help to create a stronger emotional connection to your brand, which can lead to better customer loyalty. These principles can be applied to any company, regardless of size.
Amazon has built various programs to improve customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Why Does Customer Engagement Drive Retention?
Customer engagement is essential to the success of your company. It can improve retention, boost revenue, and help you grow your business faster.
It’s better to have a small number of high-quality customers who are loyal and engaged than a large number of customers who aren’t really interested in your company. Quality customer engagement is essential for business growth.
An engaged customer is one who is happy with your services and is likely to recommend you to others. This helps you to expand your customer base and grow your business.
What Are the Top Customer Metrics to Measure?
To understand what keeps customers coming back to the company, you need to understand the customer’s emotional and rational attachment and spending patterns throughout the entire customer journey.
metrics, it’s possible to adjust your brand experience and While customer engagement is driven by emotional factors, you can measure it by focusing on the right metrics. Doing so allows you to adjust your brand experience and retention strategy to improve your company.
High Product/Service Usage
If your customers are using your services frequently, they are likely happy with what you are offering. This means you are doing something right with your engagement efforts. The usage metrics to pay attention to are frequency and average time.
Frequency
The text provides information about how often a customer uses your product over a certain period. It can help you determine if the customer is using the product regularly or not.
Average Time
It can be beneficial to assess how much time your customer spends using your product on average. By incorporating this data into your company’s KPIs and customer history, you can gain valuable insights into customer engagement.
If customers are using the service or product frequently and spending a lot of time using it, this indicates that they are satisfied with it.
High DAU (Daily Active Users)
In general, the more daily active users a company has, the better its customer engagement will be.
You can determine how engaged your customers are by looking at the number of active users you have at any given time. If you filter this parameter by active daily or monthly users, you can establish a pattern of customer engagement.
DAU can be used to segment customers and find trends to improve brand loyalty, engagement, and retention.
For example, you can use data to determine that your users stop being active three months after customer onboarding completion. You can then use this information to channel your resources toward a re-engagement campaign during that period.
Low Churn Rate
Customer engagement influences your ability to retain customers. A lower churn rate indicates higher retention rates, meaning engagement is satisfactory.
Churn rate is a metric that measures the percentage of customers who stop using a company’s products or services during a given period. A high churn rate is generally an indication that something is wrong within the company, whether it be poor engagement with customers, high prices, or poor customer service. By analyzing customer churn patterns, companies can identify periods when customers are more likely to leave and take steps to improve engagement efforts during those times.
High Referral Rates
If yousee customers referring your services to others, the engagement levels are high. This means that they are happy with your service and are telling others about it- which is the best form of advertising.
You can improve your referral levels by adjusting your engagement strategy.
License Utilization
You can find out how many licenses have been purchased for an account and compare that number to the number of active users to see if there are any upsell opportunities. You can also see how engaged customers are by comparing the number of active users to the capacity.
If customers aren’t using all the features of their subscription, they may need to switch to a new subscription that better fits their needs.
The following metrics allow you to track customer satisfaction over time, allowing you to understand both engagement and retention potential.
Social Media Activity
If you use social media channels for marketing and engagement purposes, you can measure customer engagement by monitoring their activities, such as shares, comments, and mentions. This can show how well your clients relate to your brand and how likely they are to recommend it.
How Does Customer Engagement Fuel Retention?
A well-engaged customer is likely to stay with your product or service for a long time, thus improving your retention rate. The reasons for their staying are:
- Understanding that your product/service carries great value.
- Feeling that the company cares about their interests and success.
- Feeling that the product is the top option on the market for them.
Improved customer engagement leads to improved customer retention rates.
Factors That Can Make or Break Your Customer Retention
It’s cheaper and faster to get customers who have already bought from you to make another purchase, than to find, attract, and convince new customers to make their first purchase.
To draw your customers back repeatedly, you must first understand the key factors affecting customer retention that could either make or break your customer lifetime value.
If you have been focusing on attracting new customers instead of retaining your existing ones, this article is for you.
This text discusses how important customer retention is for a company’s bottom line and how to increase customer retention rates. The drivers behind customer retention are discussed, as well as how to show appreciation and personalize communications to customers.
Your Marketplace Store and Listings
Your store and listings are key to not only making initial purchases, but also generating repeat purchases.
An easily navigable store creates a positive impression that customers will want to come back to.
The key things to consider when optimizing your marketplace store and listings for retention are:
Memorability
Your marketplace storefront should be easily identifiable, memorable, and enjoyable to navigate. You can do this by branding it with images, logos, and colors that represent your business.
Discoverability
Make your listings discoverable by using categories, tags, and keywords that help customers find you again.
Ease of Purchase
When you join programs like Walmart TwoDay and eBay Fast ‘N Free, customers can conveniently buy from you again.
Item Availability
Efficient inventory management is key to ensuring your products are always in stock and available for purchase on all sales channels.
If you’re selling products online through a marketplace store, you should also consider aspects of website design that will make the purchasing experience enjoyable for customers both the first time and subsequent times. This includes features such as guest checkouts, customer accounts, and product recommendations.
Product Selections and Variety
The products you sell have a considerable impact on customer retention levels because customers will come back if they have a need or desire that can only be met by your product.
A store that sells expensive furniture will have a lower return rate than a store that sells cheaper beauty products because people need to replace items like shampoo more often than they need to replace a sofa.
this way In general, the repeat purchase rate is lower for more expensive products. However, this does not always have to be the case.
When customers need to make a high-value purchase, you can retain them by supplementing one-off products with a variety of everyday items, so your brand is at the top of their list.
The high-end furniture store could sell products that help clean and maintain sofas, as well as covers for them. This would lead to smaller repeat purchases between larger furniture purchases.
The Delivery Experience
According to a study, more than a third of customers will not return to a store following a poor delivery experience. This is because late, missing, or damaged deliveries create a terrible first impression.
An outstanding delivery experience can lead to customers wanting to use the company again because of the great first impression.
The keys to a seamless delivery are:
Fast Delivery Speeds
Next-day and 2-day delivery improve the post-purchase experience by making it more convenient and giving customers confidence and satisfaction.
Free Shipping
Offering free shipping can make shoppers more likely to buy, and can also be used as an incentive to increase the average order value.
Tracking Updates
Updates on deliveries give customers confidence that their orders will arrive as expected, encouraging them to shop again in the future.
On-time Deliveries
If you deliver what you promise, it will increase customer trust and make them feel confident about buying from you again, especially if they’re on a tight schedule.
Accurate and Quality Orders
If you want to avoid complaints and returns, make sure you send the right product, and that it’s undamaged and in good condition.
You can use our fulfillment cost calculator to see how much 2-day delivery would cost for your SKUs. Nationwide flat-rate, transparent pricing is used, so the delivery fee would be the same no matter where your buyers are located.
Your customer support
The most significant impact on customer loyalty comes from proactive customer support, followed closely by consistently good service and fast, friendly interaction.
This means you must reach out to customers before they reach out to you, which you can do using:
Post-purchase emails
Sending post-purchase emails is a great way to thank your customers for their purchase, confirm delivery details, ask for feedback on their experience, and recommend next steps.
Delivery updates
Make sure to tell your customers right away if there might be a delay in their delivery, and do whatever you can to make up for it if the delivery ends up being late.
Product support
It is important that customers know how to use and get the best out of the products they purchase. To ensure this, send them information on equipment needed, set-up guides, and access to your customer community. By providing this type of information and support, you will encourage customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Multiple channels
Make sure you are staying visible to your customer base by being available through email, telephone, live chat, and social media. Streamlining these channels will allow your support team to manage multiple queries at one time.
Make sure you follow the marketplace’s rules for communication with customers when selling on a marketplace.
Where you advertise your products
Advertising doesn’t just bring in new customers, it can also help keep the ones you have.
Creating customer loyalty is difficult for Amazon and Walmart because people generally become more loyal to the marketplace first, before becoming more loyal to any one company. This means that customers will go directly to the search bar to make a repeat purchase, which gives your competition a chance to steal them away.
You can secure a good position in the search results by using ads on Google and social media, which will reintroduce your brand to customers before your competitors can. Once they recognize your store, they can bypass the initial stages of the purchasing process and go straight to checkout.
How you treat existing customers
The way you treat your existing customers can determine whether they return to your website or a marketplace.
You must give customers a reason to re-engage with your brand. This involves:
Loyalty programs
Offer customers who are loyal to your brand discounts, free shipping, or gifts.
Engaging emails
It is important to keep in touch with customers and send them product updates and recommendations that are based on their previous purchases.
Reminders
Please remind customers that they will need to re-order certain products that they regularly use, for example coffee beans or haircare products, as they are about to run out.
Subscriptions
Make it easy for customers to stay loyal by offering affordable and convenient subscriptions.
THE PROBLEM: YOUR BUSINESS ISN’T GROWING AS FAST AS IT SHOULD!
Your sales have stagnated or decreased, and you can’t figure out why. Discover what’s holding you back from achieving predictable sales growth in your business.
If you want to grow your business, you need a proven plan and framework. That’s what you get with the 2X Your Sales Discovery Session.
Want to learn about a formula for Predictable Growth that will put your business on a 90-day path to 2X Your Sales?