How To Increase Customer Engagement

You’ll know how hard it is to get a customer for your retail business. Once you’ve gone through all that effort, you’ll want to get as much value in return.

You don’t want your customers to buy from you just once; you’ll want them to become repeat customers. While there are plenty of tactics that retail companies use to do this, the best method is to up customer engagement. If a customer is engaged with the company, then they’ll be unlikely to take their business elsewhere.

In this blog, we’re going to look at some useful methods for increasing customer engagement at your store. Once you’ve added them to your operations, it won’t be long before you notice an uptick in sales.

Running Contests or Giveaways

Running contests or giveaways is an effective way to increase customer engagement with your brand. By offering prizes or incentives, you encourage customers to interact with your content, share it with their followers, and participate in your promotions. This generates buzz around your brand and can attract new followers and customers. Additionally, contests and giveaways can provide valuable feedback and insights into customer preferences, helping you tailor your marketing strategies to better meet their needs.

To make running contests or giveaways even easier, you can utilize tools like Gleam.io, which provide a user-friendly platform for creating and managing your promotions.

Link Up All Your Channels

You’ll have many different reach points for your customers. For instance, you may interact with them in your brick and mortar store, on your website, and on your social media channels. All of these things provide an opportunity to impress, delight, and engage with your customers. To ensure that they’re equally impressed no matter which channel they’re accessing, focus on your branding. A cohesive message and user experience will ensure that they get the same great experience, each and every time.

Make Yourself Available

Some companies are all show. They present a good image, but they’re never actually there for their customers. And once that happens, the customer realises that there’s actually not a high level of engagement; they understand that the company doesn’t care about engagement. The biggest giveaway of this is when a retail company makes it difficult or impossible for customers to get in contact with them. So don’t be one of those companies. Instead, make yourself available. If you have an online chat feature, respond promptly to emails, and have a phone number that customers can call, then your customers will trust you — and that’s something that can really drive engagement.

Create an Experience

It’s worthwhile rethinking how you engage with your customers while they’re in your store. Many store owners rely on branded displays, but in this day and age, there are plenty of opportunities to do more. Could you create a more interactive experience, for example? If you’re looking to step things up, then consider working with an experiential marketing agency. They’ll have the ideas, tools, and resources to deliver a first-class experience within your store. Studies have shown that customers are more likely to engage with a brand if their experience is positive and entertaining, so see what you can do.

The Power of Social Media

Any suggestions that social media would be a fad that eventually faded in importance have been well and truly dispelled. In fact, the opposite has happened — people are spending more time on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. There’s no denying that these outlets offer extraordinary value and potential to stores. However, in order to unleash the power of these sites, it’ll be important to focus on engagement. Some companies just use their social media sites as ways to shout their message to their customers. And who likes being shouted at all the time? Social media is a place that allows conversation. So use it! Commenting on your customer’s brand-related posts, asking questions, and commenting on the weather/holidays/trending topics will all help to maintain a relationship with your customers.

Friendly Staff

Any business will lose the faith of its customers if they have poor staff. You’ll know just how much the employees contribute to the customer experience and how much that contributes to the depth of your engagement. Indeed, rude or unhelpful staff is a sure fire way to get people looking at your rivals. There are three tips for ensuring that you have helpful, friendly employees. One is to hire correctly. The second is to train the staff well. The third is to create a fun and positive workplace. Most companies do the first two things well but do the opposite when it comes to the third. If your staff are overworked and underpaid, then you can’t be all that surprised if they’re not as friendly towards customers as you’d like them to be.

Website How-To and Guides

You can’t just list some products and hope people will come to you. You’ll need to show that you know what you’re talking about. You should be viewed as a leader in your field. There are a bunch of ways you can do this, but the easiest way is to use your website as a tool to show off your expertise by publishing how-to blogs and other guides. You can also use your blog to show the behind the scenes of your company. The more that people know about the energy and enthusiasm that drives your business, the more that they’ll engage.

Customised Recommendations

It’s much nicer to be treated as an individual, isn’t it, as opposed to just another number? There are a few ways that you can do this. The first is to use the basics of personalised communication in your dealings with your customers. It’s easy enough to begin your emails to your customers with their names. You can also use cookies and purchase history to create custom recommendations for your customers. And of course, this won’t just result in greater engagement — it’ll also lead directly to more sales since you’ll be promoting items that you know they’ll like.

Outstanding Offerings

Finally, let’s not ignore the most important element of boosting customer engagement. And that is ensuring that you have top quality items at your store. At the core of engagement is confidence. A person who didn’t have confidence in a store would not engage with it on any deep level; they might buy from the store occasionally, but there wouldn’t be much loyalty. On the other hand, if a person has faith that a store will always have the best products around, then they’ll engage as much as possible. So don’t forget the power of having excellent products!