Customer engagement is hailed as a critical part of any business-to-customer relationship. But not everyone explains why the customer engagement process is valuable to your organization.
Growing your business will be impossible if customers aren’t loyal to your brand. The first step to building this relationship is through positive engagement. The better engaged your customers are, the longer you’ll be able to retain their loyalty.
Ready to find out more? Read on for five benefits of customer engagement – and their impact on your bottom line.
1. Improving Customer Experience
Customer engagement is the process of actually engaging customers rather than simply pushing them through the sales funnel. The most immediate impact of doing so is a better customer experience.
Think about what you’d prefer in a real-life shopping situation – a place where you’re ushered towards the till with whichever items you’ve grabbed? Or somewhere that’s engaging, interesting, and relevant to your needs, where interactions aren’t solely focused on making a sale here and now?
We think we already know the answer. That’s why customers from all different demographics prefer an engaging experience, both in-store and online. Right away, that translates to bigger profits, with 86% of buyers saying they’ll pay more for a good customer experience.
2. Building Loyalty
By engaging customers, you gain more than just their money. They feel valued, which in turn leads to better loyalty. Let’s face it, you’re more likely to stick around when it feels like you’re an active participant in a business-to-customer relationship.
That’s bolstered by the positive experience mentioned above. Almost a third (32%) of customers walk away from brands due to bad experience. Instead, you’ll have customers that stick around.
In terms of cost, it’s well documented that acquiring new customers costs well more than retaining your existing base. While the figure varies from four up to 20 times more, one thing’s for certain: you’ll save money by engaging customers and keeping them loyal.
3. Gaining Insight
Okay – this is arguably the biggest customer engagement benefit. It allows you to gain better insights into how your customers feel, think and act – and what they want and need. Why? Customers are happier to give their data to brands they trust. And as we’ve established, engagement breeds trust. It’s that simple.
Digging a little deeper, those insights can be anything from basic demographics like age, location, and earnings to more complex points like preferences and values – not to mention feedback on your own products and services.
So, what’s the knock-on benefit to those insights? They can be used to personalize the experience for specific customers, give you a better understanding of your target audience as a whole, and allow you to improve your offering to customers more broadly.
That first point is certainly important according to our 2022 Consumer Survey Report. 42% of customers said they would be less inclined to shop with a brand if it didn’t deliver tailored communications. At the same time, 65% of respondents said they’d experienced poorly targeted communications, while just 18% reported receiving tailored offers. So, as well as being in demand, there’s a gap in the market for effective, well-targeted communications and offers.
4. Achieving Transparency
Our Consumer Survey Report also revealed the importance of transparency in the modern marketplace. 84% of respondents said they prefer brands to be more open and transparent about what information they collect and, more importantly, how they’re planning to use it.
Capturing data through truly engagement customer experiences provides the means to do exactly that. Why? Because you’re then not reliant on underhand tactics like third-party cookies or coercing users into providing data.
A customer engagement platform, like 3radical’s, uses consented data acquisition mechanics to remain completely honest and transparent throughout the customer journey. The result is data, what we call Earned Data, provided by trusting users in a way that’s clear and mutually beneficial.
5. Long-term Gains
One of the clearest customer engagement benefits is that it’s a long-term strategy as well as providing short-term wins.
While each of the points above are benefits in their own right, they also have spot-on effects which feed back into one another – and supercharge your long-term strategy.
Improving your customer experience improves loyalty, which in turn makes users more likely to provide their data. The insights gained from this data can then be used to further improve the customer experience itself – creating a positive cycle for the business-to-customer relationship.
In a similar sense, transparency isn’t just a one-off benefit. It’s yet another way to build trust amongst your target audience. To continue the cycle, the trust you build has actually been found to improve customer engagement overall.
Customer Engagement Benefits in Action
Still a little unclear on how these benefits manifest in real-world situations? Consider our project with the Casual Dining Group (CDG). We helped them improve customer engagement with a ‘Scratch and Win’ online game, advertised in their Bella Italia restaurants.
First and foremost, it added to the customer experience with a fun, themed game with a chance of winning prizes to redeem in restaurants. The game helped CDG collect data with complete transparency, including names, dates of birth, family information and food preferences. They could also see which prizes customers preferred and how they engaged with the game.
With 6,000 pieces of self-reported data, normally not obtainable by CDG, Bella Italia could better understand its customers, personalize marketing, and customize its offerings to suit its customer base. That means further improving the customer experience to build strong relationships and improve loyalty over time. How’s that for long-term gains?
Reap the Rewards of Customer Engagement
Customer engagement isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a tried-and-tested strategy that delivers clear benefits to businesses in practically any sector. At 3radical, we specialize in creating bespoke customer engagement strategies for ambitious organizations in the US, UK and Singapore.
If you’d like to put it to the test and enjoy all the customer engagement benefits that come with it, we’re ready and waiting. Contact us today to talk about your brand and objectives in more depth and how we can help.