The ultimate guide to customer engagement

Forging a solid relationship with your customer base is beneficial on its own, but it can also help you find opportunities, improve your processes, and boost your bottom line. Here are a few ways customer engagement is central to your business’s growth:

Creating feedback loops

One of the primary benefits of customer engagement is that it provides you with constant feedback. Whether positive or negative, honest feedback from your customers is essential to driving future success. While you may receive sporadic feedback from customers even without actively improving your customer engagement, an engaged customer base is more likely to provide you with consistent insights.

After all, engaged customers trust your brand to hear and respond to their opinions, making them more willing to share their thoughts. To validate this trust, you can take the feedback you receive from these customers and turn it into actionable change.

Driving customer loyalty

Customers who see their feedback implemented are likely to grow more loyal and advocate for your brand in the future. Not only does this make customers feel seen and heard, but it also creates a sense of exclusivity — like they are part of a small group whose opinions your brand takes to heart. These customers tend to

• Become close to your brand
• Have a lower potential for churn
• Have better odds of a repeat purchase
• Advocate for your brand to other potential customers

Loyal customers are also more likely to convert on higher-value sales, as they will be more open to upselling or cross-selling opportunities. What’s more, keeping your customers consistently engaged long term also establishes them as a reliable, continuous stream of income, which can bolster your business against economic variability.

Boosting sales and conversions

Customer engagement can help improve your overall sales strategy and performance. As customers interact with your brand, you can collect precious data from them about their buying habits, product preferences, and more. Analyzing this data can help you better understand what your customers and target audience need and want.

These insights enable your sales and marketing teams to create data-driven strategies and campaigns to inform decisions about future products and services. Additionally, identifying exactly what your customers are looking for can help you increase sales, convert more customers overall, and pinpoint upsell opportunities.

Increasing awareness

An engaged customer who is loyal to your brand is also more likely to become a brand evangelist. Brand evangelists are customers who speak highly of your brand to potential new customers. These evangelists often bring in word-of-mouth referrals — a free and easy customer acquisition method. Not only do word-of-mouth referrals offer an easy way to increase your overall customer base, they also

• Drive down customer acquisition costs
• Reduce overall marketing costs
• Improve customer retention and lifetime value

Keeping these loyal customers happy and engaging with the new customers they bring in can increase your overall brand awareness and improve your brand reputation. Shoppers often look to their peers for social proof of your brand’s value. By fostering strong relationships with loyal customers, you gain advocates for your brand and boost your public image in the eyes of potential new ones.

Building your brand identity

Effective customer engagement can also become a defining quality of your brand’s identity. Customers seeking a deeper connection with their retail partners are likely to consider how effectively your brand engages with others. By prioritizing customer engagement, you can build an image as a brand that cares about its audience — driving trust and setting you apart from your competitors.

Building a strong brand identity requires setting clear brand guidelines. To develop those guidelines, it’s crucial to research the following:

• What do your customers identify with most in a potential retail partner?
• What other brands are succeeding in your space and why?
• How does your brand identity align with internal company values?
• How does your brand identity align with social trends and customer values?

While this may seem like a lot of work, a properly crafted brand identity will generate valuable engagement that can drive long-term revenue.

Developing an intentional customer engagement strategy comes with many perks, but you can’t reap the full benefits of one until you consider where you currently stand. Read on to learn about key metrics that help measure your current engagement and how to improve engagement moving forward.

Before building or updating your customer engagement strategy, identify the areas in which you can most improve first. That means figuring out which key customer engagement metrics will offer the most insight into your current performance. Although the exact metrics may vary, there are a few core indicators that apply to most organizations.

Customer loyalty

Loyal customers are typically those most closely engaged with your brand. Identifying the general level of loyalty among your customers can help you understand how effectively you interact with them (and how you can improve). 

To measure loyalty, consider using a Net Promoter Score survey. Some survey software platforms, like Jotform, offer a Net Promoter Score template you can use to easily collect information about how likely customers are to recommend your brand or purchase from you again.

A Net Promoter Score survey is just one way to measure customer loyalty. You can also look at sales data to identify repeat customers and compare that data to your customer base as a whole over a period of time. If you currently have a customer loyalty program, you can also monitor how many members you have and how actively they are engaging with your brand.

Churn rate

Part of the reason customer engagement is so important is because of its impact on customer retention over time. Churn rate shows how effectively you’re currently retaining customers by measuring how many you’ve lost over a set time period. Measuring your churn rate can help you set goals for your customer engagement strategy.

Engagement is often directly linked to churn rate, as customers who do not feel engaged are less likely to give you repeat business over time. While acquiring new customers is great, it’s even better when they remain your customers beyond a single transaction. Implementing an effective customer engagement strategy can help with that over time.

To further enhance the value of this metric, you can also collect direct feedback from customers who churn. This feedback allows you to identify specific issues in your current engagement process to resolve in your new strategy.

Number of subscribers

A common customer engagement tool among businesses is a subscription-based newsletter. If you use a subscription-based tactic to interact with customers, monitoring some core data points can be an effective way to measure your current engagement efforts. These can include

• Your average monthly subscribers
• New subscribers over a period of time
• Lost subscribers over a period of time

You can also set up an automated subscription cancellation survey to collect feedback each time a subscriber disengages from your brand. This kind of feedback could help you adjust your methods moving forward to avoid future churn.

To take this metric a step further, consider investing in tools such as heat or click maps for your newsletters. These resources help identify the content that resonates with your audience, encouraging engagement. They also highlight the content that does not.

Positive reviews

People enjoy sharing their positive experiences with brands. When shoppers post positive reviews online, they serve as testimonials and social proof to potential customers who are on the fence about your brand.

Both the content and number of these reviews can help measure the quality of your engagement efforts. Lots of reviews could mean you are engaging with a larger percentage of your audience; few reviews could indicate an absence of effective engagement altogether.

If you are interacting with your customers effectively, you’ll probably see more positive feedback online, as highly engaged customers are more likely to leave positive reviews. Tracking the number of positive reviews you receive can help you keep a pulse on customer engagement and identify brand evangelists.

Social engagement

Most customers engage with the brands they enjoy on social media. In fact, 90 percent of social media users follow at least one brand. This trend of online social interaction with brands creates an opportunity to reach your customers where they are most often. 

Social media metrics, such as clicks, likes, and comments, are all tangible ways to measure customer engagement with your brand. By learning how to collect customer feedback using social media, you can tap into a diverse and accessible fountain of knowledge for improving your brand, engagement, and services.

What’s more, the visibility of social media metrics can also help you compare your engagement efforts to those of your competitors. By looking at follower count, post likes, shares, comments, and other statistics, you can see how your engagement stacks up against other brands online.

Dwell time

When customers search for your brand online, you want them to land on your website and remain engaged. Dwell time measures how long a user remains on your website after navigating from a search results page.

This metric offers insight into the quality and relevance of your onsite content, as well as how effectively your site engages with visitors. If your website isn’t meeting customer expectations, it will likely have a low dwell time, which translates to a low engagement rate.

For an even better understanding of how engaging your current website is to potential customers, you can monitor other website metrics closely tied to engagement, like

• Average session duration
• Pages per session
• Scroll depth

These data points will help determine how actively interested your average customer is in your online content. You could also track exit pages to identify underperforming landing pages on your site that could be cutting your customer journey short.

With the help of these metrics to measure your successes, identify potential issues, and compare your results with brands that are customer engagement champions, you can build a solid base for your own customer engagement strategy. Once you have a clear picture of your current situation, you can start to build your strategy for the future.

Just as there is no singular measure of customer engagement success, there is also no universal way to drive engagement. Nonetheless, there are several tactics your brand can implement to level up how you connect with your target audience.

Build a brand voice

Customers are less likely to interact with a brand that lacks a distinct personality. By establishing a clear, engaging brand voice, you offer your customers something tangible to connect with. Think of it as creating a human being to represent your brand. Customers are much more likely to connect with another individual than with a faceless organization.

Creating a distinct and engaging brand voice also allows you to differentiate yourself from competitors who may offer similar products but lack a recognizable identity. As customers become more engaged with your brand voice, they are more likely to remember you over others when it comes time to make a purchase.

Personalize customer experiences

Your customers are looking for a brand that understands their wants and needs — perhaps even better than they do. Collecting customer data allows you to do just that and offer a highly personalized customer experience as a result. Digital solutions like chatbots and customer relationship management (CRM) tools can help you analyze customer buying behavior and search history to generate custom product recommendations.

Offering an easy pathway toward products that will likely interest your customers helps them feel seen and more likely to engage and convert as a result. And if you don’t have access to digital tools that can collect this data, there are ways to track your customer journey manually instead.

One tactic is to share a client questionnaire or survey with customers during the customer registration process. Using these helpful insights into your customers’ preferences, you can build a comprehensive customer interest profile to guide future marketing and product recommendations. Learning how to identify customer needs will open up a wide variety of opportunities to engage with your customers and offer them value during your brand interactions.

Create targeted content

Once you’ve pinpointed what your customers need, the next step is to show them how you can meet those needs. Collaborating with your marketing team to create targeted content for specific customer profiles allows you to create opportunities for significant customer engagement.

Part of this process involves categorizing customers into different personas. These personas will share typical desires that you can use as a guide for the content being targeted toward them. Carefully crafted personas will help you maximize the benefits of any targeted content.

Targeted content that’s relevant to your customers’ needs will keep your brand top of mind when they are deciding where to spend their hard-earned money next, increasing the likelihood that they’ll engage.

Communicate regularly

Just like any relationship, maintaining engagement requires consistent communication. Your customers won’t feel a connection with your brand if they only receive sporadic promotional emails or sales notifications. One of the core methods of improving communication with customers is to increase the frequency with which you use your customer communication tools.

Consider creating a regular deliverable that keeps customers informed and interacting with your brand, such as a newsletter or survey. These recurring assets will keep your brand on your customers’ radar and allow you to collect valuable feedback for future improvements.

Host community engagement events

Providing in-person or virtual opportunities to connect directly with your brand, as well as other brand evangelists, can help to strengthen your customer engagement. A customer engagement event allows you to build strong relationships with your customers through in-depth conversations, Q&A sessions, and more.

To increase the reach of these events, try hosting them digitally. Events like webinars or online conferences present the opportunity to reach customers worldwide while reducing organizational costs, helping to maximize the value of your efforts.

Create a customer loyalty program

Increase your customer engagement by incentivizing your customers with a customer loyalty program. Customer loyalty programs are an easy way to collect valuable customer data while offering shoppers benefits for their continued engagement, such as

• Promotions
• Free items
• Discounts
• Birthday offers
• Exclusive sales

Part of learning how to create a customer loyalty program is understanding what your shoppers value. While it’s true that almost everyone enjoys receiving gifts and special offers, these perks are worth more to your customers than just their financial equivalence. When it comes to perks for loyal customers, it really is the thought that counts. When your customers receive promotions or exclusive deals on products or services that relate to them and their needs, they’re more likely to feel connected to your brand and engage with it.

Increase social media activity

A vast majority of customers are highly engaged on social media. Even if your brand has a large number of followers, you may be missing out on valuable engagement opportunities if you aren’t interacting with them the way they do with you.

While creating an account and sharing content can be a good starting point for your social media strategy, your brand needs to invest time in actively engaging with customers on each platform. The more active you are on social media, the more opportunities you will have to engage with your followers.

One of the best ways to facilitate social engagement is through interactive promotional content like

• Giveaways
• Events
• Raffles
• Contests

Such promotions create an easy way for your followers to interact with your posts and for you to offer engagement in return (without having to respond to each individual follower or comment you receive).

For example, if your brand is about to release a new product, consider setting up a giveaway for your followers to receive one for free. By offering entries into the giveaway through commenting, liking, and tagging friends, you can both engage your current followers and subscribers and gain visibility with potential new customers.

You can also use giveaway forms where your followers can sign up to win. These forms quickly collect customer information that can be used later for marketing or sales purposes.

Customer engagement tactics like the ones we’ve described here can help elevate your current engagement efforts and create new opportunities to connect with your shoppers — especially if you bolster your tech stack with the right digital tools to maximize them.

Although there are a variety of ways to increase engagement with your brand, many of these strategies share one thing in common: They require digital solutions. One of the core solutions to consider investing in is customer engagement management software.

Customer engagement management software provides you with the tools to track, analyze, and improve your customer engagement process. With a centralized, collaborative workspace, your team can better work together to elevate how you interact with your customers and forge long-term customer relationships.

But which solution should you choose? There are so many customer engagement tools on the market today, it can be difficult to know which is the right one for you. While your final choice will ultimately depend on your exact needs and budget, here are a few of the top contenders:

• Salesforce: Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM systems in the world. Offering a breadth of features that can empower your entire team to drive better engagement, it includes customer service management and sales engagement tools.
• Outreach: Focused more narrowly on sales, Outreach is a digital sales execution platform with features that drive customer retention and expansion. This platform can help manage engagement across each phase of your sales funnel to ensure customers are well taken care of, no matter where they are in the decision-making process.
• HubSpot: Built around a comprehensive customer platform, HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM solution. This platform does offer a limited free version of its full software. However, similar to Salesforce, HubSpot also provides use-specific versions of its platform centered around marketing, sales, service, and more.
• Zoho CRM: Part of the Zoho suite of products, Zoho CRM is a customer-centric sales solution offering tools designed to connect with customers and monitor engagement. Zoho’s platform provides a wide range of features with an emphasis on data security.
• NetSuite CRM: Powered by Oracle, NetSuite CRM acts as a centralized knowledge hub for your customer engagement data. This solution provides a unified view of your customer interactions, enabling you to monitor results and adjust your approach accordingly to enhance engagement.
• Intercom: Intercom is an AI-driven solution centered around empowering your customer service team. With features like the Fin AI Agent and agent enablement tools, Intercom helps you improve your customer engagement through effective service.
• Twilio: The Twilio platform is designed as a toolbox for facilitating customer engagement. Specifically, Twilio offers a wide range of communication tools, from email and SMS to voice and video calling.
• SurveyMonkey: Specializing in surveys and forms, SurveyMonkey allows your team to gather feedback from customers easily. Using their advanced interface, you can collect and analyze customer feedback to produce actionable insights.

It’s important to compare these solutions based on factors like features, pricing, top capabilities, and user reviews to find the right one for you. Consider seeking out guides that provide direct comparisons for products, like Outreach vs Salesforce, Outreach vs HubSpot, or HubSpot vs Zoho. You can also look into resources that offer options similar to these top products, such as blogs listing top HubSpot alternatives or Outreach alternatives.

To truly improve your customer engagement, you need a partner that can offer the most capabilities for your budget. This means partnering with a solution provider that offers a wide range of features to handle multiple aspects of your customer engagement process. That’s where solutions like Jotform truly shine.

With its powerful, easy-to-make online forms, Jotform can help your brand boost user engagement across the customer journey. For example, during your initial analysis phase, feedback forms like a customer engagement survey can help you gauge the effectiveness of your current efforts.

You can also use feedback forms as a way to increase your engagement with loyal customers. Jotform surveys can collect valuable information on how your customer base is receiving your products, services, loyalty programs, and more, and they can be sent via email, embedded on your website, or even shared using social media. After collecting your results, your brand can then use this information to make recommended improvements and drive loyalty within your customer base.

Jotform can assist in the hosting and organization of virtual events. There are more than 70 virtual event templates available to help you collect information for tasks like registration. You also have access to satisfaction survey templates for after your event. Using these forms, you can facilitate a smooth and successful event, as well as gather information on how to make your next one even better.

Jotform makes form creation easy with its drag-and-drop Form Builder tool, allowing you to customize each form to fit your needs. And if you’re looking to save even more time, you can also choose one of over 10,000 form templates and personalize it to meet your exact specifications.

But forms aren’t the only capability in the Jotform product suite that can help with customer engagement. There are a variety of other features that can maximize your strategy too. Here are other ways Jotform solutions can help:

• Collect responses and customer data automatically with Jotform Tables
• Build a feedback app using Jotform Apps
• Create a sales engagement workflow with Jotform Workflows
• Engage with users on your website using Jotform AI Agents

Each of these tools is available for free through the Jotform platform, or you can choose to upgrade to a paid plan for more advanced capabilities. With its wide range of features and user-friendly interface, Jotform is an easy way to take your customer engagement to the next level.

Establishing long-term relationships with your customers through effective customer engagement is a surefire way to drive revenue, loyalty, and awareness. Elevate your approach to customer engagement today using the right tools, and create an effective strategy that will produce the results you need to stay ahead of the competition.