Optimize Online Customer Engagement

Establishing the right channel for your business to excel in online customer engagement involves having the right message at the right time for each customer segment. Customers like to engage in different ways. Some prefer social media channels like Facebook while others prefer email. Test your market and determine what will work best for your customers. Check out these suggestions. They’ve been known to work very well.

1. Become the authority figure for your products/services in your business. Bring your expertise out in the open so that your customers can clearly see you are the expert. Offer free advice through your website, social media, or another company’s website. In today’s market the only way you can establish that you are an authority figure is to offer something of value to your customers. This type of engagement increases your authority while interaction with no value will lower your authority image.
2. Supporting a customer community is a good way to establish a group of buyers but the best way for to you actually engage your customers online is have open channels that flow back to your business. Provide access to product designers, your shipping managers, your production team, etc. all of which can offer insight into the how and why of the way things work. This is generally deeply engaging to your customers. You can even provide a ‘how we get things done video’ that walks customers through the steps. This type of engagement increases customer loyalty.
3. If you can offer your customers some type of game like experience this can be a real hit! Visitors love to compete and they like to have a unique shopping experience. So create a contest that has a number of different milestones so the customer sticks with it. Offer a draw for something free weekly. There are many different consumer type games and contests that you can offer. Whatever you come up with make sure it fits your customer profile. This is an excellent method to engage your customers. The majority of customers like something that breaks them out of the routine shopping experience and grabs their interest.

There you have it – three excellent methods that you can use to engage your customers online in a more effective manner. Those companies who are successful at engaging their customers excel in their markets. You too can be one of them!