3 Reasons Why Customer Engagement Counts

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption on work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him… He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do it.”

In the days when the above quote was uttered, there was no such thing as the internet, let alone social media. However, the importance of customer service was equally as imperative then as it is now.
Word-of-mouth marketing is indeed an age-old story. Business owners have always known that the second a customer steps back outside the store, they are free to share their experiences – both good and bad.
Today, no matter if you’ve got a physical store, an ecommerce site or both, your customers reside online. They are members of social networking communities that contain millions of users. Any experience shared with these communities, therefore, has massive impact-potential on your future sales – so those experiences need to be good ones.

From Customer Service to Customer Engagement 

And this is where the distinction between customer service and customer engagement comes into play.
Customer service is all about providing due attention at the point of sale, or during the moments when the customer is actively engaging with your business.
Customer engagement, on the other hand, is ongoing. Customer engagement is about fostering all those connections that you have in between customer visits – and social media provides ample opportunity to do so.
Customer engagement requires a business to learn more about each customer beyond the transactions that they make. It means delivering personalised and useful content to your customers in order to extend the engagement time with your brand.
In short, customer engagement means building and nurturing relationships online over time.

3 Reasons Why Customer Engagement Counts 

Customer engagement helps to grow your business. That’s why it counts.

1- Acquiring New Customers Costs More the Retaining Existing Ones  

How much more? Well, according to Invesp, five times more – that’s how much.
What’s more, Marketing Metrics tells us that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%, whilst the probability of selling to a new prospect is just 5-20%.
Engaging your existing customers online, therefore, is vital, for these are the people who have been good enough to give you their business already. Focus on targeting these guys and gals with interesting content in between purchases and they are far more likely to come back for more.

2- They Can Always Go Elsewhere 

Today, no business holds a monopoly. If you aren’t acting on your customers’ expressed needs, then there is a competitor out there who will more than happy to pick up the slack.
Customer engagement means listening to those who do business with you. It means actively seeking out discussions where your brand is mentioned online and addressing as many pain-points your customers are expressing as possible. If this means that you need to add additional services or improve existing ones, then that’s what you’re going to have to do.

3- Bad News Travels Fast 

Negative customer feedback travels a lot faster than positive feedback. As mentioned earlier, word-of-mouth marketing these days takes place primarily online, and so managing and even pre-empting any negative review that you may receive online can make all the difference to how you are viewed by larger swathes of the online community.
The good news, however, is that feedbacklite.com reports that 51% of people who do write a negative review will react positively again towards your brand if you address their issues. The lesson, then, is not to bury your head in the sand. Engage your customers even when they have grievances and your business will benefit.

Want to do more to improve your customer engagement processes? Check out the LeadSeed sales and marketing platform to find out how our automated solutions can help you.  

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How to Reconnect with and Win Back Lost Customers

Losing customers from time to time is, unfortunately, inevitable.  Even with the best will, and perhaps even the best product or service in the world, you are still going to experience some level of churn in your entrepreneurial journey.

However, rather than simply sitting back and accepting that a few of your once-loyal customers have veered from your path, you will be pleased to learn that there are a number of efforts you can make to win them back. Let’s take a look…

How to Reconnect with and Win Back Lost Customers 

Identification 

Your first challenge, of course, is to identify exactly who and where your lost customers are.
This might not be too difficult if you’ve been organised, for you will of course have been keeping a spreadsheet or some other database in which all customer details, both existing and past, are stored for future reference.
If you haven’t got one of those, then not to worry, all is not lost.
Instead, start by digging out your sales records (surely you keep those!). Pore over them, and make a new spreadsheet that contains a list of any customers who have gone quiet for a while. It might be a bit of a manual task that consumes a few hours of your time, but it’s nonetheless a necessary one, for you will be left with a list of prime targets for your reconnection campaign.
With this list in hand, you can now head onto your social networks and locate your targets.
Before you reach out, however, the next step is to conduct some self-analysis.

Find Out Why They left 

No one will simply give up on you without reason – so find out what the reason is.
Is your pricing too high? Your service out of date? Does one of your competitors offer a better solution than you?
The key here is to be honest with yourself. Conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis to try and assess exactly why your service or product is no longer perceived to have the best value to your lost customers.
The trick is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. It can be hard to be objective in this sense – and if it’s too difficult, then assign the task to someone else, or indeed take a closer look at any complaints that you have received to try and unearth your most likely weaknesses there.

Get Back in Touch 

The next phase is to reach out to your lost customers. With your SWOT analysis completed objectively, you will have a pretty good idea as to how they might be feeling, but you won’t ever be entirely sure until you actually ask them.
You can do this through social media, or it may be more appropriate to send a personalized email. In your message, you should ask the lost customer if they wouldn’t mind jumping on a quick call – for which you may even reward them with some sort of coupon or voucher – to talk through exactly what it was they were no longer happy with.
You might think that your hit rate for these types of calls would be pretty low, but you will actually be surprised at how well a customer loyalty initiative such as this will be received. And an added benefit of doing this, of course, is that even if you don’t manage to win them back, you will at least leave them with a better feeling about your business and your attention to customer service, which will not harm your reputation one bit.

Make Them a Great Offer 

In the B2C realm, great offers are pretty easy to come up with. Discounts and coupons are very simple to organize and distribute, and you will have no problem coming up with something very attractive that will be hard for your customers to refuse.
In the B2B space, however, you’re going to have to be a little more creative. Discounts, of course, will still speak very loudly, but perhaps you could offer something along the lines of a free assessment of their business’s situation and needs. A free report or white paper that shares invaluable insights about their industry might also be well received, and can be particularly effective if it explains in no uncertain terms exactly how your service will continue to benefit their business.

Introduce a Loyalty Program 

One of the best ways, of course, to not have to go through the trouble of trying to reconnect with and win back old customers is to not lose them in the first place, and introducing a loyalty program to your business model is one sure fire way to cut down on your customer churn rate.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop you extending the benefits of your loyalty program to those lost customers you’re trying to reconnect with, and indeed this may well be just the offer that they’re looking for to come back to you.
You can launch your loyalty program through an email campaign, through your website, your social networks, or any combination of the above. However you do it, you will at the very least be encouraging your existing customers to re-engage with your content. But, furthermore, you will also be encouraging those that have left you to at least pay you a revisit, take a look around to see what you have to offer and explore the benefits and rewards of doing business with you once more. And if you create the right package, this could be a really attractive opportunity for them indeed.

Want to do more to nurture your business relationships? Check out the LeadSeed sales and marketing platform to find out how our solution can help you. And please use our Contact Page to reach out. 

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Lock out the competition

The statistics on how much more it costs to find a customer than to keep one vary wildly – anywhere between 3 and 10 times as much – but pretty much everyone is agreed that customer retention is the cheaper deal.
If we also consider that it’s likely that 20% of your customers bring you 80% of your revenue it’s clear that the smart money should be invested in protecting what’s yours already before you invest in looking for new customers.
So, it pays to protect at least the top 20% by being proactive.  You’re likely to have your most experienced Account Managers allocated to these few precious customers – the most basic form of insurance against your customer wandering towards the competition. Your Account Manager should know the answers to two questions as a minimum:

From here it will be clear “what do we need to do to keep this customer happy?”. Only by knowing that you’ve got a good grip of the answers can you be confident of locking out the competition. (Or, in the very worst case, you will at least be clear that there is nothing your organization can do to retain the customer, because what you provide does not match what they need.)

Disruption in buying behavior

In a market place with increasingly fickle customers, “disruptive start-ups” are all over the place, challenging the status quo and doing things differently.  They’re taking advantage of the fact that the way we buy is also different these days.  The reliable Account Manager that we’ve been buying from for years isn’t our sole source of information anymore.
Google/Millward Brown Digital’s, B2B Path to Purchase Study, 2014 found that 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search online.  70% of B2B buyers and researchers are watching videos throughout their path to purchase.  Nearly half are watching 30 minutes or more of B2B-related videos during the research process and the research shows that video is helping to encourage prospects to investigate and engage further. If the answers are online, the incumbent supplier should now beware.  Just because the customer isn’t asking you the questions, doesn’t mean they’re not asking them.

Joined up sales & marketing

Better sales engagement can prevent a newcomer from sweeping into your customer and taking business from right under your nose.  This is where marketing and sales need to work effectively together.
Your website and online communications should to reflect the content of the conversation you expect your Account Manager to be having.  By using clever marketing software, you can map your customer’s digital engagement against their in-person engagement to create a single picture of what’s piquing their interest.
To have this additional perspective can pay dividends in forewarning sales about customer priorities and interests. Of course, having the intelligence is only a benefit if you apply it by acting on it.  The worst way to lose a customer is to not ask the right questions and to not have taken the opportunity to position your solution when you had the chance.