12 Customer Engagement Strategies to Boost Retention

Retaining customers is key to any business's success. One of the most important aspects of customer retention is consistent engagement, which is best achieved through customer engagement strategies.

But how do you properly engage your customers so they constantly come back? Are there strategies or products that can make this easier?

Follow along to learn about 12 customer engagement strategies to boost retention. 

What Are Customer Engagement Strategies and Their Benefits?

Before we can understand the strategies to cultivate and increase customer engagement, let's define it. Customer engagement is the relationship and interaction between a customer or potential customer and a business.

This communication and interaction can occur on many platforms, including email, text, social media, mail, and in person.

A customer engagement strategy is a plan businesses use to increase engagement across platforms. It goes beyond the initial purchase.

Businesses benefit highly from customer engagement strategies. The more customers engage with a company, the more likely they are to consider it for a product or service in the future. A few key benefits of improved customer engagement are customer loyalty, increased customer retention, and a strong brand reputation.

12 Customer Engagement Strategies to Boost Retention

Now that we've defined engagement strategies and their benefits, let's get more specific. Here are 12 customer engagement strategies you can use to boost retention.

Focus on Personalization

Personalization is everything when it comes to customer engagement. No one wants to feel like just another number to a company.

Doing something as small as personalizing a welcome email or chat with a customer's name can go a long way.

According to research results from Salesforce, 59% of consumers believe tailored engagement based on past purchases/interactions can win their business.

Apart from using a customer's name, targeted emails and marketing promos are appreciated by previous customers. This interaction reminds them of your company and its importance in their lives.

Customers are more likely to come back to your product again and again with personalized care and messages.

Personalization doesn't just refer to small changes like including your customer's name or birthday in emails/texts, but also customizable settings in community platforms.

If you use a community platform, your customers can customize their profiles, including changing their names and photos.

Respond Quickly and Consistently

Personalization is only a small part of engaging your customers. Another way to successfully boost engagement is by building trust. But how do you do this?

A great way to build trust is by successfully responding to questions and inquiries quickly. No one wants to sit around and wait days or weeks for a response. At the end of the day, time is money.

If your customer service skills are excellent, you're more likely to attract repeat customers. According to a study, 83% of customers are more likely to buy a product or service again if a company solves their complaints.

To do this, you'll need to connect with customers in a variety of ways - not just the traditional customer support phone number. By providing email, social media accounts, and community channels, clients can reach out quicker than before - and you can respond just as fast.

Foster Community Through Questions and Interactive Polls

What better way to engage with others than to pose questions? In order to gather customer feedback and also engage with your audience, it's best to create and push questions and interactive polls.

The method is up to you. You can send out polls and questionnaires through email marketing or a community platform. The questions can be simple conversation-starters or something more related to the product/lesson.

While there is nothing wrong with pushing these polls in emails, customers don't have the chance to interact with each other. In a community platform like Swarm, clients can interact with each other in chat rooms or hubs.

Analyze Data To Make Meaningful Changes

How can you boost customer retention while also gaining new customers if you don't gather and review data?

One of the best customer engagement strategies to try is to review customer data using data analytics. Whatever data analytics you have at your fingertips, you should review it at least monthly to understand what is working and what isn't.

Lean into what works best for your company and make changes to what doesn't.

Offer an Enticing Referral Program

Customers are more likely to come back and purchase products and resources when there are perks - like referrals. Offering a referral program doesn't just keep clients coming back but also introduces you to prospective customers.

Word of mouth goes a long way, especially when it comes from an already happy customer.

Referrals are very successful for B2B businesses. According to a survey, customer referrals are one of the most effective marketing tactics. Right behind referrals are personalized messages.

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Reinforce Loyalty With Loyalty Programs and Discounts

Clients want to know they are important to a company. While referral programs keep them coming back, it isn't the only method you can use to boost engagement for customer retention.

Another way to keep clients and repeat customers coming back to your product or service is by providing customer loyalty programs and discounts.

Everyone does this differently. You can offer package deals for repeat customers, including a free or discounted product.

If you use a community platform, you can create spaces for VIP customers and offer incentives and extra goodies for participating and buying. Exclusivity drives interest.

Collect Customer Feedback

This customer engagement strategy is a little different than reviewing data analytics provided through a portal or site. Instead of relying just on data reported from community platforms and social media websites, you can collect data yourself through forms and questionnaires.

Questionnaires and forms may not be the most interactive or engaging, but what you do with the results can be. Customers want to be heard, so if they see that you value their thoughts and opinions on your service and see changes based on their input, they'll be more inclined to come back.

Video testimonials, in particular, elicit a better response from customers because they can put a face to each review, and it seems far more genuine.

According to recent data, 72% of customers trust a brand more with positive video testimonials, and 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product or service online after they watch a video testimonial showcasing it.

Using a platform like Storyprompt can help your brand collect video testimonial responses from customers through a simple process that involves sharing a link and then using the same platform to publish the testimonials, all while keeping the necessary steps under one roof.

Offer Seamless Omnichannel Support

According to Passive Secrets, companies with weak omnichannel support only retain about 33% of their customers.

What is omnichannel support? Omnichannel support is a customer service strategy that effortlessly integrates multiple channels to better a customer's experience.

This includes connecting your company's website, social media accounts, physical store, and more without losing a customer's data. To boost customer retention, omnichannel support is crucial.

Build a Social Media Presence

Social media is not going away anytime soon; in fact, it's only going to continue to grow in importance. Most people find out about services and products while browsing through social media.

While word of mouth is still important, it doesn't have nearly as much of a reach as social media does.

Social media marketing allows you to connect with a global reach, which is perfect if you are running a mostly online company. For instance, if you offer coaching sessions and courses, you can advertise these to anyone. You aren't restricted to local marketing.

Not everyone who follows your social media account will be a customer immediately, but it's still important to grow your account. Sometimes, prospective customers are just curious or waiting on posted deals.

For instance, about 46% of consumers follow brands on social media to have access to exclusive deals or promotions. Meaning you have a target audience to advertise to. They may eventually become your next clients.

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Push Quality Over Quantity

As tempting as it is to want to push out as much content as possible, remember - quality is always better than quantity.

Consumers notice when social media posts and videos are rushed for quantity. While you may garner more attention initially with the large number of courses and content, this is often short-lived.

Really, customers want quality products and services to keep them coming back. It's also important for these quality products/services to have something unique that sets them up to stand against others.

Create Valuable Education Resources

This customer engagement strategy is related to the previous one. To boost engagement and customer retention, you'll need to produce content that is not only quality but also educational.

Of course, this depends on your niche/product. However, if you are an online coach or teacher, it's important to produce valuable educational resources.

To entice more people, you can offer a few snippets or tips and tricks for free.

The educational content not only sets you apart from other creators/businesses but also provides credibility. A customer is more likely to trust you if you have quality, educational resources as opposed to content or products that are basic or cookie cutter.

Use Community Platforms

Lastly, consider utilizing customer engagement tools, such as community platforms, to enhance customer satisfaction.

Community platforms don't get talked about enough. They are interactive and engaging platforms with multiple uses. Within these platforms, creators can design multiple spaces and post their courses.

A platform like Swarm enables you to provide educational resources to clients asynchronously, allowing them convenient 24/7 access to the content. 

Asynchronous learning is an excellent way to interact with clients at any time, making it ideal for those with busy schedules. Platforms like Swarm tap into that by allowing community members to respond using video as well, which highlights the use of two-way asynchronous video coaching.

It also helps increase the trust factor within communities as well. When creating an online community, people often find it harder to trust the person on the other end, and video communication can help quicken the trust process for a new member.

88% of marketers have said that users understand their product and service better after watching a video– a statistic that helps highlight the significant value of video communication over conventional messages.

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Creating polls, hosting live video experiences, providing automatic transcriptions for recorded videos, and offering a monetization method for memberships enables businesses to utilize the platform to expand their community while also creating a second income source. 

Within community spaces, community members can interact with each other and the creator. They can ask questions, discuss courses and lessons, and build meaningful connections. It’s one of the reasons community members don’t want to leave, leading to higher retention rates. 

Community platforms can boost your business to the next level by monetizing your community. You can offer monthly and annual memberships, unlocking classes, courses, forums, and more to new members.

Typically, these platforms also integrate with other customer engagement tools, such as social media management websites. They also connect with shop platforms like Shopify.

For example, members at Swarm take advantage of the Zapier integration included in that subscription model.

Zapier can then be used to create ‘zaps’ that enable tasks such as directly connecting new members of your space to your CRM, for example. 

Apart from boosting retention by offering valuable services with ease, community platforms prioritize something many people want more of - community. The community aspect of online platforms brings people together and encourages them to return.

Wrapping it up

Overall, customer engagement is crucial to customer retention. Without engagement, it's more challenging to keep customers and clients interested in your product or service.

However, if they are involved with your company, they are more likely to buy your product or service again.

Some of the best ways to do this are by creating an engaging and interactive online community, utilizing social media marketing, personalizing communication, and offering omnichannel support.

The customer engagement strategies can feel endless. Instead of trying to look for multiple customer engagement tools to increase your engagement and new customers, why not choose a one-stop shop for all?

Swarm's video-centric community platform may be the answer to all of your company's needs.

If you aren't sure where to start, contact Swarm for a demo or a free 14-day trial. You can get started in just minutes.