While this may come as no surprise to you, companies without successful customer engagement strategies stand to miss out on lucrative business deals and promising customer/company relationships. So with a statement like that a little well-known fact, why then do companies lose 75 percent of their business because of a lack of customer engagement?
"Marketing campaigns become irrelevant when an organization does not put focused efforts into engaging customers," Jen DeTracey, author of “Lift Strategies: Quick Tips to Engage Customers and Elevate Profits” said in a statement. "As a result, 75 percnet of business opportunities are lost and companies are leaving money on the table."
DeTracey contends that there are three critical areas that small businesses, in particular, need to pay attention to when it comes to customer engagement: conversion, frequency and maintenance. Conversion refers to honing successful marketing strategies and promotions tactics that can help turn prospective customers into loyal brand proponents. With regards to frequency, small- and medium-sized businesses ought to make sure that their many forms of production –from social media to email marketing to advertising – are sent out frequently. Finally, it is imperative that businesses focus on maintaining current customers as it costs up to 15 times as much to get new customers as it does to keep the ones you already have.
With customer engagement being at the forefront of businesses’ minds these days – especially with the competition always a few feet away ready to steal customers – DeTracey is not the only individual stepping forward with suggestions for how to bolster customer engagement. In fact, since its inception, ACCENT Marketing Services – a performance marketing company for brands that are passionate about customer engagement – has tapped its Continuous Engagement Improvement Process, which couples ACCENT’s resources with a data-driven approach to help brands get the most out of their customer relationships. As explained by ACCENT officials, companies ought to go through five steps when trying to reach their customers: listen, learn, connect, influence and optimize. Each stage is centered upon making each customer interaction more intelligent and engaging than the last, regardless of the interaction channel.
For the past few weeks, ACCENT has been sitting down with TMCnet to discuss the five stages in its customer engagement cycle. Most recently, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Searcy shed light on the fourth stage of the cycle – influence.
“Influence happens when your brand can not just meet but anticipate your customer’s needs,” Searcy told TMCnet in a recent podcast. “This can be accomplished by providing information to help them figure out the answers they are looking for, resolving their issues quickly and efficiently, turning a bad experience into a good one or presenting an up-sell or a cross-sell that actually is relevant to them on a timely manner and that helps them further entrench with their brand.”
“The goal of influencing customers is to strengthen their level of involvement and intimacy with the brand and we want to do that across a wide variety of channels,” he added. “Influence has a great deal to do with what that customer’s influence is in the social community – where are they in the blogosphere, how active are they within their own communities and what level of involvement do they have that we want to be able to impact.”
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Edited by Jamie Epstein