Customer engagement is crucial for startups because it initiates interaction between the customers and the business.

Strong customer engagement helps to build relationships with your client base,  improves audience reach, leads to better conversion, cultivates loyalty, and results in improved quality of product or services.

With an effective customer engagement strategy, you can encourage customers to spend 23% more..

Moreover, around 80% of customers agree that experiences provided by a brand are as significant as its products or services.

Here are the five best customer engagement strategies that startups should follow:

1-  Practice Social Media Storytelling

The key to engage the audience with the business lies in building the user interest towards the products or services, which is achievable through storytelling on social media. 

Storytelling helps to develop curiosity that encourages people to start searching for your business on the web.

Curiosity leads to customer actions and begins an inflow of leads, branded searches, brand hashtag engagement, and direct website traffic which are vital for initial customer reach.

You can share a story of your business or the customers. To begin with, you can tell your own story, such as how the company started, the initial challenges you faced, what inspired you to never stop dreaming, etc.

Here are few tips to prepare great social media story that generates engagement:

• Present fresh or valuable information with a creative touch.
• Create posts that initiate emotional responses, such as inspiration, happiness, laughter, or sadness.
• Narrate some lessons for audiences to learn.

Personalized emails convey a strong message – you care about your customers. When you send emails to your subscribers with their names on them, it makes a great difference. Here are some points to check:

Create personalized emails for special occasions, such as birthdays and anniversaries with special offers or discounts on the specific days.

This way the recipient realizes that the mail is created especially for them and is not a random one from the bulk emails sent to everyone. Hence, they would care to respond and engage with your brand.

Go For Email Signature Marketing

The next thing you need to focus upon is your customer’s quick response, which you can achieve through email signature marketing.

Email signature is like a business card with professional information like your name, job title, contact details, and company information that is included in the email. The difference is that they have a CTA that directs to your site or landing page.

Hence by using email signature in your email, you give quick access to your contact details to any recipient who finds the offer interesting.

However, there are other solid reasons why a business owner should use email signature:

• Your email will look more professional.
• You will personalise your email.
• You can provide social proof for customer’s quick reference.
• You will experience an improved response rate.
• You will drive more traffic to your site.
• You will increase brand awareness.

3- Run Frequent Contests

Contests have a conversion rate of almost 34%, which is higher than any other content types. This is because contests are very powerful to grab the audience's attention and engage them in the activity. Business owners and marketing professionals launch contests from time to time, aiming both customer engagement and conversion.

For startups, this is a good idea to capture audience interest and expand their engaged audience count.

Note that that contest should be appealing to prospective buyers and not just any random audience. Hence, create contests keeping your target audience in mind.

Here are a few tips to create contests:

• One of the popular contest ideas is a photo contest that mostly receives amazing responses. You can ask your followers to post their picture along with your product and specify a hashtag linking your brand. If you could notice, the theme of the contest is clearly relevant to the services the company offers. Since Southall Travel is a tour and travel company, it is asking for holiday pictures only with hashtags for the contest. Also, the post is specifying the winning prize.
• You can also conduct a video contest. Nearly, 89% of industries are using video contests for their products and services promotion.
• Another trusted way of maximum engagement is to the quiz contest. For a startup, the strategy will help in promoting your business and gathering valuable feedback. For the quiz, you simply have to compile a few questions relevant to your industry. It is easier to make it effective as long as you keep it short and include interesting questions.

Make sure you offer great rewards to the winners. Bigger rewards will generate more interest among the customers.

4- Respond To All New Interaction

When you are aiming at high customer engagement, it is never one way. As a startup, you should consider responding to people who are engaging with your business through different means.

As a beginner in the industry, do not be selective. Reply to every response you receive through email or comments via social media posts or campaigns. When you reply to social comments you actually encourage others too to get into the conversation and engage them with your business.

It also includes reviews on other sites, whether it is good or bad. For many, responding to reviews is a subject to discussion. But, it can incredibly benefit a new business in a number of ways, as much as in other forms of interactions.

Firstly, you succeed in engaging them with your business. Secondly, it will highlight the areas of improvement and thirdly it would help in building a strong brand image that people will remember.

On different notes, it is also a good customer relationship management practice, as you can understand their expectations, flaws in your product or services, and determine the solutions for quality improvements. 

Ultimately you will strengthen your bond with your customer and increase the chance to encourage repeat purchase.

5- Send Quick Survey Forms 

A survey form is a quicker way of engaging customers with your business. They are effortless and least time consuming and for this reason people readily agree to fill up the forms. Hence, a survey form is preferred by both new and existing businesses to communicate with their customers. 

Besides, there are some other compelling benefits of survey forms that would tell why you must consider them as a beginner in the business. For example:

?You can benchmark customer experience metrics

?Helps understand customer demographics

• Improve your support or sales services
• Receive feedback on your services or products

?Measure and improve customer satisfaction for retention

?Test branding decisions

?Find customer’s interest in products you can introduce

Survey forms are one of the excellent ways of engaging customers with the business, if it is done right.

Summary

Building a brand value takes time. Startups that are yet to establish themselves in the market, have customer engagement as an effective and quicker way to build brand value. It is a key to develop great customer service and excellent products/services that lead to happier customers.

For a startup, it might look tough to build a brand through customer engagement, but it wouldn’t be as long as you follow the above strategies dedicatedly and be consistent in employing the marketing ideas.