Business is best conducted within the bounds of a relationship. Establishing and nurturing a relationship between sales reps and customers is key. By meeting your customers where they are and engaging them, you are better poised to sell and sell again. Customer engagement is not a trend. It’s a necessity. Engagement has become an influential factor for businesses when strategizing and planning best practices.
Creating a customer engagement strategy should not be taken lightly. Brands must examine why engagement is important, define engagement goals, and measure how their engagement strategies help accomplish the outlined goals. Otherwise, brands can lose sight of processes and, ultimately, the reasons why customer engagement is so important.
So why is customer engagement important?
Before you can formulate solid customer engagement strategies, you need to consider why customer engagement is essential to your sales engagement process.
Here are 4 reasons why customer engagement is important for your business:
- Engagement influences purchasing.
The fact that engagement influences how people purchase is probably an obvious statement. Because of course, it does! Without an engaged audience, who do you have to sell to? While this might seem like a basic element of sales, it’s also blatantly important to keep in mind when considering engagement strategies. Customer engagement plans, whether well done or poorly done, majorly impact your bottom line. For better or for worse.
It’s important to consider buying habits. There is great potential for prospective clients to visit your site with no intention of shelling out money. But if you have creative, engaging content available to them, they could be more inclined to consider purchasing. For a lot of B2B companies, creating engaging content is a cornerstone of a solid business plan.
- Engagement increases brand loyalty.
If engagement truly does influence purchases, then it stands to reason that engagement would greatly increase brand loyalty. Think about the brands that you love. Do they consistently produce personalized content that caters to your specific interests, values, and product needs? Apple has been doing this for years. With top-notch marketing, a good product, and creative, emotional storytelling, they are able to assure that their audience sticks around.
The thing about brand loyalty is that it can’t be bought. If there are other products like yours on the market, it’s HUGE if people are loyal to your company. The only sure way to secure the revenue from loyal customers is to find better ways to engage them. This whole relationship is based on how your brand makes them feel and how positive each interaction with your brand is. So making sure that you are giving your audience a reason to want to come back to you is all a part of increasing loyalty. And hey, if you’re lucky, they might just bring some friends with them!
- Engagement increases revenue.
Revenue increases when customers purchase a product that they believe in and want to be a part of. Engagement is such a huge part of this. The more you invest in engagement, the more revenue is produced. You would never bank your business on impulse purchasing, great as it is. The fact is, the more engaged a customer is, the more likely it is that they will make purchases – planned or impulse. Even better, the more engaged a customer, the more they will spend.
- Engagement opens a line of conversation and builds relationships.
At the end of the day, we implement engagement strategies to open a dialogue with our audience. It’s all well and good to talk with and provide information to your audience, but what you really want is for your audience to talk back. This gives them the opportunity to share opinions, ideas, feedback, and problems they are facing in the market. Engagement allows for this dialogue to provide for a learning experience for your team while giving your team the chance to provide solutions, sell suggestively, and build relationships. The relationship your sales team has with the customer is the foundation you need to succeed in 2019. Nothing happens without a relationship, and implementing a successful engagement strategy is exactly what you need.
Have a question about implementing an engagement plan of your own? vidREACH is here to help!
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