Achieving growth and success for your business is a bit like baking a cake. For this particular recipe, you need two basic ingredients: customer acquisition and customer retention. The trick, however, is to keep your customer acquisition costs low while also maintaining low customer churn rates.
But how do you ensure that once customers enter your world, they remain dependable patrons? The secret ingredient for that is customer engagement. It's the element that can solidify lasting relationships. By understanding actionable customer engagement tactics, you can drive both meaningful and measurable results.
In recent years, there's been a paradigm shift in sales and marketing. The business world has moved from an immediate transactional mindset to a long-term posture that’s focused on forging deeper, more meaningful connections.
Customer engagement is the process of regularly interacting with customers via various channels. It’s about nurturing relationships, providing customer support, understanding preferences, and delivering consistent value. As Shep Hyken, CX and customer service expert writes:
“The secret weapon that differentiates exceptional, enduring companies is the quality of their customer engagement, encompassing the full set of activities through which companies build direct relationships with their customers.”
This ethos shift recognizes that every customer interaction and touchpoint is an opportunity for your business to strengthen that bond, build trust, and drive brand loyalty for years to come.
If you assume the customer journey ends at the bottom of the sales funnel, think again. That’s just the starting line. Customer engagement is the marathon that follows afterward. In fact, local businesses have realized that it's significantly cheaper—and more rewarding—to nurture and retain an existing customer relationship than to constantly chase after new prospects.
Continuous user engagement is the secret ingredient businesses can use to foster these relationships. More high-quality interactions tend to open up several advantages, including:
So, how do you develop an effective customer engagement strategy for your business?
Keep in mind that every small business must customize an engagement strategy that caters to their industry and target consumers. That said, major brands often deploy the following common tactics:
Customer engagement is the secret ingredient that binds a business to its customer base. Without it, even the strongest initial attraction can grow stale and become unsatisfying.
In today’s crowded digital landscape, organic engagement can be challenging to achieve. Fortunately, Nextdoor offers a unique space for small businesses to not just promote their services, but to truly engage with their local communities. With the Nextdoor advertising platform, your business becomes an integral part of local dialogues, allowing you to build trust and interact with customers one post at a time.
Ready to engage your customers in a new and authentic way?
Sources
Forbes. Customer Engagement Is Your Secret Weapon To Beat The Competition. https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2021/02/21/customer-engagement-is-your-secret-weapon-to-beat-the-competition/?sh=32caa347daf3
Gartner. Why Customer Engagement Is Important. https://www.gartner.com/en/digital-markets/insights/why-customer-engagement-is-important