By Robin Singh
03/21/2018
By Robin Singh
Sales and profits are probably the most important goals of any business. Nobody’s ever wanted to run a company that has no chance of becoming cost-effective, right? However, you may end up in a dead-end street if you strictly limit your goals to increasing sales and profits, without paying attention to the factors that influence it indirectly.
In the world of internet, you should think of these extra factors as they may or may not provoke your web presentation and customer engagement. Fruitful engagement should lead to social shares, increased number of page views, and therefore, growing sales. Yet, you should have in mind that this aspect doesn’t only improve your profits but customers’ loyalty too.
So, if you’re still wondering why online engagement is an essential part of every successful business strategy, hold tight:
According to Engager model, more than 60% of profits may rely on meaningful customer engagement.
If this made you reconsider the way you run your business, let us help you out in provoking some purposeful engagement. Stay with us and check out the seven simple yet essential engagement strategies that will boost your sales.
First of all, you should know that there’s no meaningful engagement as long as you have no idea what you want to do with it. You may have thousands of followers on social media or millions of website visits, and that’s awesome. But if you don’t know how to use them or what’s the point of it, it won’t mean much to you. This situation may be a signal that you should stop and think about some serious questions.
In the first place, you should find out to what extent current customer engagement on your website brings value – if it does, at all. Next, you should figure out how this engagement can be used to contribute to your business goals.
Finally, think about the ways of increasing it, having in mind:
Before we go through this one, just imagine the following situation:
You’re a 50-year old business owner who’s trying to sell a service to millennials. From your point of view, promoting your business in an old-fashioned way, via mailbox, may be a way to go. But can you really imagine kids nowadays enthusiastically reading the content of an averagely designed leaflet?
Yeah, we neither. Unless we’re talking about something really special.
No matter who your target audience is, you should be aware of their needs, preferences, and everything else that they have in common. For a day, just put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and answer
Who are these people? What do they like? What social media do they use? What type of content would they like to see? How does your service fit into that picture?
That information can be useful when deciding about how to approach them and interact to effectively promote your business and transform them into customers.
According to Emarketer, customer personalization was a priority for 70% of US retailers last year and there’s no wonder why. The importance of personalization lies in the fact that you’ll make your customers feel more pleasant when interacting with you.
On top of that, they won’t have that awkward sensation that you’re inspecting them. On the contrary, they’ll feel more comfortable sharing the necessary information with you while being happy to see you care about those little things.
What can you personalize? Emails, deliveries, manuals, birthday gift cards, support system – practically whatever comes to your mind.
Brand personification has become a real deal these days. All major brands are hiring the relevant influencers and use their faces and voices on TV, radio, social media, billboards. Basically everywhere. This strategy has become the simplest way to meaningful engagement and growing sales for every business that can afford it.
But, what if you’re not ready to spend a large amount of money and hire someone super famous who will bring you an enormous number of potential customers? Well, you still can make some baby steps. For instance, hire an aspiring yet not so famous blogger or Youtube content creator. That way, you can give them promotional space and let them grow while making a meaningful connection with your customers.
Yes, we know that using chatbots and automated live support chat may save your time and money. However, it may radically influence the willingness of your customers to stay loyal to your online business.
If you want to succeed in establishing meaningful communication, you should get real people talk to people. With the appearance and popularization of live chat software, the ways of developing a friendly vibe have become numerous.
You can choose if you’re going to hire a proactive silly agent that will use gifs and emojis or an unobtrusive or a pleasant formal operator. The point is, what will make people come back to your business is the fact that they feel understood. And no robot understands better than a compassionate human with a friendly vibe.
If you want your online business to blossom, you may have to put additional effort to make it stand out. One of the most efficient ways of doing so is developing a unique social marketing strategy that will let fully represent your business’ ideas, goals, and visions.
By introducing fun, sassy, inspiring multimedia content you will reach out to your followers easier and provoke their instant reactions. Accordingly, you’ll make them want to communicate with your business and reply to the message you send out to them. And that’s exactly what you need.
Finally, numerous studies have confirmed the importance of educational content when it comes to establishing a meaningful business – customer relationship.
A study performed by Google says that 48% of smartphone users tend to create a long-term relationship with companies that offer useful instructional and educational content. This particularly refers to videos, multimedia content, and interactive manuals that can be accessed from mobile devices.
As you could see, none of the listed strategies requires extremely heavy financial investments. Instead, they show that the core and focus of a successful business are far beyond profits calculation. On the contrary, it’s about connecting with customers, making them feel comfortable communicating with you, and therefore, turning them into your long-term allies instead of simply selling your product.
Editor’s Note: This amazing guest post is by Robin Singh. Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in knowledge management and various knowledge base tools. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.
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