The New Rules of Customer Engagement

No one doubts that the fundamental rules of customer engagement have changed. Whether your company sells laundry soap or automobiles, or offers services for the elderly, customers rely on information from many sources and engage with each other to discuss your brand – often long before you have any contact with them.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t want or need to engage directly with your company. In fact, customers are engaging more deeply with brands than ever before.

The challenge for marketers is to find ways to engage effectively with customers across channels in a seamless, truly conversational, way. As most marketers will confirm, it’s not easy to execute a comprehensive engagement strategy across all channels. In fact, according to a recent McKinsey quarterly report, having the ability to engage their customers and leverage those relationships is the number one digital marketing challenge facing marketers today.

Read on for some proven tips on how to engage more deeply with your customers and prospects to drive more conversions, create greater customer loyalty, increase lifetime customer value, and generate more referrals and word-of-mouth advertising.

Get to Know Your Customers Better

While messaging documents and brand positioning frameworks can help marketers stay on message about a product or service, they don’t usually go very far to help you ensure that you understand your audience in detail – their roles, responsibilities, needs, and wants. That’s where personas come in.

Personas enable you and your marketing and creative staff to get into the mind of your customers and prospects. And when you understand your audience’s world and their motivations, you can create experiences and content that engage them more deeply.

To do this, start by defining a persona for each of your target buyers and influencers. Give each persona a real name, a title or position, tasks they need to accomplish, relevant demographic info, problems, needs, and wants. A good persona description also includes a narrative that describes the flow of that person’s day, including their skills, attitudes, environment, and goals.

Then share the personas with everyone on the marketing team as well as external agencies and creative partners. Hopefully you also have an engagement platform that will let you use the personas you define to track site visitor behavior and gain greater insight for optimizing your digital marketing efforts.

Understand that Relevance Has a Shelf Life

Relevance is a key driver of engagement. Accenture states in its Point of View series, “… without relevance, nothing else matters."

However, when it comes to relevance, timing is essential to effectiveness. Temporal relevance is the term we can apply to the fact that relevance has a shelf life – what is interesting to a prospect or customer now, may not be as interesting or relevant a few hours from now. Over time, interest wanes and so does relevance.

But if we capture the latest behavior of our prospect and then trigger an interaction based on that behavior in a very timely way, we harness all the power of relevance. We deliver a relevant comment or opportunity while interest is still at a peak. In being timely and relevant, marketers can significantly improve engagement and help prospects move farther along the buying process.

The problem is that the value of capitalizing on an interest or need in a timely fashion is proportional to the difficulty of the task. While research from MarketingSherpa shows that the numberone way to engage a customer in terms of relevance is with behavioral segmentation, that is segmenting based on previous behaviors, it also shows that the level of difficulty increases with effectiveness (see Figure 1).

So what’s a marketer to do? You can start by looking for an engagement platform that lets you automate much of the process with defined customer interaction scenarios and triggers that move the conversation forward with relevant responses.

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Create a Natural Conversation

When you think of a normal conversation, there’s a natural cadence to it, and each party remembers what was talked about in previous conversations. The next conversation then picks up where you left off in the current one.

To have intelligent, engaging conversations across channels, you need to follow the rules of natural conversation by keeping track of the context. If you have siloed cha nnels and marketing, the conversation is constantly restarted, rather than being a single conversation that builds on the last interaction.

To create a natural conversation with each of your prospects and customers, you need to collect, store and mine customer intelligence across all your channels. Everything you learn in one channel – behaviors, job title, interests, attitudes – needs to be accessible in all your other channels so you can continue the conversation wherever it left off.

There are three essential elements for creating more natural, deeper conversations with customers:

1. Customer intelligence – you need to collect information across channels in one central place.
2. Moments of opportunity – this is where it’s your turn to speak in the conversation. You need to identify these moments throughout the customer engagement lifecycle.
3. Automated interactions – the only way to ensure a timely response is to automate the engagement flow, so that relevant offers and content get provided at the height of interest.

Here’s an example of what can happen when you put this concept into action: a prospect comes to your site from Google. You use the visitor’s keywords to start guiding the prospect to relevant content and interactions. You can make recommendations based on what other people using those same search terms found useful. And when that prospect then downloads a report you suggested, that information together with the search terms used and other online behavior helps you determine the right content or offer to suggest next.

Take Personalization to the Next Level

You’ve undoubtedly read the reports that personalization increases conversions and the average dollar amount spent. And you’ve probably experienced the power of personalization as a consumer. But many companies still haven’t moved beyond personalizing email with the customer’s name. In fact, personalization is one of the most under-utilized strategies in marketing.

But it shouldn’t be – it should be one of the most important tools in your digital engagement toolkit. So how can you take your personalization efforts to the next level?

It starts with data – information that you are probably already collecting in some way about your prospects and customers. The data includes interest level, keywords used, preferences, behaviors, needs, wants, patterns of usage, and more.

Then you need to model scenarios for what content or offer to present next in the customer lifecycle that would be most relevant based on this data. Technology that can sense and adapt to site visitors’ behaviors can help you automate your scenarios to personalize the experience and deepen the engagement.

Measure Engagement Value, Not Just Clicks

Measuring open rate, clicks, and traffic to your site are metrics that show digital marketing performance from a volume perspective. But two-way conversations and customer engagement with the brand can’t be measured using purely quantitative methods.

You need a way to measure engagement so you know what’s working. One way to do this is to start tracking and measuring engagement value. You can do that by assigning a value or points to interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. These interactions are your conversion goals and should be indicative or predictive of revenue. For instance, signing up for a free trial of a product or service demonstrates a certain level of engagement and you would assign a value accordingly.

By tracking engagement value, you can begin to see trends that you might not see if you’re only looking at volume statistics and trends. For example, let’s say traffic to your site has increased, but engagement value is going down, that tells you that there’s a problem somewhere in your cross-channel interactions. You wouldn’t have known you had a problem at all if you had only been looking at the volume of traffic.

With engagement value, you can understand how channels are affecting engagement and which interactions are performing better than others.

Embrace Today’s CrossChannel Buying Process

Customers are empowered by access to information and it’s changed the buying process, shifting the balance of power to the customer. Google calls it the Zero Moment of Truth, and it’s the new decision-making moment that happens when customers go online and start to learn about a product or service.

That new decision-making moment happens across channels and devices, with customers interacting with brands and content in real time. Many companies have marketing strategies and campaigns targeted towards specific channels. They may even have a cross-channel campaign that starts in one channel and crosses to another like a contest on a Facebook page that links to a corporate website.

But that’s not enough. The trick to adapting to today’s buying process is to put action plans and techniques into place that let you understand and embrace the interplay between all your channels and touch points – from your website to social media, from email to mobile. You need to create a seamless experience across these channels and touch points, knocking down any silos you may have so that you can listen and learn in every channel and then apply that insight across all your channels.

While this is no small feat, it’s a marketing imperative if you want to deepen engagement and stop frustrating customers and prospects with messages, content, and offers that don’t recognize behaviors happening in other channels. With insight across all your channels, you can then adapt your interactions, personalize them, and become more relevant to customers throughout the customer lifecycle.

Marketing has changed. Is your company ready?

In the age of the empowered customer, it’s clear that the nature of marketing is changing in fundamental ways. Traditional marketing is fast losing its effectiveness. Today, online customer engagement is mandatory. Delivering relevant, valuable interactions that earn prospects’ and customers’ interest and trust is the new way to build your brand.

The tactics described in this eBook can help you re-structure your marketing strategy going forward to adapt to the new imperatives in today’s digital-powered world. From breaking down silos between channels to intelligently responding to your customers as part of a twoway conversation, you’ll be laying the groundwork for more conversions, greater revenue, and happier customers.