6 Proven Customer Engagement Strategies For Small Businesses

Small businesses have great potential, but you need to put in much effort to realize this potential. Several small businesses know their target audience and try to engage with them regularly. While some engagement activities might lead to great results, some might not work at all. Therefore, you must develop a strategy to improve your engagement with your target audience.

Engagement can take different forms. Your customers and potential customers can either like or comment on your post, or they can share it as a story or among their close groups.

However, customer engagement is much beyond the likes and shares. You need to create a relationship with your customers where they start to trust you and your products. Let’s discuss the strategies that can help you increase engagement.

Understanding Customer Engagement Strategy

A customer engagement strategy involves chalking out a plan to maximize the satisfaction of the consumers. You can formulate strategies to improve your interaction with the customers. The strategy can also increase the touchpoints between the business and the consumer.

The interactions are not just limited to offline channels. You can also include social media, e-mail, telephone calls, etc., for this interaction. Your customer engagement strategy should be proactive. The interaction involves answering customer queries, reaching out to them and increasing awareness about your product.

1. Organize Contests and Giveaways

Social media contests are a great way to create a buzz about your business or a particular product or service that your business offers. You can conduct a weekly giveaway to boost the engagement of your social media handle.

Customers follow you on social media because they love your products, and they are on the lookout for some discounts and vouchers. With a giveaway, you can build excitement among your followers. 

For example, you can create a post that asks your followers to tag a friend and then share the post as their story. You can then declare three lucky winners randomly and send them a few of your products. This way, you increase your followers and your post’s reach and improve your brand image.

You can also send surveys and offer a freebie for completing the survey. Surveys are the best way to understand if your customers are happy with your products and services. You can create a simple form with basic questions to understand consumer sentiment about your business. Once you collate these results, you will get an idea of the percentage of consumers happy with your product and services, and what are their pain points.

2. Use Email Marketing Campaigns 

Email marketing is a way more powerful customer engagement tool than you imagine! Instead of sending dull sales emails, craft beautiful email campaigns using drag-and-drop templates. Add images of your work/products, share news and latest trends, attach customers’ reviews, and most importantly, include booking links in the emails themselves for instant appointment booking. 

Use software like Yottled. It’s 100% free for businesses and has beautiful drag-and-drop templates for email marketing campaigns. 

3. Publish Diversified Content

Diversification is key here as it will help you understand the kind of content your audience likes. For instance, if you have posted three static posts on your Instagram, Facebook or on Linkedin you can break the monotony by adding a video. The video will help your audience to understand the products and services you are offering and keep engaging with your brand. The video should be well edited. To edit video professionally you can take the help of an online video editor that provides you with pre-made templates which will help you to save time.

4. Showcase Reviews

Reviews add a lot of credibility to a small business. Customers want to hear from people like themselves. Hence, they are always on the lookout for reviews. Getting good reviews for your products and services as a business would be best. If a customer is happy and feels like the business is doing enough to engage with their customers, they might write a good review about you. The review can be on your product page or on public platforms like Google, Facebook, etc.

Reviews get a high engagement as it reinstates the customers’ faith in your business. If you get a good review for your business or products, you must take a screenshot of that review and share it on different channels like Instagram, Facebook, etc. You can also tag that person to improve the reach of the post.

People like to be mentioned and tagged on social media by popular brands. Hence, you are indirectly motivating your other customers to write a review about them when you share a review on social media. Instead of taking a screenshot, you can create a post and incorporate the review interestingly.

5. Create a Community

As per the Pareto rule, 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Therefore, you should focus on 20% of the customers. You can do so by starting a fan club and inviting all of your loyal customers to join the fan club. People who love your brand and are looking forward to buying your products in the future will be a part of the club.

You can appoint them as the company’s brand ambassadors and incentivize them by giving coupons and exclusive discounts. Your fan club will ensure that a positive review about your company flows across groups. You can create a community by thanking your loyal customers for their support and giving them early access to your collection.

While your primary audience might be on one channel, you might be able to get the attention of a different audience group on another channel. Therefore, you should keep an open mind about the channels you use to engage with your customers. However, managing multiple channels can be time-consuming. In this case, you can hire a resource who looks after all the channels or use an omnichannel contact center.  

6. Use Data Strategically

Social media collects a massive chunk of data every day. A small business needs to understand the data if it wants to improve engagement. Companies like Netflix use customer data to make recommendations based on the watching patterns of the customer. Similarly, you must use the data collected from social media channels to understand your business’s loopholes and develop insights that can help you improve customer engagement.

For instance, if the data shows that most of your customers are active around 8 pm, you can try posting content during those hours.

Wrapping up!

The customer engagement metric has a direct impact on your revenues. Therefore, developing ways to aid you in improving engagement is essential. You can try out new content formats, like videos, carousels, etc., to engage better with your audience. Ensure you check the engagement metrics after every experimentation you do on your social media handles.