Most business owners know that an active marketing campaign is vital, including regular social media engagement, email marketing, and creating engaging content. If you have a marketing campaign in place, do you ever think beyond the initial marketing strategy, and how that can affect the customer experience? Marketing should never just be about sending out information and hoping for a quick sale, you should be customizing it to suit the entire customer journey – and ensure the customer leaves with a positive impression of your company. Consider some of the companies you have made a purchase from and received no response when you’ve tried to engage with them. How do you feel about them afterward? You are probably left feeling a little deflated and disheartened, even if the in-store experience was extremely positive. It is just as essential to manage the customer experience via your marketing campaign, as it is when the customer visits you in-store or at your office. If you want to ensure positive customer experience, these are some ways to manage customer experience via your marketing campaign successfully.
Respond to Comments
If your customer has uploaded a photo of your product or tags you in a post, make sure you respond to them. Companies who take the time to respond to every comment stand out when it comes to exceptional customer service. Businesses should never focus their attention on just bringing in new customers. It is more lucrative for a company to retain its customers than it is to try and find new ones continually. If your business is failing to hold onto customers, something is amiss, and it may be down to their experience of you via your marketing campaign. If anyone comments or responds to you, reply to them, as this will ensure they have a good impression of your business from the offset.
Deal with Complaints
You can’t hide online, and if you have a marketing campaign in place, you are bound to get negative comments, as well as positive. No one particularly enjoys dealing with complaints, but it is part of running a business. Deal with your complaints quickly and efficiently, don’t ignore them. If you ignore a complaint or have a negative response, it won’t just be the person who makes the complaint; there will be many other people who see it too – such is the beauty of online marketing! Customers have a right to be unhappy, and it’s up to you to turn that negative experience around.
Online Smile
Consider your online presence in the same way as you would if you were talking to customers face to face. People want to deal with positive people, and this is true in business as much as it is in day to day life. Take time to consider how to respond to customers via your marketing campaign, and always ensure your language is positive, even if you are dealing with someone who isn’t particularly pleasant. The customer should consider your brand as happy, positive, and friendly. Remember to wear that online smile, no matter how frustrating the interactions may be.
Be Authentic
It’s quite common to see Facebook ads or general social media posts, where the responses are the same, regardless of the comment. For example, ‘we’re glad you are interested, please visit our website where you can place an order.’ These types of comments leave little room for engagement, and they suggest that the company is not particularly interested in a conversation; they simply want the sale. Most people want to deal with a person online; they don’t want to feel like they’re talking to a robot, which is why it is important to be engaging. Talk to your customers online in the same manner as you would if they were face to face with you. Ask general questions, talk to them about their day, and encourage them to share your content. Publish content that shows your office, events you attend, or anything “backstage.” Personal posts are much more engaging to customers than speaking to a generated response, and the good news is, you will probably get more shares and likes as a result. The best way to be successful using social media is to be authentic.
Ask for Feedback
The only way a business can ever truly improve their services or products is by listening to its customers. You can achieve this by asking for feedback via surveys, but there are also ways to do this via your marketing campaign. Pay attention to how customers refer to you online, introduce a live chat function, and keep track of your analytics. If a customer puts a photo of your business online, ask them how their experience was. How would you feel if you posted a comment about reading a specific book, and the author commented back to ask for your feedback? You’d feel special, and you’d probably enjoy the book a whole lot more. These are things to consider as part of your marketing campaign and making the customer experience more enjoyable.
Analyse Data
You can significantly improve the customer experience by analyzing data available to you. The kind of questions you want to consider are; how many customers are you retaining? What does your website analytics look like to the user? What do your customer surveys say about your online presence? Keeping track and monitoring data related to your business is an excellent way to improve the customer experience. Analyze data on how many are returning visitors you have to your website, social media analytics, including the number of shares, comments, and likes you are receiving. You can also find out the number of opens you have on your emails via your email marketing campaign. If people are engaging with your marketing campaign and your business, they will open your emails. If not, why are they not engaged with you? You should also check the bounce rate on your website; if it is high, it means visitors are not staying for very long, which suggests the content is irrelevant to them. Make sure you use your data well and to improve the service you are offering. You can also use data to target your ideal customer via social media ads. It’s surprising how annoyed people can get if they receive ads on their timeline, which are unrelated to their interests!
Ensure Content is Relevant
Your data can offer an insight into the demographics of your customer, and this you can use this to create content that is relevant to them and, therefore, improving the customer experience in the process. We hear a lot about engaging content, but what does this mean in reality? It means creating content, including blogs and articles, which will offer something to your customers. For example, if you are selling athletic wear (such as trainers, leggings, etc.), your customer is someone who is active and enjoys keeping fit. You should, therefore, focus your content on your customer’s potential pain points. For example, what are the best training exercises for competing in obstacle races? How do I stretch after a run? How do I exercise with a broken foot? If you can inform your visitors by creating educational and engaging content, you are setting the customer relationship up nicely, and you will become the go-to place for advice and information.
Reward Engagement
Why not reward people for their online engagement? If the same people are consistently engaging with your comments, sharing or liking your posts, throw them a freebie or give them a special discount. Many businesses fail to offer any kind of loyalty for engagement or even for customers, and this is where you can stand out. If someone is continuously visiting your restaurant and posting about it – offer them a free meal. If someone shares and likes all your yoga posts – offer them a free session. It’s a very simple gesture, but it can significantly improve customer experience and loyalty as a result. You may even find that just by doing this, you can turn a bit of engagement into a paying customer.
Run Competitions
Everyone loves a competition, and if you run these regularly, you will increase customer engagement and experience. Have you ever won a competition? What was your impression of the company afterward? You probably have them sitting on a pedestal with the sun shining over them! The fact that you even offer regular competitions can give you a better reputation as it shows you genuinely care about your audience, and you want to do something for them. Competitions and freebies are extremely popular for engagement, and the costs associated with these are minimal.
Personalize Responses
Customer engagement is critical, and it can be even more effective if you personalize any engagement you have with your customers. For example, referring to customers by their name in comments or personalizing emails. You can go even further by referring to something about them which you have taken from their profile. For example, if a customer tags your product in a post, you might reply by saying “thanks Lucy, I can see that you are very active, so we are honored you chose our trainers to purchase! What did you think of them”? This response is personalized, it’s engaging, and it encourages a reply. The customer will then feel that they are valued and appreciated, which is how you want your customers to feel after any dealings with your business.
Consistency is Key
If you want to engage with your customers and ensure a positive experience, you need to keep up with your marketing strategy. If you have been posting every day for a year, and there’s suddenly nothing posted for two weeks, customers will forget all about you. If you announce that there will be a follow up to your blog in a week, but you don’t post anything, this will leave customers feeling disheartened. Consistency is key with any marketing strategy, and if you are going to start it, you need to be prepared to follow it through. Customers are looking for reliability and consistency if you say you will do something, make sure you follow through with it. If you start posting regularly, keep doing it. Customers will regard you highly if you stick to stay consistent and reliable.
Use Different Marketing Avenues
You might not like using Facebook or understand why people watch videos on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile incorporating these into your marketing campaign. In order to improve your customer satisfaction levels, you need to be prepared to explore platforms that you may not have considered before. In doing this, you will open up your business to a broader audience, which will improve your customer engagement. The thought of doing a Facebook Live might send shivers down your spine, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bite the bullet and do it. Find the best ways to engage with a broad audience of customers, and you will improve the overall customer experience. Increasingly, people are attracted to those customers who offer better ways to engage with them, including videos and images. If you don’t use these elements in your marketing campaign, you could be missing out on customers, and your customer satisfaction is unlikely to be as high as you might like.
It is essential to have an active marketing campaign in place, but even more important to keep on top of customer interactions. If you are posting without any engagement, the marketing campaign almost becomes obsolete. A lack of engagement means that customers are getting nothing from you in terms of their overall experience. An active marketing campaign will also incorporate engagement and response to queries while ensuring the customer leaves with a positive impression of your marketing activity. You want your business to stand out from the crowd, and to do this; you need to offer something different. Business success is often the result of providing exceptional customer service, which makes the customer feel valued.
