Engagement
Building engagement with customers using social media is something that takes time and there is no quick fix solution.
Key Success factors to successful customer engagement
Here are some of the key success factors we’ve identified over the years which are critical to building successful customer engagement using email and social media networks
Don’t try to collect all customer data at once.
Every additional data field will deter customers from signing up to communications from you. Keep it simple (name and email to start) and over time invite them back to share more with you.
Clear Privacy Policy
Make sure you have a clear privacy policy which clearly states what you will do with their data and if it will be shared with any other parties.
Reward customers for sharing more data with you
This may be a newsletter, a special offer or a free guide or gift voucher.
Enable your customers to view their profile online
Keeping your customer data up to date is a key challenge and unless you have routines in place your data will age within 3 months. We recommend that you email them at least once every 3 months and ask them to check their data is up to date. Many databases such as Act or Salesforce now have add ons which enable you to do this seamlessly where it will enable the customer amendments to be automatically fed back into the database from their email responses.
Be clear about your response policy
Let customers know what your opening hours are and when they are likely to receive a response from you. Ideally it is good to have a service level in place and check with your customers as to what they would be happy with.
Use every opportunity to get client feedback
There are many new online tools which can help you in getting feedback from clients on your service and your website, both online and offline. I recommend that you look at some of the good tools that are now available such as get satisfaction.
Reward customers for joining your network
Many small businesses have had a lot of success using social media networks such as Twitter for announcing new product launches, special exclusive sales periods and have issued vouchers for free or subsidised products and services. They have made a commitment to their Twitter followers to be the first to know and given them special shopper privileges.
Reward customers for recommending their friends and colleagues
Recent research carried out by Nielsen with brands such as Virgin Atlantic has proven the improvement in purchase intention if customers make a referral. Make sure you have share icons on your website to enable customers to share any pages, offers and other information and ensure all your blogs and web content can be retweeted which can also boost your web traffic.
The importance of "deeplinks" to your website
A deeplink is a web page link directly to a specific part of your website. When creating your web pages it is very important that you enable your customers to be able to send a link to others and this is especially important if you are aiming to tweet about information on your website or your latest news or blogs. For this reason you need to be sure that all your information can be deep linked so that readers can go straight to that specific part of your website. This is also important for building internet marketing campaigns.
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