Understanding and Building a Customer Engagement Strategy In Four Steps

Understanding and Building a Customer Engagement Strategy In Four Steps

Developing a customer engagement strategy may sound like something you’re going to need to bring your business analyst on board for, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, if you think about the goals of your marketing strategy for a moment you’ll realize that there are only four steps involved. Here is what you need to do to build these four steps into your customer engagement strategy.

Segmentation

Segmentation is a cornerstone of customer engagement. It refers to the process of identifying groups of customers with similar needs, then developing tailored strategies for them. The goal of segmentation is to create more meaningful and personalized interactions between brands and their customers. Instead of trying to reach everyone with one message (the “one size fits all” model), marketers can tailor their approach based on each type of customer’s needs and preferences.

Segmentation can be done by demographic or behavioral factors, or even both at once—for example, by gender if your target audience is male or female, or by location if you want to target people who live in New York City versus those who live in Miami, or by purchase history if you want to specifically target repeat customers only.

Persona

A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer—a person who fits the profile of your target audience and has wants and needs that align with yours. To create a strong identity for this persona, you need to understand all the characteristics that make them unique. Asking yourself questions like “What are their joys?” or “What do they dislike?” can help guide this process.

Once you have created an engaging and realistic customer portrait in your mind, it’s time to put pen to paper and start writing out everything about him or her that you know so far. You can do this by hand first, then move into typing up these notes once everything has been recorded.

Hypothesis and “A/B” testing

It’s time to test your hypothesis and figure out what messaging resonates best with customers. One of the most common ways marketers A/B test is by creating two versions of the same email or webpage and sending them out to different groups of users. The one that gets more positive responses will be adopted as the default version for all future communications with users who have yet to receive any messages from you at all. This method can also be used when designing landing pages or ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Google Ads, or Twitter Ads as well as other digital marketing channels including email newsletters and webinars.

Engagement mapping

The next step is to create an engagement map. This is a visual overview of your customer journey, visually displaying each of the steps in the process. The benefit of this step is that by visually laying out your customer’s journey you can quickly see what needs improvement and where you should focus your efforts.

Conclusion

As you can see, the process of developing a customer engagement strategy is not rocket science. It doesn’t require years of experience or huge budgets. However, it does require you to be committed and dedicated to getting your message across in a way that resonates with your audience.