CUSTOMER AND FAN ENGAGEMENT: A FEW DEFINITIONS
The term Customer Engagement literally means ‘customer involvement’ and in marketing is defined as the set of interactions aimed at creating a strong relationship and a deep, intimate and long-term connection with the customer.
Customer Engagement is the creation of personalised, relevant and engaging content aimed at customers to make them feel as connected to the brand as possible.
According to a report published by Salesforce pre-pandemic, developing Engagement activities, both in B2B and B2C, has become more and more important in recent years. This survey showed that 76% of customers expected companies to understand their needs and expectations, while 80% believed that the customer experience was more important than the goods and services purchased. Furthermore, 57% of users said they had left a company and gone to a competitor that was able to offer them a better experience.
Fan engagement embraces the concept of customer engagement transposed, however, to sports and artists; in fact, this term generally refers to the involvement of fans with a team or fans with an artist with whom they establish an intense and intimate bond.
ENGAGING CUSTOMERS TO ADD VALUE TO YOUR BUSINESS
The goal of Customer Engagement is to establish a connection with your target audience in such a way as to anticipate their needs through contact on various channels. As revealed by a Digital Commerce 360 survey, companies with higher engagement rates retain on average 89% of their customers, while companies with weaker loyalty strategies retain roughly only 33%.
The goal of fan engagement, therefore, is to activate and engage the fan in order to provide them with a memorable and closer experience with their favourite team or artist. Achieving better results in terms of brand performance through fan engagement activities is easier.
In fact, such activities are able to attract new customers, stimulate sales of a product in the short term, and very quickly collect a large amount of user data with which to refine any critical points or enhance quality initiatives.
So, the ultimate goal of Customer & Fan Engagement is essentially economic conversions, increased awareness and, of course, increased engagement.
IMPROVING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: CHANNELS TO USE
The company, in order to engage and communicate with the customer, needs to guarantee a valuable customer experience through the use of different touchpoints. One of the most widely used strategies for communicating with users is the omnichannel Customer Engagement solution: the unification of all company-owned communication media – newsletter, social media, website, mobile app, e-commerce – with the aim of improving the user’s Customer Journey by capturing the latent needs of its customer base.
In particular, again according to Salesforce, today the most performing marketing communication channels are video content, social and digital advertising on which to develop content marketing activities relevant to each customer and with which to personalise the Customer Experience.
Another tool for creating engagement is e-mail marketing through which it is possible to engage consumers through call-to-action messages that stimulate them to behave more actively towards the brand. The blog section of the website is a further possibility to interact with the fan base through the publication of articles or exclusive information. Also for fan engagement the most used channels are social media: YouTube and Twitter in the first place, Twich as a new and engaging alternative.
ANALYSING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT RESULTS: THE KEY KPI
In order to measure customer engagement results, it is good to use the right KPIs. The most commonly used metrics include:
- the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), which is used to understand the degree of customer satisfaction with a brand and/or its products;
- the Customer Effort Score (CES), which measures the effort exerted by customers to solve a problem by finding the best solution for them.
- the Stickiness, an index that measures the degree of happiness of consumers and their propensity to continue using the brand’s products;
- the churn rate, which measures the number of customers who stop using a service or product.
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT TODAY
In a world saturated with messages, it is essential for brands to adopt engagement activities to capture the consumer’s attention. Today, in order to trust and establish a deep connection with the brand, customers increasingly need to be listened to, monitored and have personalised experiences.
This is precisely why lab-go’s Customer & Fan Engagement service was created: to help companies be more connected and closer to the end user by engaging and listening to their needs through physical products. Only by following this path, in fact, will they be able to occupy a fixed place in the minds and hearts of their consumers.
