If you run a small business, you have an interest in its customers genuinely enjoying the time they spend with it. After all, if they don’t, or their enjoyment is only fleeting, those customers might not feel sufficiently tempted to purchase from your business again and, in the process, help sustain its growth.
Various numbers underline the importance of customer engagement. According to research highlighted on the Forbes website, companies improving engagement can also boost cross-sell revenue by 22%, up-sell revenue by 38% and order size by 5-85%. So, how could you encourage this kind of engagement?
The good news is that, as a small business, you have various customer engagement tools at your disposal. The bad news is that these tools are likely to require some financial expenditure on your company’s part – though whether or not you should indulge your urge to spend on these tools is a complicated point.
Is there such thing as a “free” customer engagement tool?
At first glance, yes, there apparently is – in the form of social media. As revealed by research outlined in another Forbes article, 74% treat social media as a buyer’s guide, while 58% of people have upped their social media consumption since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
Especially reassuringly for your business, 86% of respondents to a survey said they anticipated maintaining their pandemic-era level of social media use for the long haul. However, while your company’s access to social media might be free, you would still need to work hard on creating social media content.
Putting together that content could, naturally, cost money – but it could be money well worth spending. With 53% of customers having claimed they are likely to purchase from brands showing transparency on social media, you could give your brand’s own social media followers a behind-the-scenes peek into the company – even if it’s just one employee taking centre stage in a funny TikTok video.
What other tools should you consider?
When someone uses Google to search for a business like yours, they will probably come across your brand’s website before any of its social media pages. For this reason, it makes sense to build various interactive functions into that site – think the likes of chatbots and live chat.
While a chatbot would be programmed to respond to queries very much as though it is a human customer service representative, a live chat facility would let visitors to your site speak to an actual customer service representative. You could especially benefit from incorporating an element of video into the conversation.
PureVPN digital marketing executive Rameez Ghayas Usmani points out to Business News Daily: “Because the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, it is far simpler for people to remember visual information than the same information in a written form.”
This could incentivize you to invest in a video platform like the ON24-provided Digital Experience Platform, which would also give you technical means of measuring customer engagement and so could help you to discern potential ways of enhancing it.
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