Customer Engagement Archives

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How to Get More Sales on Amazon

March 19, 2024 No Comments

These three tips can help you move products outside of this online retailer as well.

Amazon is a behemoth of a marketplace that every e-commerce merchant should be on, or at least consider. However, with competition so fierce, it can be all too easy to fade into the background.

Follow these three practical steps to get more sales on and off of Amazon.

Address issues proactively

Pay attention to product reviews and feedback. If a particular issue or concern is recurring, address it at the source, be it product design or shipment packaging.

Then, when a customer has a negative experience, apologize sincerely and offer solutions, which could be a refund, replacement, or a discount on future purchases.

Offer additional value

If your product requires assembly or specific instructions, consider creating easy-to-understand online guides or video tutorials. Link to these resources in your product listings or follow-up emails.

Another way to add value is to reward loyal customers with exclusive discounts or early access to new product launches.

2. Build brand loyalty

Building brand loyalty can be difficult when a marketplace has so many options and sellers to choose from. However, you can help promote customer loyalty by being strategic in your packaging and investing in your brand presence on social media.

Personalized touch

Consider including a personalized thank you note in your product packaging. While this is logistically more challenging with FBA, you can achieve it with some planning.

After purchase, you can also send a follow-up email checking in on the customer’s experience and offering assistance if needed.

Build an off-Amazon presence

Engage with customers on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest. Share behind-the-scenes content, gather feedback, and announce promotions. You could also create a brand website and encourage Amazon customers to sign up for newsletters. This allows you to communicate directly with your customer base and foster loyalty.

Providing stellar customer service can significantly enhance brand perception. Additionally, acquiring a new customer is often more expensive than retaining an existing one. By focusing on building trust, loyalty, and offering unparalleled support, Amazon FBA sellers can ensure long-term success.

Use an experienced FBA prep partner to ensure your product packaging complies with Amazon guidelines. Companies such as mine, MyFBAPrep, can help you strategize your unique packaging, source materials, put everything together, and send shipments into Amazon for you.

3. Enhance customer engagement and reviews

Amazon’s marketplace is competitive, and often the difference between a closed sale and a missed opportunity can be your product’s reviews and how you engage with customers. As such, you should actively solicit reviews.

Use Amazon’s automated email system

Amazon’s system can ask customers for reviews after they’ve received and spent time with their purchase. A gentle and neutral reminder can sometimes nudge satisfied buyers to leave positive feedback. Then, show appreciation for positive reviews with a brief thank you to foster goodwill and loyalty.

However, if someone leaves a negative review, promptly address their concerns. A professional and courteous response can sometimes turn a dissatisfied customer into a loyal one.

Brush up on Amazon’s review policies before you request reviews. Importantly, reviews must be honest and authentic, and you cannot incentivize positive reviews.

Handle returns gracefully

One of the advantages of Amazon FBA is its streamlined return process. Ensure customers know how easy it is to return products if they’re dissatisfied.

When a product is returned, try to ascertain the reason. This feedback can be invaluable for product improvements.

While a quality product and optimized listing are critical, how you engage with customers can make or break your brand’s reputation on Amazon. Positive interactions and reviews boost immediate sales and drive long-term success by building trust and credibility on the marketplace.

By prioritizing your customers and building loyalty, you can enjoy more sales and engagement both on and off Amazon. Having consistent customers, and providing a reliably good customer experience will help build your brand’s reputation.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

BY TOM WICKY

CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF MYFBAPREP

Sourced from Inc.

In News

App appeal: four steps to successful app engagement

May 18, 2022 No Comments

By Steve Peretz

The attrition rates for app users are staggering – but do they have to be? Steve Peretz, group director (health experience and product strategy) at Appnovation, shares four strategies for engagement and retention.

Abandoned shopping carts, neglected Netflix series, snap decisions on Tinder. There’s plenty of evidence that audiences in the digital age have low attention spans and rely heavily on first impressions.

It’s no different with apps. The average app loses 77% of daily users within three days of installation. Within 30 days, it’s 90%. Three months in, 95%.

Often this rapid disengagement results from something simple, such as an error in the app’s design or a frustrating experience. But this negative first impression invariably has adverse commercial consequences for the brand or company behind the app.

Dubbed the ‘halo effect,’ app users can base their entire perception of a business on this initial interaction. They express their dissatisfaction by taking their purchasing power elsewhere.

Fortunately, the halo effect can also work in reverse. Get that first impression right, and customers will stay for longer. Follow up with great customer experience, and they’re likely to spend more, stay loyal and increase frequency of impulse purchasing.

Here are four first impression strategies to help brands achieve a match and ensure initial interactions result in successful engagement:

1. First contact: convey benefits simply and succinctly

Users judge apps by their descriptions. App descriptions and reviews are a fundamental reason people consider a download, so keep it focused. Use relevant keywords. Explain the app’s value proposition concisely. App users don’t want to scroll endlessly to understand the point of a product, so craft a message that cuts through.

Challenger bank Monzo’s app couldn’t be clearer about what it does: ‘Banking made easy.’ Likewise, Deliveroo entices app users by saying: ‘Food: we get it. We all have our favourites. With Deliveroo, get your favourite local restaurants and takeaways delivered straight to your door.’

If the initial messaging easily answers questions around why someone should engage with a digital solution, the brand has hit the bullseye.

2. Debut experience: try before you buy

Sharing a flavour of the app’s experience makes sense before customers commit to the download. If possible, offer the app for free – at least upfront (tiers can come later). Share content that gives a sense of the experience without requiring consumers to hand over personal data. Avoid blitzing people with ads, which will build frustration, not engagement.

Wellbeing app Headspace tells potential customers it will help them ‘Get happy. Stress less. Sleep soundly.’ It then supports app users from the first point of engagement with free educational resources on managing stress, improving sleep and learning to meditate. Users get ample opportunity to build trust in the brand before confidently purchasing the app.

Consider offering a preview video, which increases app conversions by over 20%. A well-crafted video delivers a compelling first impression, building immediate engagement and showing how the app works. For example, podcast and audiobook service Audible differentiates itself with a preview that doubles up as a mini-tutorial and a short promo.

3. Onboarding: use gradual disclosure

After downloading an app, users want to use it immediately. They get frustrated if they can’t engage with an experience quickly. Avoid complex registration processes and complicated tutorials.

Instead, brands need to use gradual disclosure techniques to educate and inform customers about the app in bite-sized chunks. The goal is to tell the audience what they need to know when they need to know it, not overload them.

This can take the form of streamlined content previews, ‘accordion’ elements, mega-menus, sliders or animated hints. Start with the basics and then disclose the more complicated aspects of the solution once the customer needs them.

Shopify is especially adept at gradual disclosure, incorporating the method right from the sign-up page via a non-intrusive pop-up window that explains the domain. Registration processes should be user-friendly and well-tested.

4. Retention: prompt action with instant reward

So far, all the brand has done is get its customer to the starting line. But the main battle begins once the customer is onboard. Work to sustain their early enthusiasm by rewarding their effort immediately and providing instant gratification.

New users should realize that brand interactions will directly lead to personalized rewards. Caffe Nero’s app immediately offers users the opportunity to accumulate stamps for a free coffee, which draws them into an app experience that positions them against competitors through positive reviews on Apple’s App Store.

Elsewhere, health group The Mighty invites new members into the community by extending an invitation to make an introduction. Right away, they feel like a part of the group, having found an online home.

Beware of deterring new users with a barrage of push notifications. It’s a tricky balance, particularly for digital health solutions that require regular inputs (for example, to monitor chronic conditions). If in doubt, err on the conservative side, and restrict communication to relevant, purposeful messages.

Some user attrition is bound to occur, no matter how well-designed the solution. But a strong first impression undoubtedly contributes to committed customer engagement. First impression strategies can help build impactful, purposeful apps with longevity.

By Steve Peretz

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Customer Engagement: Improved Through Technology

March 1, 2022 No Comments

Sourced from NewsReports.com

It is more crucial than ever for businesses to use information technology to improve customer engagement as they expand and adapt.

Customers can interact with businesses in a variety of ways in the digital age. This includes chatbots, social media, and other channels. Businesses must ensure that they are utilizing the most up-to-date technologies. They must do this in order to engage with their clients in the most efficient manner possible.

Consider using the most cutting-edge technology that companies are adopting to boost customer engagement.

Make use of social media.

For businesses, social media is now more vital than ever.

Customers continue to find social media accounts to be one of the most effective ways to communicate with businesses. Many businesses have adopted social media in recent years, but not all of them are efficiently using it.

First, engage with people on your social media profiles whenever possible. Make sure that each of your social media profiles has an easy contact option so that customers can simply get in touch with you.

Keep an eye out for people who mention your brand or product in their postings, as well. As much as possible, reach out to them and engage in discussion with them. This ensures that they are aware that you are paying attention. In addition, it shows that you are aware of any knowledge they may have about your product or service.

Customer engagement is improved by providing a live chat option.

In the digital age, live chat functionality is becoming increasingly vital.

Customers desire to contact businesses as much as possible. Furthermore, many prefer live chat over other types of communication. As a result, organizations should seriously consider using an online message platform with live chat capability. This allows your consumers to interact with you as much as they want. In addition, it lets them contact you in the method that is most convenient for them.

Furthermore, having a live chat platform allows organizations to effectively address their customer support needs.

Many online messaging systems can provide users with automated responses. They can do this based on the information they provide. This ensures that each consumer receives the finest possible service from your company.

Make a user-friendly website to ensure customer engagement.

One of the most significant methods to engage with your customers is through your website.

Every day, customers are online, whether on their PCs or on their mobile devices. They will go to your online store if they wish to buy your products or services. As a result, companies must ensure that their websites are simple to navigate and use.

It all begins with the design. Every online store should have a contemporary design.

It needs to appeal to customers who are accustomed to social media sites on a daily basis. If you run an online cosmetics business, for example, your virtual storefront should resemble the virtual shops of prominent social media networks. That’s because this is what your potential clients are used to seeing.

Make sure that your online business is very easy to navigate. You can, for example, include a quick-search bar at the top of each online storefront page. That way customers can find what they’re looking for quickly.

You may also make movies to show clients what they need to do to complete a transaction. In addition, guarantee that clients have the information they need. Make sure they can use the various aspects of your online store. Therefore, focus on virtual video production while creating the video.

Use mobile channels for customer engagement.

People nowadays are constantly on their mobile gadgets. They use these gadgets to surf the web, check email, and connect to social media sites.

Businesses must ensure that they can interact with clients while on the move. This entails developing a mobile-friendly website that includes services such as live chat. This allows customers to communicate with you.

Chatbots can help you increase engagement.

Chatbots are another common means of business-to-customer communication. They enable organizations to interact with clients in real-time, 24 hours a day.

This, of course, enhances customer engagement. Virtual chatbot technology is being used by many businesses to boost customer satisfaction. In addition, it helps cut response times and improve overall service quality.

Businesses are increasingly using chatbots to connect with their customers. The finest chatbots provide virtual self-service.

In addition, they allow users to seek assistance without having to wait for a human to respond. This is especially useful if you need to contact a customer service person after work hours. Customers can get speedy service without having to contact a person.

Virtual chatbot technology is also for other applications. Chatbots, for example, can collect information from customers. In addition, it can provide verbal or written training on how to use your products or services.

The way businesses connect with their clients is changing as a result of technological advancements. As a result, businesses must ensure that they are utilizing the most up-to-date technologies. They must do this in order to engage with their customers in the most efficient manner possible.

Sourced from NewsReports.com

In News

Top 10 Warning Signs Your Startup Will Fail

May 21, 2021 No Comments

By George Deeb

Being an entrepreneur is no simple task, given the fact that 90% of start-ups collapse. But based on the learnings from past flame-outs, there are some leading indicators that can identify whether your start-up is headed for failure.

1. Lost Focus on Primary Goal

For some start-ups, their focus can divert to unimportant factors than the primary goal at hand. A successful start-up learns to prioritize its efforts, and stay religiously focused on that end goal. Keeping the team firmly focused on the end goal can also be beneficial for the work environment as it will keep the team all rowing in the same desired direction. If you see a start-up flailing in the wind of change, going in multiple directions based on the “flavour of the month,” you know that business is in trouble.

2. Poor or Slow Execution

There are start-ups that begin with innovative concepts but cannot execute them properly. This is due to a number of reasons—lack of relevant resources, lack of motivation or poor working habits for starters. Firms that are properly tracking their progress with regard to a particular project will quickly see if they are falling behind and come up with ways to correct the problem before it becomes a material one. Those that are not executing well will suffer deficits in capital or timelines. There is also a problem with the speed in execution, with many start-ups not being able to push out products or services as fast as their competitors. Speed is critical, to staying ahead of your competitors as the first mover, and not being forced to play catch up.

3. Lack of Customer Engagement

A lack of customer engagement is something many early-stage start-ups face. There are a many possible scenarios in which customers might lose interest in a product or service. Maybe the start-up didn’t properly research the market to ensure meaningful demand? Maybe sales and marketing efforts are not the best strategy for that business? If you don’t truly understand your customers pain points, they will never have a serious interest in your product or service. It is best to figure out why customers are not engaging, sooner than later, to try and resolve those product or marketing related issues to see if they are fixable, before deciding to cut your losses and close shop.

4. Poor Teamwork

Sometimes, perfectly capable and promising start-ups begin descending into failure because of differences among team members or lack of effective teamwork. This does not necessarily have anything to do with how well a person or a group of people can perform in the workplace. It just means, at times, some people cannot work well together. It is a start-up CEO’s responsibility to know what is required to keep the team gelling and how to improve the team’s performance in thinking and acting like one well-oiled machine. If ineffective teamwork goes undetected or unresolved for an extended period of time, the start-up will struggle to recover.

5. High Employee Turnover Rate

If the employee turnover rate is high and recurring, it could be an indicator of a failing start-up. There could be a number of reasons why the turnover rate is high. For one, a start-up’s culture plays a strong role. If employees are unsatisfied with the work environment, don’t like the people they are working with or don’t have confidence with their management, they will most likely be looking to leave. So if you have a revolving door with your staff, something is wrong and needs to be fixed, as you can’t scale a business on a wobbly foundation of talent.

6. Lack of Adaptability

Any start-up that says it is immune to changes in the market is setting itself up for failure. External market forces ultimately dictate how your start-up will fare against changing trends and competitors in the industry. If a start-up doesn’t truly understand or disregards what is happening outside of its own office, it is doomed to fail. For a start-up to truly reach success, it may have to pivot several times until it finds the right mix of product-market fit. If a start-up does not pivot fast enough, that is usually a sign the end is near.

7. No New Product Development

For a start-up to stay relevant, it needs to constantly be reinventing itself. Your product development efforts are never done, as you should always be striving to improve from version 1, to version 2 to version 3 over time. Because if you don’t, you can rest assured your competitors will clearly copy whatever you are doing successfully today, and will be improving their business at your expense.

8. Unaware of Finances

Every good start-up should always be aware of its financial situation. But you would be surprised how many entrepreneurs have no clue about their finances, and hence cannot easily predict they are about ready to slam into a brick wall. There needs to be financial reports, dashboards and KPI’s that a start-up studies closely each week to understand how much it is spending, earning and retaining vs. its goals. You can’t manage what you are not measuring, so make sure you get your key reporting metrics identified and tracked.

9. Creative Block or Stubbornness

Oftentimes, a start-up’s team gets hung up on a particular perspective or approach to an issue. When things are not going well, it is important to push the team to change their perspective and try something new and creative to solve the problem. Start-ups that are heading towards failure are often unsure of where they should be heading as a company, and lack the creative thinking skills that are required to ideate potential solutions. Or, they are simply inflexible and not willing to entertain a different approach.

10. Boredom

The team getting bored with what they are working on can surely be a start-up killer. Early in the start-up’s life, the team is motivated, as the venture is exciting to work on, and the team enjoys working towards the success of a start-up. Hence, everyone works with dedication and puts in long hours. But the reality is, after the euphoria wears off, it is easy for the team to get bored with their work. It could be due to their attention diverting elsewhere, lack of motivation, or monotony in the day-to-day grind of the workplace, especially if the business is not succeeding as planned. A good entrepreneur will figure out ways to keep its employees engaged and motivated at all times.

So, do a critical assessment of your business to make sure you are not about ready to drive off the cliff. If any of the above resonates as happening with your business, it is time to put an immediate fix in place.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By George Deeb

George Deeb is a Partner at Red Rocket Ventures and author of 101 Startup Lessons-An Entrepreneur’s Handbook. For future posts from George, please follow him here or on Twitter at @georgedeeb or @redrocketvc.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Making Customer Engagement The Common Scorecard For Growth

April 1, 2020 No Comments

By Stephen Diorio

Using big data and analytics to create better incentives for sales, marketing and service teams

Steve Lucas, the new CEO of iCIMS, a business that makes software that helps companies recruit talent, is set on doubling sales over the next 18-24 months. He’s done it before as the CEO of Marketo, where he doubled the revenue and tripled the value of the firm to $4.75B in 24 months.

One of the reasons he’s very likely to succeed is he understands how to lead sales and marketing transformation in an engagement economy where customers are channel agnostic and non-linear buyer behavior has blurred the lines between sales, marketing, and customer success functions.

In his book, Engage to Win: A Blueprint for Success in the Engagement Economy, Lucas explains how to grow a business in a market where changing customer buying behavior defies traditional notions of a linear “lock-step” customer journey and makes CRM based on customer, lead, and account ownership an outdated management concept. A key lesson from the book is that growing a business in the engagement economy will require teamwork, customer stewardship, and a highly orchestrated stream of never-ending customer engagement.

“I view my role as CEO as being the firm’s Chief Engagement Officer,” reports Steve Lucas. “My job is orchestrating the customer experience across many touchpoints and functions. This means developing a real-world strategy for customer engagement, which is something they don’t teach in business schools yet because it is different from a traditional marketing or sales approach. Executing a customer engagement strategy involves creating a vocabulary, culture, measurement system and model for orchestrating the engagement of sales, marketing and services with all the key customer stakeholders in ways that resonate and deliver a superior customer experience.”

Many organizations are putting a single leader in charge of marketing, sales, and service to gain more coordinated control over the entire customer journey. To succeed, this new breed of “CXO” will need a better set of financial incentives for these disparate groups to work together. A key success factor in this new growth equation is to create a common scorecard for customer success based on unified customer engagement metrics that provide go-to-market teams more incentives to work together. The holy grail is to create a common set of financially valid and data-driven incentives where the ultimate scorecard for marketing and sales is firm value, future profits and revenue growth.

Growth oriented investors like Vista Equity Partners (which owns iCIMS) and the Rock Ventures Family of Companies understand and exploit this new buying reality. These market leaders are generating outsized returns on the companies in their investment portfolios because they are mastering the science of growth by actively working with their leadership teams to help them apply advanced analytics to transform their go-to-market culture, processes, and incentives.

“One key to winning in the engagement economy is to develop a universal customer engagement quality score that defines engagement excellence to all the stakeholders in your organization,” according to Lucas. “That means defining as an organization what a 10 out of 10 looks like in terms of customer advocacy, quality of interaction, content sharing, and other relationship health metrics. And then using advanced analytics to build composite metrics that quantify and track customer engagement quality on a customer and account level”

Putting this scorecard for success into operation involves deriving customer engagement quality metrics from the customer data that exists in CRM, exchange servers, marketing automation, and content management systems. The secret is to develop a set of Key Performance Indicators using advanced analytics that track the behaviors and activities that define team success but ladder up to a common scorecard for winning.

Sports teams have embraced analytics in this regard in recent years and provide a model for sales organizations to follow. Like selling teams – sports teams have many different players that play many different roles in order to win the game. There are nine different positions on a baseball team. 11 in Soccer. And over 25 in the NFL. But there is only one scorecard for success – winning. And everyone on the team works together towards that goal.

For example, winning soccer teams can get all 11 players to work as a team because they all understand what it takes to win – score more goals than the opponent. A revolution in advanced analytics has allowed these teams to break down the performance expectations of each player on the team into discrete KPIs – goals saved, passes made, possessions won, and clean tackles – that help each player understand and measure their contribution to that overall goal. In baseball, advanced analytics have allowed GM’s to structure player contracts with financial incentives based on a coherent set of individual performance metrics – runs created, runs saved, errors avoided, hitting efficiency – that all add up in ways that increase the “win probability” of a team and “wins above a replacement player” for an individual.

Sales and marketing leaders need to push their analytics teams to do the same. They need to use advanced analytics and AI to turn their sales engagement data into a common set of measurements and financial incentives that get sales, marketing and services working as a team towards the goals of growing firm value, customer lifetime value, and profits.

For example, Steve Lucas pushed his team at Marketo to clearly define and quantify what a good client relationship looks like empirically on a scale of one to ten. He kept the bar high on engagement quality. Any account team with a customer engagement score less than 9 had to take a series of actions to improve customer health. In parallel, he created a tightly defined customer persona called an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). He created a vocabulary, criteria, reporting, and most importantly financial incentives for his go to market teams to develop relationships with these “ideal customers”. To enforce this discipline of delivering high quality customer engagement to the highest potential customers, his teams were paid 20% higher commissions when they engaged and developed “ideal” customers. They were paid 20% lower commissions when they spent their energies on less than ideal prospects.

Lucas plans to put the same formula to work at iCIMS once his team defines a vocabulary and metrics that best describe customer engagement quality and the ideal customer profile within their unique business model. “The scorecard for successful customer engagement is different for different business models. What worked at Marketo will be different from what works at iCIMS because it’s a different business. But the principles will be the same”, according to Lucas. “The key is to develop a universal customer engagement quality score that defines engagement excellence for all customer facing employees.”

Unfortunately, advanced engagement-based incentives like this are the exception rather than the rule, even though most go to market leaders have the customer engagement data they need to build them. This is a missed opportunity because traditional measures of marketing and sales performance based on a linear sales process are becoming outdated and dysfunctional. These measurement systems fail to reflect the complex variety of touchpoints, stakeholders, and hand-offs involved in the modern customer buying journey. This creates leakage, friction and conflicting agendas when sales and marketing spend too much energy negotiating credit for lead handoffs and not enough time engaging with customers as a team.

Sales leaders are missing a big opportunity by not using the customer engagement data available to them to create advanced measurement systems. Most organizations are sitting on top of large amounts of customer engagement data in a variety of Revenue Enablement systems – including CRM, exchange (email and calendar), content management, marketing automation, web sites, social media, customer engagement management systems. And that’s not counting data third party partners (like LinkedIn or D&B). This information needs to be used to track and inform the right sales behaviors, actions and performance incentives.

“Organizations are going to need to rewire their commercial engines to better reflect the new buying reality where customers are channel agnostic and buyer behavior is non-linear,’ reports Brent Adamson, distinguished Vice President in Gartner’s Sales practice. “It’s a big job. It’s going to be painful because it involves reworking the legacy commercial infrastructure, and creating new roles, processes and metrics. So, getting it right in the next several years is probably a reach. But companies that even start to make progress creating metrics, dashboards and incentives that are a more accurate proxy of the current buying reality are going to have a significant advantage over the competition.” According to Adamson, companies that align their metrics and incentives with customer buying behavior will give them a much more accurate picture of the cost of sales, the opportunity cost of selling time, and how different resources contribute to their commercial organizations in terms of commercial outcomes. This will allow them to make much better decisions about how to allocate people, technology, data and content resources based on what they are contributing to the top line, bottom line and value of the company.

Sales and marketing leaders like Marketo and DHL are taking the first steps to align their metrics and incentives with the activities and behaviors that lead to commercial outcomes, customer lifetime value, and account health. They are using advanced customer engagement analytics and sales AI to create customer engagement metrics to serve as the foundation for performance measurements based on real-time information about sales engagement, deal attractiveness, content usage, and persona-level interactions to provide management a more accurate proxy of the current buying reality.

For example, using advanced customer engagement analytics and sales AI to create measures of customer engagement quality were fundamental to helping DHL transform the way they sell, according to Ton Verleg, the VP Global Sales Development at DHL. “We changed the way we sell and for that you need to be armed with relevant data and insights,” relates Mr. Verleg. “The analytics and AI give us unprecedented visibility into the opportunities and provides actionable next steps for our sales executives to sell with the buyers perspective, helping customers be more successful.”

To help organizations develop more financially valid ways to manage their growth resources, I will be studying how leading organizations are creating a common scorecard for growth and presenting the findings at a Revenue Enablement Forum this summer. Reach out to me to participate in the research, and the forum.

Feature Image Credit: Customer Engagement Metrics, Getty

By Stephen Diorio

Sourced from Forbes

In News

The Surefire Ways Of Increasing Customer Engagement On Social Media This 2019

March 6, 2019 No Comments

By Fred Chua

Social media has become more social especially for brands and companies that use it as their medium of communication. Customers have also started using it to convey their feelings towards the product or service they received.

Because of this, increasing customer engagement on social media is very important for companies. But how should brands do it nowadays?

There are many ways to do it. Here are the top 6:

1. Post or upload content that is relevant to your brand.
Uploading a bunch of nonsense would get you nowhere. Of course, people would want to know more about your products and services so you should post about that. They would also like it if you don’t sell them to their face. Be creative and subtle about it. This way, they would comment and share your content.

2. Join groups that are related to your company.
This probably should be a common sense. Joining a group that is not related to your brand is unwise. When you select the right groups, you’ll reach new audience and would probably have more customers and engagement at the end.

3. Answer in a timely manner.
Salesforce has stated in their report in 2017 that 80 percent of consumers think if a company replied to them faster, they would be more loyal to them. Meaning, they would constantly engage with your brand as long as you keep on answering them efficiently. Also, according to the same report, 71 percent of customers stated that 24/7 customer support also adds to the factor of loyalty.

4. Make everything mobile-friendly.
Mobile has surpassed desktop, tablet, and laptop users. People would use their phones to do almost anything. Whether it is booking flights, online shopping or complaining about things, they would go to their phones. In fact, Statista has found out that last year, 52.2 percent of all online traffic was from mobile users.

5. Share user-generated content.
When you share content from one of your customers, it would make your brand’s social media accounts more personalized. Personalization is one of the things that make consumers want to interact with you more. This is important because 69 percent of people surveyed by Salesforce emphasized that personalization is important.

6. Offer things like discounts, promos, and games.
Many people are naturally competitive and this would initiate a conversation. It would also make your audience interact with each other and build a community within your brand. Moreover, discounts, promos, and other free things would definitely garner attention even from non-customers and that would result in more engagement and ultimately sales and revenue.

Why is social media engagement important?

To grasp the importance of communication between brands and customer through social media, let’s look at this example, Rogers Communications. The Canadian provider of wireless communication services has increased its customer satisfaction by 65 percent after using Facebook’s Messenger to answer their customers. They have also managed to decrease customer complaints by the same percentage all the while using Messenger.

The digital age is here to stay and companies should embrace it.

By Fred Chua

I am a Philippine-certified Electronics and Communications Engineer who serves as the CEO of Magellan Solutions Outsourcing Inc. Magellan Solutions is one of the top call centers/BPO companies in the world that can deliver high-performing operations to businesses of any type and any size.

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