In online business, engagement is a measure of a company’s interaction with its people across all touchpoints throughout its cycle. Consistently engaging with people on a variety of channels help companies build and strengthen a human-to-human connection with them and adds benefits beyond transactional relationships.
Here we will cover the following:
- What is Engagement?
- Why Engagement in Business is Important?
- How to Improve Engagement in Business?
- Engagement vs Experience
- Summary
What is Engagement? 🤝
Engagement is the process of keeping a specific class of audience such as customers, management, employees, etc. interested in an organization or brand and invested in its success because of its perceived relevance and benefits of the audience.
Engagement is no longer limited to sales, service, or support. It is an ongoing practice for companies to satisfying their customer's or employee's needs and keeping in touch with them to a long-lasting relationship, loyalty, and business growth.
It is often used interchangeably which involves active interacting with your customer, management, or employee with messaging that interests you. Educates, or motivates them and encourages two-way conversations with your business basis their stage in their journey.
With more and more businesses concentrating on sales while developing their marketing strategies, business engagement holds the main stage in order for them to build major awareness and achieve deliberate inbound growth.
Why Engagement in Business is Important? 🤔
If you don’t have an engagement strategy, you could be missing opportunities to interact with employees and customers and build a relationship with them. There are no single engagement techniques that work for every organization across all types of industry. Although, a sincere focus on empathy, clarity, and simplicity in your dealings with people should be the basis for all your engagement activities.
There are many healthy engagement examples that can be used to model an engagement technique. Most of the brands use everything from funny, responsive social media agents to personalized discounts and offerings to inspire loyalty and affection in their customers and employees.
How to Improve Engagement in Business? 🧐
The more engagement you get, the more emotional investment you get for your brand. An emotional investment makes people less likely to shop with a competitor and what so strongly connects business engagement to people’s loyalty.
People don’t want to feel like they are missing out on something in the world. When you add value to every engagement that a customer or employee has with your company, you will create a powerful relationship between your company and them. They will be less likely to shop with a competitor or move to their company since they will miss out on the additional value they could earn from your store.
Here are the three ways to use your loyalty program to drive business engagement:
- Award Points when Purchase Made 🙌
Showing your people that you appreciate their investment and work in your company can be as simple as awarding them points each time they place an order. If you give value to every order when your customer place, making each of them more likely to return to make another order in the future. By showing your people (customer, management, or employee) they have just as much to gain from each sale as they do, they have the encouragement of reciprocity that will give them every reason to order from them again.
- Encourage to Connect on Social Media 👋
Driving engagement doesn’t necessarily have to focus on more sales. Actions like following your company on social media or sharing your store with friends on social channels can also go a long way in keeping them engaged over time. Add tangible value for every new follower on social media with rewards. That reward makes each new follower more likely to find other ways to engage and gives another reason to stay engaged with their people over time.
- Encourage People to Share Your Company with Referrals 👆
Driving engagement also doesn’t have to be only between your people and your brand, it can also be between people. Empowering your customers and employees to easily share your company with their friends and family can not only help you acquire a new one but also engage the people you have.
Add value to the person that is been referred to your company and the customer that referred by the person. It is this value that will make both of them more likely to reengage again in the future.
Engagement vs Experience 🥊
Everyone often confuses engagement with experience or sometimes, assumed to be the same. But experience and engagement are actually quite distinct concepts. While they aren’t the same, they do work together in impacting and determining a business to reach success. Experience refers to people’s perception of business interaction with them.
Whether it is with the sales, marketing, or support department, each and every interaction a business has with its people on any given channel constitutes their experience. The experience could be positive, negative, or troublesome depending on the outcome of the series of actions when people get in touch with a business. It influenced by the speed, convenience, ease, value, and delight of performing the same. Since anything and everything adds up to an experience, it can be interrupted by the mildest of hiccups and cause the people’s overall perception to change for the worse.
On the other hand, engagement is the sum total of all interactions between a business and a customer, encouraged by the business but driven by the people who involve in it. Engagement is an effort on the business part to encourage and nurture a relationship with people wherein they consistently receive value out of the same. A business can only encourage engagement and completely up to the people on whether or not they wish to engage with the company.
Experience is both an input (an engagement strategy) and an output (to know your engagement strategy is working) for engagement in business.
Summary
Engagement is another way to drive loyalty outside of an official loyalty program. Most of the successful brands aim to engage with business beyond the transaction. These brands stand out to bring in more repeat purchases, but they also keep their people as the focal point in the business by offering incentives, personalizing their journey, or providing educational content that is relevant to whatever they have shown interest in.
Share the engagement strategies that you have used to engage people in your business with us at LeadMine.
