4 Ways to Increase Consumer Engagement for Your Small Business

Expert Paul Greenberg emphasizes that true customer engagement encompasses “the ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.”

If you can succeed at customer engagement, you’ll unlock significant revenue growth. A recent study by Gallup shows that higher consumer engagement leads to 66% sales growth and a 25% increase in brand loyalty. But it’s easier said than done.

Engaging your customers involves monitoring their behavior closely, regularly collecting feedback, testing new things, and interacting with the perfect message at the perfect moment on the perfect communication channel. This is especially challenging for small businesses, as they have to operate with limited resources.

Fortunately, there are some key ways you can improve consumer engagement with minimum investment in terms of time, money, and effort. Let’s look at four of them.

1. Run reactivation campaigns with coupons

Reactivation is a tactic that allows brands to send personalized messages to leads or customers who have “gone dark” for a while. A common example is a “we miss you” message with a discount coupon or a personalized offer.

Discount coupons are used to “sweeten the deal,” which will help you encourage your customers to make a purchase by making them feel valued. You can create personalized discount coupons based on past purchases, days of inactivity, holidays, or birthdays.

The challenge here is collecting consumer data and sending the right offers at the right time. You will need to rely on multiple tools to conduct surveys to collect data, create customized offers, and send them to your customers on their preferred channels.

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Because it syncs with your CRM and customer transaction and appointment records, vcita makes it easy for small businesses to automate reactivation campaigns. Whether it is wishing your customers happy birthday with a discount coupon or offering them a discount for the holiday season, vcita helps you do it all with ease, on autopilot, via email or SMS.

2. Work towards building an omnichannel presence

Even though different social media channels will give you varying levels of success in terms of leads and customers, having a presence on a few of them is necessary for wider brand awareness.

Brand awareness refers to the extent to which your target audience thinks of you under different circumstances. For instance, in general, when you are thinking of booking a ride, you might think of Uber or Lyft.

The challenge that small businesses face is creating different kinds of content for different platforms to build their brand presence on all channels. It is also equally challenging to monitor engagement rates on each channel.

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Ocoya offers a solution where you can create, publish, and monitor your posts on different channels at once. It comes with functionalities like an AI copywriting tool, hashtag generator, and scheduling tool which can save up to 80% of your time.

3. Collect first-party data with quizzes

Earlier in this post, we mentioned how collecting user data will help you deliver more engaging experiences. However, with increased concerns about data privacy, collecting first-party data might be challenging even when you are completely transparent about your intentions.

Fortunately, you can rely on gamification to get it done.

Gamification is the process of encouraging people to complete certain activities by rewarding them at each step towards completion just like video games. It allows you to engage with your target audience by providing them with directions and rewards at each step to make tasks look effortless and fun.

You can create quizzes with this philosophy to encourage your consumers to share their preferences with you.

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Jebbit helps you create interactive and fun quizzes that you can share with your customers via the channel of their choice to learn more about them. You can create quizzes with the help of templates within minutes with Jebbit and monitor responses in real-time.

4. Simplify the customer experience

Customer experience is the impression you make on your customers through all the interactions in each step of the buyer’s journey. In other words, it is how your customers perceive your brand as they go from a cold prospect to a verified customer.

Customer experience depends a lot on how easy you make it for your target audience to explore your products or services, get their questions answered, and make a purchase.

For instance, if your customer needs to book an appointment with you, they should be able to do it without requiring your assistance. However, if they need help while doing so, it will require more effort from their side, leading to a suboptimal customer experience.

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You can empower customers to interact with your business at will with vcita’s self-service portal, where they can ask questions, share files, book appointments, and make payments leading to higher engagement. They can also view all the relevant details on a friendly dashboard.

Wrapping up

Focussing on consumer engagement allows you to build meaningful relationships with your customers beyond one-off fleeting transactions. This pulls your consumers closer to your brand which increases the chances of repeat purchases.

Small businesses can engage with their customers better by following the four ways:

• Automate reactivation campaigns that send personalized discounts, offers, and coupons to your customers periodically based on their preferences.
• Share content on all social media platforms regularly for an omnichannel presence which can lead to increased brand awareness.
• Create fun and interactive quizzes through gamification to understand more about your customer's pain points and expectations.
• Remove roadblocks from your customer’s buyer’s journey by enabling them to interact with your business as per their needs through a self-service portal.

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