Conventional wisdom says that acquiring new customers is six to seven times more expensive than retaining existing customers.
Businesses would have to invest considerable time, money and other resources to bring in a new customer, and therefore it is in a company’s long-term interest to keep an existing customer happy!
The best way to engage a current customer is to strike a professional relationship and maintain constant contact without being obtrusive. This is possible only if you have insight into your customer expectations about product quality, service excellence and other key metrics. Based on this insight, you can focus on delivering to such expectations. The actual engagement process should also include feedback for the overall business, and operations as well, and should result in a continuous loop of enhancing or tweaking customer service or support based on the feedback. Most customers feel empowered when a company actually makes changes based on specific feedback, and such empowerment more often than not translates to loyalty.
The proliferation of social media provides companies with a great method of understanding the pulse of the customer via status updates announcing latest products or services, contests with gifts for winners, asking questions, sharing informative posts, uploading infographics, and more. Social media can be less obtrusive than other mediums such as telephone calls or even emails, and provides the customer flexibility in how they like to communicate with you.
The rise of social media, however, should not make companies oblivious to other methods of online engagement such as blogs and emails. Blogs for instance, allow sharing technical and in-depth information, and the comments section allows for focused discussions. Direct emails can facilitate a much more personalized experience when compared to social media.
So, what’s the best way to engage your current customers? It usually depends on what the customers themselves prefer. But, many organizations have seen a great deal of success in simultaneously implementing more than one communication strategy for various mediums. There is a great deal of power in multiple touch point campaigns.
Source & infographic: Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application
