Becoming Fiercely Loyal Your 3-Step Plan to Repurpose Customer Engagement

The Gist

• Beyond clicks and likes. Engagement that drives loyalty is bidirectional, relational and continual. Extend your perspective beyond superficial metrics like clicks and likes.

• Loyalty is more than repeat purchases. Engagement-driven loyalty helps cultivate customers who stick with your brand over time, explore a broader range of your offerings and stay committed even as conditions change.

• Engagement is all-in. Move from passive efforts to active engagement by using AI to uncover deeper insights, scale your approach and strengthen connections with your customer community.

People, in general, naturally want to be well-liked and talked about positively. Many brands extend this view to how they gauge their position in the market. They tend to believe that if their content is clicked on or liked, they’re providing what customers need. But in a world of clicks and likes, do companies really know who customers are and what they need from brands to build lasting loyalty?

Often, these approaches are limited in focus and very short-term. This leaves companies to wonder if they’re really getting true value out of their customer engagement program. Are the strategies they’re employing today driving brand loyalty? Could there be a better way?

Rethinking engagement means looking beyond common metrics like clicks and likes. Customer expectations are shifting, with relationships and experiences now taking priority. Companies need an engagement strategy with a repurposed focus on people and community that drives brand loyalty.

Let’s further explore how repurposing engagement and focusing on truly understanding customers will transform loyalty programs. It can also help companies develop lasting, deep relationships with users and increase retention with their growing customer community.

Table of Contents

The Experience Economy — Engagement Repurposed

Markets and customer needs are changing. Today, customers expect more than products or services; they’re looking for meaningful experiences. They want a real connection that they can find nowhere else. 

But are companies viewing engagement from a traditional brand view or from customers’ evolving needs? Brands need to rethink engagement to align with a more customer-centric approach, one that drives stronger customer loyalty programs and relationships. 

Customer Engagement: What it Is and What It’s Not

Customer engagement is bidirectional between a customer and a brand. It’s relational. But brands live in a clicks-and-likes world, and these measures can be very misleading when trying to understand engagement. Clicks and likes are singular, brief and anonymous. They’re almost superficial. There’s no significant engagement because a click or a like is fleeting. On the other hand, engagement is just the opposite. It drives brand loyalty because the interaction is bidirectional, relational and continual.

Engagement’s Increasing Importance

Customers want connection, experiences and memories more than anything else when they interact with a brand. Engagement is the engine that drives customer loyalty and builds a strong sense of community, because the brand is focused on dialogue that drives meaningful connection through their platform, content and social media. They’re developing a thriving, virtual marketplace for customers to remain connected with the brand and other like-minded customers. 

Loyalty’s Cornerstone 

Engagement drives loyalty, loyalty fuels connection, and connection enables community. Engagement is the anchor in loyalty programs that drives repeat purchases and brand advocacy. A strong, growing loyalty program drives revenue and organic growth. It will also protect brands from brand erosion and new market entrants.

Related Article: Is Customer Empowerment the New Customer Engagement?

Customer Engagement: 3 Key Leading Edge Benefits

As discussed, a repurposed engagement strategy fuels customer loyalty and brand advocacy. With engagement driving relational purpose that brings connection and community, the astute marketer focuses on influencing current and future customer behavior.

Here are three key leading edge benefits of repurposed customer engagement:

The Lifetime Customer

New customer acquisition is an expensive and time consuming effort. It can take several attempts and efforts to land that first purchase, and it doesn’t always guarantee repeat business. It’s often not the most effective strategy for driving organic revenue. But a loyal, engaged customer is a repeat purchaser, potentially for life. Focusing on existing customers can be more efficient. Continually engaged customers are retained customers, and they bring repeat business and a high customer lifetime value.

The Horizontal Customer

Lifetime customers can also become horizontal customers, with a tendency to explore the entire range of products and services that a company offers. Deep, meaningful engagement can instill customer trust and lower the hesitancy to try something new, since these customers know that the brand has consistently delivered value for them in the past. Exploring the horizontal range allows a company to increase its engagement further, strengthen brand loyalty and maximize revenue opportunities.

The Resilient Customer

The resilient customer is the company’s shield against the volatility of the modern market and builds long-term brand stability. A strong engagement strategy will drive your loyalty program, and when customers are loyal, they’re resilient. With switching costs low and countless new market entrants, customers have a wide range of options to select from. In an environment where one mistake can ruin a customer relationship, it’s the engaged, loyal customers who are far more forgiving. They’re more likely to look beyond a mistake and continue to be that trusted, resilient customer.

The Path to Repurposing Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is not a one-time effort. People nurture their personal relationships by spending time with others. It works the same way with customers. To build those lasting, strong customer relationships, brands should extend themselves beyond the traditional selling models and engage their customers. They should focus on the real root of engagement by moving beyond clicks and likes and prioritizing both personalization and a sense of community.

Here are three steps you can implement right now to build your customer advocacy program into a substantial market differentiator.

Make it Personal

Engagement requires a relationship, and relationships require personalization. Brands shouldn’t be afraid to increase their market segmentation, get more specific and increase their number of personas. All these activities open up new ways to communicate and help teams discover new paths to sell and serve. Personalization will lead to more relevant customer interactions.

Use AI to Open and Scale

By integrating AI into their operations, companies can work faster, scale smarter and uncover more sophisticated ways to connect with customers. AI is a wonderful tool to build and enhance market segments and personas. It can help brands uncover new strategies and insights to deepen personalization.

Use AI for deeper customer understanding. With customer demands and markets constantly changing, AI is a great tool to capitalize on emerging trends with little to no upfront investment. 

Engage From the Center

Remember that engagement is continual and bidirectional. The final critical step is to engage from the center. Brands should not consider themselves an outsider looking in, and they should view engagement as a proactive activity rather than passive activity. 

Don’t hesitate to get in the center of the customer engagement strategy. Brands can interact with their growing community as if they’re the host of the party. This will help them maintain a continual pulse on engagement, build a strong sense of belonging and represent themselves as a living, breathing entity.

Related Article: How AI Analytics Transforms Customer Experience Into a Strategic Investment

Customer Engagement as a Strategic Growth Engine

This table distills the article’s core concepts on turning customer engagement to fuel customer loyalty, which builds those necessary stronger relationships in the experience economy.

Putting Customer Engagement to Work for Your Business

A strong customer engagement strategy will serve as the cornerstone for a loyalty program. It allows brands to evolve from transactional clicks and delve much deeper into what customers truly want from the brand. True, continual engagement takes effort, but the payoff brings lifetime customer advocacy, deeper insight into purchasing behavior and brand resilience against competition. Following these steps outlined above can strengthen customer relationships and build lasting brand advocacy.