How To Delight and Better Engage Your Customers for Repeat Business

Did you know that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one (Source: Capterra)? You’re also 14 times more likely to sell to an existing happy customer than sell to a new one.

With this said, it’s important to foster repeat business by utilizing delighting techniques that keep your customer engaged with your brand, eager to return for more. This is the final key component to the inbound marketing strategy; WOWing your customers in a way that turns them into loyal, raving fans of your brand, gleefully promoting you to their networks.

You see, the relationship doesn’t end once the sale is made. Successful companies who embrace the inbound way understand they must continue to deliver amazing experiences to improve customer retention, boost followership, and increase revenue. This could be the grand differentiating factor between you…and your competitors.

Here are four simple ways on how you can delight and better engage your customers to encourage repeat business.

#1 Use Online Surveys for Feedback

Surveys are excellent tools for gaining real customer opinions and feedback to better your service, customer experiences and products. The data gleaned can be used in different ways to delight your customers including developing more buyer personas to expand your marketing reach, publishing content tailored to their interests, and stimulating innovation toward new ways of doing things.

The following are a few tips for your online surveys:

• Keep it short and simple so it takes less than 10 minutes to complete
• Opt for more multiple choice answers and limit open-ended ones
• Survey people who still remember their purchase and the buying process
• Share it with your list and on social networks like Facebook
• Use the comments from these surveys as part of your user-generated content

#2 Segment Your List for Personalization and Customization

Marketers have noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns (Source: Campaign Monitor). Segmenting your list, or divvying subscribers up into categories for personalization, is an extremely effective tactic to boosting engagement, increasing open rates, and generating sales. Your recipients will feel that you’re speaking directly to them because you’re sharing messages that specifically relates to their buyer’s journey and true interests.

Consider these ideas to help segment your list for greater customization of email content:

• Past purchases – Use order history for upselling opportunities to offer services or products that complement their previous purchases. Also share content that is relevant to orders they’ve placed in the past that could help them better use the product
• Buying frequency – Great for creating loyalty programs (i.e. “preferred customer rewards”)
• Content Topic and Format – Segment your list based on the content types they’ve expressed interest in from open percentages. Also consider the types of formats that have captured their attention the most (i.e. videos, infographics, blog articles, etc.)

#3 Utilize Social Tools to Monitor Engagement

Social media management tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and MeetEdgar will help manage and monitor your social campaigns. You see, these apps are valuable for maintaining an active presence on social media, interacting with followers, managing your accounts from one dashboard, and monitoring the conversations around your brand.

One way to stay tuned with your audience and discover what they want is to see what they’re saying about you (and your competitors) on social. Consumers are regularly using these networks as outlets to express their gratitude, give criticism, get advice, and share experiences. Watch for these discussions. Quickly respond and interact to show that you’re listening and truly care about their opinions. Being this active definitely adds credibility to your brand.

#4 Continue Publishing Value-Rich Content

Cultivating your customers with quality content always wins! It keeps them coming back to you for more because they know you’ll deliver the goods. Staying abreast of industry-related topics, answering common questions, offering solutions to problems and giving inspiration are ways to continuously share relevant content to your customers.

Here are a few other suggestions to publishing remarkable content:

• Build a content campaign from your survey results
• Share new blog posts with your email list and social media followers
• Curating content is a simple solution to fill in the gaps of your content strategy
• Work smarter by repurposing blogging content to extend the life of your post. Leveraging video, podcast audio, live-streaming platforms, tweets, and webinars are ways to get more out of your articles and give customers multiple options to engage in your content
• Use an editorial calendar to plan and schedule your content for consistency

Conclusion

Delighting your customers is the final piece to a working inbound marketing plan. Executing this step will boost retention, increase revenue, foster new customers and easily convert your current ones into loyal, raving fans of your business.

Commit to incorporating all four techniques into your strategy. You will appreciate the level of engagement generated and how it will improve your overall digital strategy.

Much success!