Keeping your customers at the heart of everything is crucial if you wish to develop and maintain strong relationships with existing and potential customers and engage them with your brand. Customer engagement begins with the customer's first interaction with your brand and goes on till they make a purchase and beyond.
Customer engagement helps you strengthen their emotional connection with your business. It puts your brand at the top of the customers' minds when they make buying decisions, thereby positively affecting your bottom line.
Customer engagement instills trust and a sense of belonging among customers. Around 22% of customers are loyal to their favorite brands because of the strong sense of community these brands offer to their customers.
Customer lifetime value is one of the important metrics that play a significant role in measuring customer engagement levels. Depending on your business and goals, you can monitor this metric and craft excellent customer engagement strategies to boost your eCommerce business.
Before we proceed further, let us understand what customer lifetime value is and how it impacts the bottom line.
What is Customer Lifetime Value?
Customer lifetime value is the total amount of money a typical customer is expected to spend with a business as long as that customer remains a client of that business.
It helps you understand how valuable a particular customer is to your business by evaluating their relationship throughout the time they have been purchasing from you and not on a purchase-to-purchase basis. It gives you insights into the total average revenue generated by the customer and the total average profit generated by your business.
CLV is calculated by multiplying the average order value of the customer's purchases with the average number of transactions during a certain period and the customer's average lifespan with your brand.
CLV helps you develop excellent strategies to acquire new customers and retain existing ones while ensuring a steady flow of profits.
Now that we know what CLV is and the role it plays in impacting the bottom line of your business, let us understand the top 3 tactics to boost the same.
3 Ways to Enhance Customer Engagement to Boost Customer Lifetime Value
1. Create a User-Friendly Website
Your website is the first interaction your customers have with your brand. Hence, ensuring that this interaction leaves a positive impact on their minds is crucial for turning them into customers.
In fact, 94% of customers believe that website design plays a major role in how they perceive your business. Further, 89% of customers would prefer shopping from a competitor if the eCommerce store does not offer a good user experience. Hence, designing a beautiful website that offers excellent user experiences is crucial for businesses.
Here are a few tips you can follow to create a high-quality, visually-appealing website that attracts customers and engages them with your brand.
- Choose a color scheme that goes well with your brand logo to give your website a professional and polished look.
- Use high-quality images and videos to showcase your products. You can use a simple graphic designing tool like Canva to edit the images without any hassles.
- Write detailed product descriptions and other website content to convey the right message to the customers.
- Enhance product discoverability by installing advanced product search and filters on your website. You can use Sparq's Product Search and Filters plugin to do so.
- Simplify the website navigation by dividing products into various categories and sub-categories.
- Optimize your website design for mobile devices as 56% of online sales happen from mobile devices.
2. Provide Exceptional Customer Service
Offering excellent customer service is the next step toward engaging customers and retaining them. Provide 24/7 customer support to prioritize and build lasting customer relationships. Remember the type of relationship you share with your customers is directly proportional to the CLV.
According to Khoros, 86% of customers believe good customer service can convert their one-time purchases into long-term ones.
Follow the below-mentioned tactics to provide stellar support to your customers and boost the CLV.
- Deliver omnichannel support to customers through various channels, such as live chat, email, phone, social media, and others.
- Interact with your customers on social media by responding to their comments and messages on a regular basis.
- Invest in live chat software to connect with customers in real-time and resolve their queries. As per Invesp, 73% of customers revealed that live chat is the most effective way of communicating with a business.
- Maintain and manage a knowledge base offering customers access to tutorials, guides, videos, articles, and more. This will help in quick query resolution.
- Configure a chatbot on your website to address customers' questions without any manual intervention.
3. Personalize Customer Interactions
Every interaction you have with your customers contributes to cementing your relationship with them. The happier and more satisfied your customers are with your brand, the more likely they will make purchases and stay loyal to you.
Foster good customer relationships and nurture a healthy bond with the help of the following tactics.
- Pay attention to customer data and metrics. Unify the customer data across all the platforms to understand them on a more personal level. This will help you create a consistent experience for the customers.
- Personalize your customer experiences by delivering tailored content or messages to them. Did you know 80% of customers admitted that they would willingly pay more to a business that offers a personalized experience? Introduce personalization to every aspect of your marketing campaigns, such as email marketing, SMS marketing, product recommendations, and more.
- Conduct feedback surveys, such as NPS surveys, CSAT surveys, and more to collect actionable feedback about your products. It will help you find out what exactly the customers like and dislike about your business. It will also give you insights into the recurring issues and take measures to fix them.
- Introduce loyalty or referral programs to encourage customers to recommend your products to their families and friends. Offer incentives to these customers based on the number of referrals made or orders placed.
- Leverage upselling and cross-selling sales techniques to encourage customers to buy your products. You can bundle a few products together, promote popular items, offer complementary products at checkout, provide free shipping with a minimum spend, and more to lure them.
Wrapping Up
By demonstrating how much you value your customers and what they mean to your business, you can connect with your customers on a personal level. Engage them with your brand by offering top-notch customer support, providing value-packed content, and delivering personalized discounts. Follow the tips we mentioned in this post to boost customer engagement and increase your customer lifetime value.
