Customer engagement – how to engage your customers with mobile messaging

Customer engagement is the offline or online interaction between a company and a customer. It can be used as a KPI, a metric to measure the quality of customer interactions (clicks, opens, conversions, churn, service quality, NPS, and more). Strong customer engagement drives business results, loyalty, and brand recognition.

You need to keep your customers engaged as much as possible. The better the relationships are, the more customers you will see in your customer base. To make sure your customers come back to you, you need to gain their confidence, guarantee their satisfaction, and make them repeatedly trust your products.

Each customer interaction requires different processes and might differ in priority. If you break down each customer journey, you will have a list of multiple touchpoints that contribute to the overall business-customer relationship and communication. To engage today's customers, relevance, personalization, and quality of services are essential!

Engaging customer experiences start with data

Consumers are more likely to purchase when a brand offers a personalized experience. With more stringent data privacy regulations, companies must earn the right to collect consumer data. The flood of irrelevant e-mails leads consumers to find ways to filter, block and ignore e-mails, even e-mails they subscribed to in the first place. Marketing and customer services departments must diversify the way they connect with consumers. They must, regardless of channel, put the customer experience above all else. Providing personalized, instant, and positive customer experiences and touchpoints increases your company's chance of being more valuable than your competition. Still, many enterprises lack a 360-view of the consumer, and data is kept in silos.

"Every customer is different and has their own needs, wants, preferences and behavioral patterns."

Send text messages to support the customer journey.

By reaching out to customers at different points along their customer journey, companies can create a positive customer experience and remind customers of the value offered. Once you've identified where you'll engage customers, you need to figure out what types of text messages you'll send. You can use mobile messaging to create campaigns based on specific triggers. The moment after the first sale is critical for the customer relationship. Reaching out to new customers is your opportunity to set them up for success. Send them a text message to follow up!

It's all about opt-in - collecting customer consent for SMS communication

Customer consent means higher conversion, engagement, and, in the end, ROI. Align data privacy and customer data with customer values and customer preferences

• Always offer "an SMS consent option" (opt-in)
• Empower customers to manage their preferences at all times
• Understand customer channel preference: e-mail, app, SMS, WhatsApp, etc

Giving customers the option to sign up for product offers, reminders, back-in-stock notifications, and other services improves ROI. Customers who receive these messages are generally more interested in what you have to say.

Messaging is a highly effective yet highly underutilised communication strategy to build engagement at any stage of the customer journey.

Create personalised customer journeys with rich messaging

Customers expect to be treated as unique, and without personalization, many consumers will opt out. Personalization can be as simple as greeting the customer with "Hi Anna" and marketing personalized products and offers through the communication channel that the customer prefers. There is a wide array of different communication channels: SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, and many other rich messaging channels. Find out which channel suits your customers best.

SMS, RCS and OTT messaging channels allow marketers to create personalised SMS and landing pages using your company's custom font, logo, and branding. Rich messaging supports images, colors, videos, GIFS, CTA buttons, and more for a higher impact.

The challenge, but also benefit, of today's marketing and CRM systems is making sure you treat customers individually in the customer's preferred channel. Rich messaging is here to stay, and it gives customers app-like experiences that improve conversion rates and innovate dialogue with your customers.