What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is simply a catch phrase used in reference to the emotional connection a brand creates with its customers. What measures have you put in place to boost your brand awareness and foster brand loyalty within your customer base? This is your customer engagement strategy!

Simple, you may think. However, as simple as it sounds, customer engagement is one of the more difficult parts of brand management. Although concepts like customer experience and customer service – of which you are likely very familiar – form a part of the customer engagement process, there’s more to customer engagement than those two might provide.

A good customer engagement strategy sets out to improve the relationship between your brand and its customers. The mistake many marketers make is believing that every customer engagement strategy or tactic must encourage the customer to spend more liberally and more frequently. As nice enough as that sounds (the goal after all is to increase your revenue!) it is far from an ideal way to build a lasting relationship with your customers.

If you hope to build durable, lasting relationships, you must shift your focus away from mere transactional relationships. What you want is to get your customers to love your brand and associate themselves with it; more like a relationship between two friends. To achieve that goal, you should be able to think creatively and critically, giving your brand a human face that can be empathized with.

Note that customer engagement basically involves getting the customer to voluntarily interact with your brand, as well as with other customers regarding your brand. While you may initiate the process, the client chooses to engage or not to engage, and his engagement levels may vary in depth and degree. Running promos of any kind might or might not translate into customer engagement.