Engage and Nurture East Coast Prospects Insights

Are analytics showing a spike in the number of viewers/visitors on your website?

Amazing, isn’t it?

But this is just the first step to a cyclic journey that never ends.

After all, the marketing world runs on the systematic approach to attract, engage, convert, and retain. And while attracting them with judicious strategies is a challenging task, going further uphill from there to engage and nurture the audience is as essential as it is even more difficult. 

Why do you ask?

Because your audience will take a microsecond to move to your competitor if your website is not able to engage them with the right information and services that add value to their lives. 

Did you know engagement is the driving force behind a 23% share of profit, revenues, and maintaining the relationship between business and customer?

Yes, the right engagement strategy can take your business to greater heights!

But before we dive into our tips that will boost your ability and empower you to engage and nurture prospects going forward, lets touch upon the basics, shall we?

So, how would you define customer engagement and nurturing?

Engagement and nurturing are two aspects of marketing that are responsible for forging and fostering trust and building long-term relationships with consumers. 

With the aim to enrich customers’ experience, engagement in the simplest form can be defined as the process of interacting with the customer, keeping two visions in mind- one of fulfilling customer’s needs and second, yours, of checking the list of the unique set of goals.

Why is customer engagement important?

• The unique interaction between the customer and the brand, which lays the foundation of a relationship is important in the long run. It goes beyond just communicating and using tailored and customized processes to serve the audience and convince them to move towards the buying and retention end of the sales funnel. 
• The touchpoints at which engagement goes beyond communication are marketing, shopping, and purchasing, and this is where you can make the difference. How your business and brand is perceived is what makes the targeted audience choose you over others and build loyalty. 

Price(81%), quality(80%), and convenience(55%) drive engagement while loyalty is ensured by likeability(86%) and trust (83%).

• It is necessary to keep the customers interested and show them how committed you are to deliver to their personalized needs and how every product and service is aligned to resolve their issue and add value to their purchasing cycle. 
• Proactive and personalized communication through email, messaging helps both ways- the consumers can better understand your business. With regular communication, your business can devise strategies that hit the bull’s eye. This ensures customer loyalty. 
• If put in the right manner, customer engagement strategies with defined and periodically tracked metrics can continuously grow and improve. The defined metrics will help your team, work towards dedicated factors for customer satisfaction. 

So what should you practice?

• Don’t overlook the impact of feedback. Not gathering and implementing feedback will become a roadblock in your business’s growth and development. 
• Be clear with your message, make it readable, easy to understand, and even easier to retain. This will guarantee retention marketing is done right. 
• Connect with the audience with a personal tone. Take, for instance, address customers by their first name, or go for app-style chats, which give off the personal vibes. 

What you should avoid?

• Businesses often lack or don’t make enough effort to establish a human connection with consumers. We understand bots have made the work efficient, but nothing can replace the human touch. 
• If your business does not have a case-by-case flexible solution and system that resolves issues, then the standard one-size approach will ruin the customer experience and affect the loyalty of your customer base in the long run. 
• Having covered the basics, now let us move to some effective customer engagement tips that will help you maintain and grow a loyal customer base in 2020:

What are some of the customer engagement strategies that will drive your business in 2020? Let us look at them:

Conduct Surveys:

Surveys are an effective form of communication that will not only engage your audience but also devise and implement strategies based on these surveys to improve your business’s brand engagement and loyalty. This will help you identify what process or system is the audience most satisfied with and want changes in. 

Utilize multiple channels:

Keep your brand active on every possible channel where your target audience is. This will broaden the scope of awareness amongst your followers and widen the loyalty base. But it is essential to keep in mind that you need a different strategy to engage the audience on the respective channel. What would attract the Instagram audience might not be likeable to the Twitter crowd. 

Omnichannel engagement strategies have proven effective in retaining an average of 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies not utilizing engagement seriously?

Keep Customers Updated:

To keep your customer base engaged, it is essential that you keep them well informed about any new service that is being launched or if you are coming up with a new update of a product. Pre-renewal communication and offering personal discounts will keep your customer base stay loyal to your brand. 

Now that you know the what, why, and how of customer engagement, let's move on to nurturing.

So, what is lead nurturing? 

While many businesses can generate leads and begin through the first step of the sales funnel, they find themselves stuck with how to convince those who visit but do not buy. This is where nurture marketing comes to rescue. 

Nurturing goes one step ahead, which taps on the consumer's experience to understand better and devise effective strategies that can build a loyal base of customers who will become advocates of your products and services while they are moving through the sales funnel. 

Why is nurturing important?

This nurturing marketing through effective communication empowers your brand's standing as the authority after the consumer is done with the researching across the channels for the product that desire to invest. 

• Some of the common examples that effectively used nurture marketing to convert prospects into buyers are Nike Run Club, Amazon, Helix, etc.
• Amazon, take, for instance, sends emails to remind you of the products you have added to cart or a wish list but didn't go through the purchase. 
• While it takes time to deliver results, incorporating nurturing in your sales and marketing strategy will result in an exponential increase in return on investment. 
• Effective nurture marketing increases the number of opportunities that enter the pipeline and further enhances response to the campaign. 
• When incorporated right, nurture marketing plays a crucial role in improving prospect segmentation and push the conversion rate to a higher level. 
• The Annuitas Group reported a 47 % increase in the purchase made by leads that were nurtured throughout the sales funnel compared to those that weren't. 
• With nurtured leads, companies can shorten their sales cycle by 23% and generate 50% more sales leads at a 33% low cost per lead. 

As the marketing landscape gets competitive, research shows that compared to before, 48% of businesses now need a more comprehensive cycle for nurturing their leads before they convert.

What should you practice?

• Make use of marketing resources to pique interest in the users and how your product/service will add to the customer's life. 
• Keep track of the step where your consumer is in the buying process so that you can confidently send relevant, targeted content.
• Take a cue from Apple with the way in which it asks people to create free content which enhances the personalized buying process. This drills the company's name in the consumer's mind, affecting their purchase decision. 

What shouldn't you do?

• Don't skip the research. It is important that you know that thorough research of the prospect is important, not just in capturing them but also in building long term relationships.
• Don't go all sales-ey the minute you receive a lead’s contact information and overwhelmed with information about your products and service. 
• Never overlook email campaigns in the lead nurturing. Take Amazon, for example, which makes use of captivating email reminders if the consumers have shown interest in certain products but didn't, but it or have abandoned their cart. 

Now that you are aware of the basics, allow us to help you with the tips to create an effective lead nurturing process that will deliver in the long term: 

Segment the audience: 

Do you know what is a good way to lose your customer? Trying to sell your product and service without keeping into consideration the stage of which the audience is, in the buying process. This is why you should first segment your audience on the basis of their buying behaviour, which can include the blogs they read, the material they downloaded, or the video they watched. The audience segmentation will lay the foundation for a strong nurturing campaign.

Go Multichannel: 

Consumers now spent more than half of their time online. It only makes sense to be present to get the maximum return on investment from the nurturing campaign. Retargeting, social media monitoring, website content are just some of the ways which will help you build brand awareness and reach out to a broader spectrum of prospects.

Automate email marketing: 

Invest in an automated email marketing system to boost the impact of your nurturing campaign impact. You can opt for drip-feed or event-based trigger email campaigns. When compared to standard marketing rates, automated email messages generate 70.5% of enhanced open rates and an increase in the number of clicks by 152%. 

The aim should be to make consumers feel valued, especially in this testing times of COVID, by devising strategies to approach with the products and solutions in a way that culminates into a long term relationship. The aforementioned strategies should help influence retention marketing and convince consumers to repeat the purchases. 

You can always reach out to a team of digital marketing specialist of Saffron Edge for effectively engaging and nurturing your prospects with the maximum possibility of a higher return on investment.