Note: This blog post is an excerpt from From Clicks to Loyal Customers: 5 Proven Strategies to Boost Customer Engagement. Download the full guide to learn how to use each strategy to build enduring customer relationships.
The numbers are striking.
According to Zendesk, companies with high customer engagement rates have a 35 percent lower churn rate than those with low engagement rates.
It adds up: engaged customers are more likely to be satisfied with your products or services, spend more, and feel a sense of loyalty to your brand. As a result, they are less likely to switch to a competitor.
And that’s more important than ever. The prospect of acquiring new customers has become increasingly uncertain, and the costs less sustainable. That’s why an estimated 80 percent of successful growth companies generate their value by unlocking new revenue from existing customers.
The good news is that any organization can boost retention by improving customer engagement with the right strategies.
1. Develop a customer-centric strategy
Above all, an emphasis on customer engagement requires a shift in focus—from acquiring new customers to enhancing the experience of the ones you already have. This means setting goals that align with customer needs and expectations, creating a customer experience strategy, and designing customer journeys to ensure consistently excellent experiences. Many brands might be able to offer one satisfying, frictionless experience. But the ones who pull it off again and again? They are the lucky few who earn customer loyalty—the kind that translates to deep engagement.
Use the Amplitude Journeys chart to build your customer journey strategy. Try this analysis in our self-service demo or with a free Amplitude account.
2. Build a deep understanding of customer behavior
The only way to foster deeper engagement is to see your customers’ journeys through their eyes. Understanding what actions users take (and do not) will help you foster the engagement and retention essential for long-term success—and ensure a ROI. The numbers back this up: according to the Braze 2023 Global Engagement Customer Review, 55 percent of its top-performing brands ingest data from multiple sources to build “360-degree user profiles, which provides the foundation for effective, relevant consumer experiences.” You can start driving customer lifetime value by collecting behavioral data, tailoring retention analytics to your product usage patterns, and identifying engagement and disengagement patterns.
Use the Amplitude Retention Analysis chart to explore customer retention in your product.
3. Design and deliver personalized experiences
Today, almost every business may be digital, but the old rules of what wins a customer’s loyalty still apply: remembering personal details, special access to their favorite things, and discounts on the products they regularly use. While doing this without a human touch may seem daunting, businesses have found new ways to cultivate meaningful customer relationships. These include going beyond generic segmentation (think demographics) to deliver tailored experiences.
Using first-party behavioral data drives cohesive experiences that mirror today’s omnichannel reality. Tracking customers to interact with them at critical moments in ways that provoke emotional responses is key. Equally important: thinking of your personalization efforts as a continuous cycle that you can optimize to activate newly acquired users and resurrect dormant or churned ones.
Use the Amplitude Lifecycle chart to view new, resurrected, and dormant users.
4. Enable curiosity
When it comes to engagement, shifting your focus to the customer experience is only one part of the equation. Another is adopting a mindset—and toolbox—that allows your team to drill down into the paths your customers take and how they can be improved. Democratizing data and equipping employees across your business with the tools and resources they need to uncover customer insights will help you deliver exceptional experiences for the audiences that matter most.
Use the Amplitude Funnel Analysis chart to identify friction and improve user paths.
5. Continuously innovate and adapt
Customer expectations are ever-evolving. Your product experience needs to keep pace. That might take extra work, but it will be well worth the effort. This requires embracing both qualitative feedback, such as NPS, with quantitative feedback, such as real-time data, to better understand why customers are satisfied, or not, with their experience and how to improve it. It also means tackling experimentation in a serious, programmatic way. It’s no small undertaking but doing it—and doing it right—will set you up for success for years to come.
Robust experimentation platforms like Amplitude Experiment can help you build a successful product-led experimentation program.
Drive growth through customer engagement
Read more about how you can improve engagement at your organization with these five best practices and discover how other businesses put them into action to achieve real results.
Download From Clicks to Loyal Customers: 5 Proven Strategies to Boost Customer Engagement and get started today.
