Engaging customers with brands is an effective way of understanding their purchasing behavior. It also helps delve deep into their nature and get an insight into their idiosyncrasies, when it comes to making a choice about a particular product or service in the market. Incidentally, it is also an exercise that can be as tough a nut to crack as it gets.
Customer engagement
Understanding human mind has never been easy. Often the manner in which a customer engages at a given point of time may not be the true reflection of his or her inner self. It is also not rare that a customer appears to be reluctant to engage but turns out to be a genuine buyer, subsequently.
Marketing ploy
Marketers, therefore, find customers’ brand engagement such an important marketing ploy for analyzing their behavior. This helps them work out a long term outlook for products and services from the perspective of customers’ satisfaction and their purchasing frequency.
Meaningful relationship
No wonder, brand engagement has been today widely recognized as a crucial marketing process for forming an emotional or rational bonding between a customer and a brand. For the retailers, such an engagement can help them plan a more meaningful relationship with customers.
Long term engagement
That customers’ behavioral affinity to the image and value of a brand plays an important role in ensuring his or her long term engagement with it has been proved by a recent survey. It points out that over 85 per cent of customers are greatly influenced by the brands that are in sync with their personal values. The same survey also found that over 70 per cent of customers avoid those brands that do not conform to their personal values.
A lot at stake!
This means there is a lot at stake for online stores or retailers when it comes to a fruitful customers’ engagement with a brand. Deeper the customer-brand connect more the chances of success for businesses. It has been found that when the brand connection is in sync with values customers hold so dear to them, it also instills in them a sense of being more successful in their lives.
Customers’ engagement with a brand can be made more long lasting and fruitful through:
Living up to the promise of quality
No matter how deeper the brand-customer bonding is everything is likely to fall apart if the products or services fail the quality test. It is the trust quotient and foundation of the bonding. Quality drives brand loyalty. Pricing and customers’ awareness about product or service is also crucial for ensuring loyalty to a brand.
Being frank with values a brand espouses
A customer is more attracted to a brand if it is found to be reflecting his or her most personal values and aspirations. So it is a value based affinity that helps create high respect for brand in customers’ mind. If the brand is open and honest with what it espouses it is likely to rope in more like-minded customers to its fold.
Cashing in on customers’ satisfaction
Creating those unique happy moments in the life of a customer during brand engagement can be a force multiplier. It is human nature to share joyous moments of life and experiences with others. A happily engaged customer with personal and emotional connections with brand is the most valuable brand ambassador.
Marketers challenge
Marketers constantly work on customer data to derive insights from past campaigns. But customer data is available across various data sources like web reports, transaction data, email responses, social analytics and other. As the information is available in different sites, the marketer needs to export these as excel and build a custom app to read the web-services offered by the respective sources and overlay data to arrive at customer behavior across these sources.
Plumb5 profiler
Plumb5 profiler, built for the marketer, helps synchronize his external sources and overlay data to arrive at desired reports, in real-time. It also helps understand customers’ engagement with brand better and chalk out an effective business strategy.