Keely Lords
Brand Manager
Don’t take shortcuts to engage with your customers. Creating lasting relationships with your loyal followers requires authenticity and effort - but it doesn’t have to be overly complicated.
At its core, customer engagement can be executed effectively with the right tools working at the right time. When you start creating your customer engagement framework, we recommend identifying the tools that turn your process into a strategy. Whether you need to refine your current approach or start from the basics, knowing what to do, how to do it, and when can have immediate benefits and take the guesswork out of execution.
Let's dive into six proven strategies that can help your customer engagement take flight.
6 proven customer engagement strategies
1. Strategic gifting
Cutting through digital noise is almost impossible these days. Most of us wake up to a deluge of notifications, and mass emails become a triage exercise—keep important emails unread for later, and ignore the rest that don’t seem personalized.
Add social media platforms saturated with ads that most of us quickly scroll past and it becomes an environment that makes it hard to get in touch with your audience
In this kind of environment, the power of tangible gifting shines through. A physical token of appreciation, ranging from locally sourced baked goods to a custom-engraved champagne bottle (bonus points if it includes a hand-written note), puts your message of “I value you” in front of online efforts.
Make gifting a regular part of your customer touchpoints with platforms like Postal. We meet our users where they are in their offline engagement strategy. Whether you’re just getting started or a veteran in offline tactics, we ensure your strategy is low-effort and has a big impact.
Remember when we said the key is figuring out what to give, when to give it, and how to give it? We do that for you with our AI smart collections that suggest gifts for certain groups of recipients, integrations with major CRMs that can trigger a send X months before customer renewal, and handle all of the shipping logistics for you. Plus, Postal's real-time reporting dashboards allow you to measure the impact of your gifting strategy, ensuring your efforts resonate with your audience and help boost your customer retention.
Give Postal a try today and see how gifting can amplify your customer engagement efforts.
2. Know your target audience inside and out
To build relationships in any walk of life, you need to get to know a person. The same is true for your target audience—customers are more likely to trust someone they feel like they know.
The kind of understanding we’re talking about goes beyond demographics. You need to delve deep into their desires, pain points, and habits. What makes them tick, what are their goals, and what are the problems they need a partner to help solve? These are the questions that lead to truly effective engagement strategies.
User data enrichment tools use AI to layer personalized insights on top of standard user personas, allowing you to spend less time researching and more time focusing on how you want to personalize your outreach. Craft detailed messages congratulating customer contacts on a promotion, acknowledging an impressive news feature, or asking them if they’ve tried out your newest product release that solves their pain points they’ve expressed in the past. These precise details enable you to tailor your marketing strategy and content marketing efforts to resonate on a personal level.
When your message speaks directly to your audience's needs and desires, they'll feel seen, heard, and valued. The goal is to make every customer an evangelist for your brand. This means your customer is happy, they want to continue being a customer, and they’ll refer their peers to be customers too.
3. Craft a seamless customer journey
Your customers should feel valued equally regardless of their stage in your customer journey. From initial point of contact to post-purchase support, the customer journey is filled with engagement opportunities from end to end.
Start by mapping out each leg of this journey. Postal’s Solutions and Campaign Strategy team recommends specifying the customer stage, who is your contact, the purpose of the stage (educate, introduce, demo, re-engage, thank, etc.) and what software tools you are using to understand the current design of your strategy.
An example you might relate to goes like this: a LinkedIn connection sees a thought leadership piece written by your CEO, navigates to your website to download a customer playbook, returns the next day to request a demo from your sales team, signs the contract, gets onboarded to your platform by customer success, receives newsletters to inform them of product updates, submits a ticket to customer support for help, and is contacted to renew their contract at the end of their term.
Your goal should be for them to feel the same after each of those touchpoints - valued. If you sent them a gift before they became a customer, consider sending them a gift again congratulating them for their first utilization of your tool, and again when they are considering renewing their contract for another year.
An important tool to organize the journey is a customer relationship management (CRM) system. This is one of the components you’d want to map out in your customer journey design outline. It allows you to consolidate and continuously update for interactions across channels, which you can use to optimize the personalization of each touchpoint.
Postal’s gifting platform integrates with major CRMs to update the customer profile for gifts sent, accepted, delivered, and post-delivery ROI. Use these insights to tailor your next outreach and gifting strategy to build off your previous successful touchpoints.
4. Personalize, personalize, personalize
Stop just replacing the company name in your email template and pressing send. Generic messaging may have worked in prior eras. But today, it simply gets lost in the shuffle.
Personalized outreach is your secret weapon for cutting through the noise to drive engagement. What says personalization better than including a link to a gift that you know the recipient will love. Even better - mention in your email WHY you thought they’d love the gift, reiterating that you’re thinking about them specifically. Build a caring follow-up into your automated cadence to ask your contact how they like their gift and use this as an opportunity to send an invite for a meeting to hear more.
Addressing customers by name in your communications is the status quo, so you need to find a way to stand out from every other generic email your competitors are sending. Some suggested email messages include product suggestions based on their browsing history, tailored offers to their purchase patterns, or take it offline and send handwritten thank-you notes to your most loyal customers.
5. Maximize efficiency through automation
In a perfect world, you’d conduct one-hour sitdowns with each of your customers on a weekly basis to nurture these relationships. Obviously, as your customer base grows, this isn’t feasible.
That’s why automation is such a potent force for making sure your engagement strategies remain effective as you scale up. With marketing automation tools, you can streamline repetitive tasks and give your team more bandwidth for strategic initiatives.
The possibilities are endless. With Postal’s customizable integrations, you can set up trigger points in the customer journey, that when satisfied, automate a direct mail send to the contact. Your time investment is in strategizing and the one-time setup with the help of our Solutions Team - then leave it to our tech stack to implement the gifting for you.
With automated workflows, you can even trigger follow-up messages based on customer behavior. Haven’t heard from existing customers in a few months? Automatically send them a nudge with a special discount. How about one that’s been buying a lot from you recently? Thank them with a free gift that’s sent without manual intervention.
The beauty of automation lies in its ability to deliver personalized experiences at scale. This means that, as you grow, your customer engagement can continue to thrive.
6. Turn customers into champions with loyalty programs
Loyal customers are the bedrock of any business. They typically represent a minority of your customer base, but are worth several times as much as one-time buyers.
These high-value relationships require special attention. Rewarding their brand loyalty won’t just boost customer satisfaction—it will likely lead to a positive feedback loop that fuels stronger retention and growth.
A well-structured customer loyalty program doesn’t need to be time or labor intensive. Simply offering exclusive incentives, discounts, or early access to new products can be an enticing way to encourage repeat purchases. Gamify the experience with tiers and levels to make the act of buying more exciting.
You can also transform your loyal customers into brand ambassadors by incentivizing referrals. Offer referral bonuses, discounts, or exclusive perks to both the referrer and the new customer to encourage advocacy. Even in the digital age, word-of-mouth marketing remains one of the most powerful ways to attract potential customers.
Elevate your engagement game with Postal
Executing an effective customer engagement strategy requires a lot of moving parts. Adding Postal’s offline engagement platform to your customer engagement plan doesn’t have to be complex. Our system is built for ease of onboarding and adding it to your current tech stack seamlessly.
Postal’s all-in-one engagement platform empowers you to implement these customer engagement strategies - create personalized customer connections through automated offline experiences that are measurable in real-time.
A successful customer engagement strategy requires the right steps and the right tools. Reach out to Postal today and let us show you how it’s done.
