Currently marketing is going through a revolution. We are seeing a fundamental shift from brands pushing marketing messages in one direction to organizations now getting involved in a two way engagement with their customers.

1. Tips for Customer
Engagement
Written by Robert Barker, Vice President, Corporate
Marketing and Digital Engagement
www.alterian.com

2. Tips for Customer Engagement
Currently marketing is going through a
revolution. We are seeing a
fundamental shift from brands pushing
marketing messages in one direction
to organizations now getting involved
in a two way engagement with their
customers

3. Tips for Customer Engagement
Engaging with customers in a two-way
dialogue, connecting online and offline
channels within an analytics
framework, and fully recognizing the
value of each individual customer is
the way of the future.

4. Tips for Customer Engagement
With this ‘revolution’ in marketing we feel it
also calls for a revolution in the strategies
used to engage with customers.
To help in navigating these new strategies,
and this new approach, we have come up
with the following top ten tips to make
customer engagement more successful.

5. 1. Be Ready to Engage with Customers Now
The fact that internet search is now ubiquitous
means that when customers are looking for a new
product or service, they are likely to type into a
search engine what they are looking for and they
are ready to engage with the brands they find
immediately.
When they arrive on a website they are looking to
be engaged with interesting, dynamic content and
offers to lead them in to a relationship and buying
cycle.

6. 2. Engagement Permission is Valuable, Do Not Squander It
If customers give a brand permission to engage with
them by opting into receiving email or responding to a
direct mail, this is extremely valuable. The latest
popular statistic is that every email opt-in on average
costs an organization $118 USD.
When brands decide to “sell to them” or they don’t
engage them with relevant content or offers, be warned,
this is likely to end with the customer terminating the
brand relationship. Organizations need to take heed
that they can lose customer permission faster than it
takes to gain it.

7. 3. Engagement is an Ongoing Process
Engagement is about taking the customer on a
journey. This travels from an unknown to the
brand, to familiar with the brand through to
customer and finally on to advocacy.
This takes multiple engagement cycles and
therefore an organization needs the process and
technology in place to capture, analyze, create,
optimize and deliver content in a continuous
engagement cycle.

8. 4. Engaging Customers Means Focusing the Business on
Customers
Start thinking and orientating your organization
around customers, ideally as individuals. It may
sound simple, but many organizations instead
focus their business on their different product
segments or channels.
To do this effectively, organizations need to use a
customer database with which to build and record
customer relationships and engagement cycles to
track who is spoken to, about what and when.

9. 5. Engagement Needs new Marketing and Agency Skills
If marketers don’t understand all of the different
tools in a marketing arsenal then they could find
themselves left behind very quickly. Some of the
tools marketers need to be aware of include
multichannel marketing, analytics, online
marketing and SEO, social media monitoring,
social media marketing, content management
democratization, the list goes on. There is also a
new category of agencies emerging that
understand the need for these new skills, these
are called Customer Engagement Agencies.

10. 5. Engagement Needs new Marketing and Agency Skills... Cont.
The Customer Engagement Agency has been
brought on by the demand from clients to orientate
around the customer, which means the creative
side and the data side of marketing agencies need
to act as one.
There are organizations that can help clients with
this change and integrate the strategy, analytics,
creative, CRM and execution as a whole. Agencies
that move into this new category will thrive,
agencies that don’t, will die.

11. 6. Engage in the Conversation First
With new social media monitoring tools, it is now
possible to listen to conversations about brands as
they happen. However, judging when to engage
requires respect for the individual, for their privacy and
how to approach will vary as a result. Reputations are
at stake here. In the same way it is considered rude to
force yourself into an unknown group at a party, hand
everyone a business card and then ask when they will
buy from your company, it shouldn’t be done online.
Listen and wait to engage in the conservation, provide
valuable input, build trust and understanding and the
business will come.

12. 7. Engagement is an Organization Journey
The shift from mass marketing to customer
engagement doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a
journey of defining a strategy, understanding a
starting point (better web engagement, better
social media engagement, better email
engagement etc), and planning and rolling out the
necessary technology process, skills and
campaigns to support the strategy.

13. 8. Engagement is a Team Game
If marketing is organized in silos both from an
operational, digital and data perspective, then
customer engagement will be a challenge. The
objective is to engage with, and understand, the
customer and then communicate and deliver in the
way that best suits them, at a convenient time, with
their preferred frequency. The marketing department,
and its respective agency silos, sending uncoordinated
communications to the same customers is old,
unresponsive marketing that can cause a brand
irreparable damage. To achieve true customer
engagement, marketing must act as a whole.

14. 9. Engagement is Everyone’s Responsibility
Simply put, engagement is moving from one-way mass
marketing into two-way interaction. It’s inherently a
conversation and, with the rise of social media, more
than ever before, everyone in the organization is
engaged in the conversation. From the receptionist
engaging politely and efficiently with visitors in
reception, to the services reps doing the same by
responding to twitter service complaints, or sales
teams listening and engaging in the conversation on
social media networks and blogs – everyone needs to
be aware they are part of an engagement strategy. It
really is the democratization of marketing.

15. 9. Engagement is Everyone’s Responsibility... Cont.
Companies take note: Engaged employees equal
engaged customers – keep them part of the
engagement process.

16. 10. Engagement Builds Relationship Assets
What engagement is building is relationship assets
for the firm. We all know the stats about how much
it costs to acquire versus retain customers, but
there is a new terminology – it’s keeping them
engaged and understanding them as individuals
that matters. If it is done correctly it will build a
predictable, loyal, profitable set of customers that
will become of more measurable value than any
other asset of the firm.

17. Tips for Customer
Engagement
Written by Robert Barker, bob.barker@alterian.com
Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Digital Engagement
www.alterian.com