The line between customer service and marketing has grown thinner than before. Today, they are both often thought of as one and the same when looking for ways to improve marketing performance or increase customer satisfaction. Right in the middle of that intersection is customer involvement.

There are several tactics and strategies that you can use to increase customer engagement. It takes a combination of your social, sales and marketing teams to increase overall customer involvement and the specific strategies for each of them are a little different.

1. Get Real on Social

Too often, your brand becomes lost on social networks, being just another brand that sends pre-scheduled promotional posts with shots of luxury products, carefully tested copies, and advertising budget to support it. Taking care of your social media profile by keeping it current and relevant can have big results in terms of engagement. This will encourage more of your audience to interact with your brand because they know they will get a response!

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2. Personalize Communication

Another tactic that you can use to increase customer involvement is to highly personalize your communication. This doesn’t just refer to email usage as your personalization can go much further.There are numerous ways to personalize your brand communication from the simple to the complex.

Let’s start with the easy way:

Send a happy birthday email

Use online quizzes to recommend products

Use messages that make users feel welcomed and known

On the more advanced side, there is an option to create your own recommendation algorithm

3. Make a Better First Impression

Another tactic that you can use to increase customer engagement is to create a better first impression. There are several different ways to do this, but one of the favourites is to use direct chat. The conversation platform used on your website can be used to proactively engage with your visitors, giving them a great first impression.

When using live chat to make a first impression, it’s important to send the first message. You might already recognize this tactic because it is used on many sites, especially eCommerce.

These simple and friendly questions asking if you can help are similar to in-store colleagues who offer help when someone sees new sales items. It should be polite, and easy to ignore if they don’t want help, but available if they need it. From there, just make sure your tone of speech is friendly and approachable. The same concepts apply to digital signage in your store. For more information on Digital Signage, visit moodmedia.co.uk/sight-solutions/digital-signage/

Here are some tips for increasing your helpful tone:

Use emojis. They will help add emotion and character to a boring conversation format.

Avoid long pauses between messages. Even if you need a few minutes to search for something, fill in the blank space with small talk or at least occasional messages and notify customers that you haven’t forgotten.

Don’t send more than 3 messages in a row, this can feel like bombarding your customers with text like that.

Create short messages and conversations.

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4. Create Useful Content

One of the biggest things you can do to increase customer engagement is to create content that benefits your customers. Too often, marketing efforts are focused on attracting new customers. This leaves current customers without interesting content, and because of that they begin to interact less with your brand.