How to Build a Winning Customer Engagement Strategy for Your SaaS

Customer engagement strategies are essential to your marketing success, especially in the SaaS industry. Guiding existing customers as you acquire new customers simultaneously will give you incredible momentum.

Even though customer engagement is a must in marketing campaigns, many companies face challenges they didn’t anticipate when implementing customer engagement strategies. According to a survey in Marketo’s “The State of Engagement” report, 82% of marketers believe they understand the types of interactions their customers want, but nearly half of consumers disagree. This points to some fundamental disconnects between what companies offer and what customers experience.

This article will focus on customer engagement strategies, why you should create them, and how to create them. With the information in this article, you can review your current strategy and decide more clearly what improvements you need to make to meet your users’ expectations.

What is a customer engagement strategy?

There are tons of different definitions of customer engagement on the Internet. But the gist of these definitions is that customer engagement strategies are implemented to encourage customers to continue being associated with a brand. These strategies span across various touch points throughout the customer journey. Your customers constantly interacting with your brand and products is the most significant indicator that these customers are engaged. 

In customer engagement strategies, the bond users establish with your brand is as essential as their interaction. That’s why you need to deliver content and experiences that add value to the customer. When your customers begin to see your brand beyond a product or service provider, they become attached to your brand.

Does your business need a customer engagement strategy?

Customer engagement is one of the most important aspects of a successful company. It doesn’t matter whether you are a new startup in the industry or a massive company with many products and services. Regardless of the size of your company or what you offer your customers, you always need an effective customer engagement strategy.

One of the reasons for this is that there is a deep relationship between customer engagement and customer loyalty. Having customers who trust your brand will keep them long-term and keep them engaged. Therefore, customers who have developed relationships of trust with your company are likely to generate more revenue than a customer who feels less valued by that company.

Your loyal customers don’t just increase your profitability by making repeat purchases themselves. At the same time, there’s a high chance that they’ll also influence the decision of others and encourage them to purchase what you’re offering. This communication can also help you control what others say about you on third-party websites.

What are the benefits of building a customer engagement strategy?

Implementing an effective customer engagement strategy enables companies to make progress in many areas, from improving customer relationships to driving conversions. We can summarize the benefits of the customer engagement strategy to companies under five headings as follows:

#1 Improved customer relations

Your users often ignore your sales efforts when you don’t have any customer engagement strategy in place – primarily because they feel like they are not being valued enough. They have no affiliation with your company, making you only one of many options rather than their number one choice. Needless to say, it is unlikely that a user who feels this way will buy from you again or want to stay affiliated with your brand.

Thanks to user interaction, the possibility of your users choosing you, a brand they trust, increases by almost a quarter. This also happens no matter what new trends emerge with the trust you have established with your customers or what your competitors promise. 

#2 Offers sustainable growth

If you’re relying on increasing customer loyalty by offering constant discounts, you’ll notice that this model is not profitable in the long run. On the other hand, customer engagement strategies that you support with personalized services encourage your users to come back for their lived experience. This saves you the trouble of constantly looking for new customers. 

Continually looking for new customers makes it difficult for you to scale your business. Focusing instead on developing your customer engagement strategies will expand your loyal customer base, paving the way for sustainable growth.

#3 Increases brand value

An effective customer engagement strategy is value driven. Customer engagement is about providing value to the customers who want to buy your product. With effective customer engagement strategies, you can essentially change the way your customers view your brand, allowing you to build meaningful relationships with them. 

#4 Better customer experience

Customer experience is how your users perceive your brand. Delivering a satisfying customer experience to customers can be a  little challenging. Sometimes users may even engage with your brand several times on various channels before making a purchase. 

Customer engagement is directly related to how customers interact with the company, the product, and how they experience it. Therefore, effective customer engagement strategies positively affect the customer experience.

#5 Higher revenue

Engaged customers are essential to revenue. These users are often more loyal to your company and have high purchase rates. In fact, a prospect who has just interacted with your brand has a 5-20% probability of buying, while the chance of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. This proves that investing and customer engagement can boost your revenue and help your business grow.

What are the challenges of customer engagement?

Despite its benefits, customer engagement can still be challenging at times. For example, when you view your customer journey in a tool like Hockeystack, you may find that less users make it through the trial phase than you think. 

In such a scenario, it becomes challenging to re-engage and retarget customers. Your responsibility at this point is to minimize friction as much as possible when taking the next step.

Another challenge with customer engagement is that users prefer self-service options over other options. The SaaS industry is self-service primarily, which mainly simplifies the process. However, since human interaction is minimal, your users may feel that you are not addressing their needs adequately in some cases. In such a case, you may notice a delay in user activation and product adoption. Therefore, when determining your user engagement strategies, it is helpful to take a slightly more proactive approach to ensure customer engagement from all channels.

Examples of customer engagement strategies to follow

You should tailor your customer engagement strategy to offer solutions that align with your customers’ expectations and interests. You can use some effective methods to succeed in this process. 

Here are six strategies to follow:

#1 Stimulate emotions

70% of purchasing experiences are based on how customers feel about being treated. That’s why you need to develop something that will stimulate your customers’ emotions to take the positive action you want. 

Appealing to your customers’ feelings is a powerful conversion tactic. Therefore, take care to reliably introduce yourself to your customers through your brand’s communication channels. Providing emotional customer experiences will increase purchase frequency, customer engagement, and customer promotion of your brand to peers.

Another effective way to activate users’ memories, emotions, and desires is to focus on building a narrative rather than being explicitly salesy all the time. Leverage dynamic content to tell different stories that touch each customer segment based on your data. In this way, you increase the probability of purchasing by honing in on the emotions and imaginations of your users.

The easiest and most effective way to implement this for B2B companies is with case studies and emails to describe different use cases based on industry or job role characteristics. In B2Cs, emails that will touch users’ emotions on special days exemplify this.

#2 Leverage personalization

Personalization is fundamental to successful customer engagement strategies. Using customization makes your customers feel important and not just one of many. Therefore, the key to a practical personalized experience is to listen to your users and leverage marketing channels where you can connect directly with them. So, whether you’re leveraging private communications or curating virtual events, create personalized customer experiences that let your users know you match their needs, wants, and expectations.

#3 Segment your audience

As essential as customizations and appealing to users’ emotions may be, it is equally important to analyze your audience in all its reality and variations. This way, you can adapt your product to your customers’ personalities, preferences, and expectations.

A high customer engagement rate depends on precise audience segmentation. This provides inclusivity to different groups of your target audience in each interaction you have with customers. Tailoring your message to each segment increases your likelihood of engagement. In addition, users who engage with highly relevant content, in the long run, are more likely to become representative of your brand and promote it to their environment.

#4 Listen to your customers and address feedback

Often, customers are clear and vocal about what they want and what they like. So listen to their comments about your brand and ask them very specific questions via sending a survey such as

• What do you like and dislike about our product?
• Which feature do you use most? 
• Are there any features that you’ve never used or would like us to improve?

All this feedback is a way of measuring customer satisfaction. Therefore, collect data and focus on necessary improvements to fully understand your customer’s experience. Establish a system of checks and balances that ensures proper communication. Finally, when faced with negative feedback, focus on calming the customer and solving that problem.

#5 Create a customer success center

A customer success center helps your customers access resources and find answers to their questions. The goal here is to provide your customers with all the support they need to make purchasing decisions and use your product to its full potential. Without proper support and communication, your customers may get lost or hesitate to take action. This is where the customer success center comes into play. The customer success center ensures your customers answer their questions.

#6 Use the right tool

To connect your users, you need many metrics and KPIs to measure and track the success of many strategies, from personalization to segmentation. In addition, customer engagement depends on your active user rates, the channel through which your users interact with you, and your conversion rates. You need a powerful analytics tool to keep track of all this effectively and clearly.

With Hockeystack, you can track all of these metrics – and more! – by unifying data from sales, marketing, product, and revenue. With these metrics, you can create customized dashboards and ensure everything runs smoothly as you guide your user engagement strategies.

Also, Hockeystack allows you to create surveys for any use case easily. And using this feature is not troublesome at all. You can choose the one that suits your needs from Hockeystack’s many ready-made templates and create the ideal survey in minutes.

Conclusion

Remember: customer engagement strategies involve creating the experience your users expect. Increasing your customer engagement and earning their loyalty is as comprehensive and necessary as developing and launching the product. Follow the tips mentioned in this article to create the ideal customer base for your brand.

FAQs