The top 10 high-performing customer engagement strategies for 2024

Having a reliable and engaged customer base has never been more important. In the face of economic uncertainty and increasing competition, fostering loyalty across the customer lifetime journey makes solid business sense.

Why is customer engagement important? When customers are engaged and loyal, this generally correlates with higher customer lifetime value.

In this article, we explore how the economy affects consumer behaviour and reveal 10 customer engagement tips to incorporate into your strategy.

The economic drivers of consumer behaviour

Australians are tentatively optimistic about the economy’s future. There is no denying that the events of the last few years have changed consumer behaviour and that those changes persist. Changes in consumer trends include a dominant shift towards digital behaviour.

Nonetheless, we may be facing a global recession in the future. While Australia may avoid the full brunt of the economic fallout that may follow, there’s no denying that the rising cost of living is hurting consumers all over the world.

In the face of these trends - economic uncertainty and the digitisation of consumer behaviour - businesses need to rethink the way they are approaching their customer relationships overall. The strategies that worked in the past may now fall flat in the face of changing priorities and rising concerns.

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Top 10 customer engagement and retention strategies

The future of customer engagement is rapidly evolving. Businesses need to keep pace with this change through smart customer engagement strategies that deliver results. Here are 10 strategies to consider.

1. Listen to feedback

Most of the time - the best place to find inspiration for future growth strategies and innovative ideas to add to the roadmap - is your customer base. Your customers are best placed to give you the greatest insights into the actions you need to take to retain them more specifically. If you’re not already doing so, it is essential to embed a regular programme of customer feedback initiatives that will allow you to listen to what they are saying about you. Keeping it regular means you can maintain a real-time pulse check on your customer base, ensuring you are continuing to keep them happy. Turn those insights into action, and the practise could also help define your future roadmap too. 

2. Make it personal

Marketing personalisation isn’t a nice-to-have any longer. It is essential. In exchange for the data they provide you with, customers expect that data to be used to create smooth and seamless personalised experiences. Personalisation is a win-win: not only do customers get the solution they need at a faster rate, but the business benefits from the positive brand sentiment that this cultivates.

3. Gamify the experience

Who doesn’t love an added element of excitement added to the shopping experience?  Using gamification engagement strategies helps to hook your customers into your brand and become more deeply entrenched into the community. Whether it’s loyalty discounts, referral rewards or gamification of some element of the digital experience, this strategy helps to keep your customers engaged in your brand beyond a single purchase.

4. Foster loyalty

It is becoming more and more elusive by the day - in both business and personal contexts… but how to inspire loyalty today? You build it through a shared values connection and then reward it in order to maintain it. Not only does this help to support customer retention, but it can also be a powerful tool for new customer acquisition through word-of-mouth marketing - as people are much more likely to talk about brands they feel are aligned with their personal values and beliefs system with their friends and family. 

5. Onboard as you mean to continue

The customer journey can begin and end with the onboarding experience. If this is seamless, engaging and meaningful, it will leave them in the best position to get what they need out of the business now and into the future. The power of having a positive experience in the initial ‘honeymoon’ stage of a business-to-customer relationship goes a long way to the way they feel about your brand in the long term, promoting a long-lasting positive brand sentiment.

6. Prioritise convenience at every point

Customers want convenience. From the availability and accessibility of customer support options, to finding the information they need about your product, convenience is king. Make it easy for your customers to do business with you, and they won’t be able to help but keep coming back for more.

7. Optimise for Multi-Channel

In today’s digital age, you can’t avoid omnichannel solutions. Modern customers need you to meet them where they are, whether that’s across SMS, email, web chat, social media channels or other digital communication platforms. A consistent, seamless and harmonious branded multi channel solution is the answer.

8. Use your data

If you want to understand why customers churn, look at your data. Analysing the data available to you can provide you with valuable insights to inform your customer retention efforts.

Recency, Frequency, and Monetary or RFM is a way of understanding customer shopping habits deeply, and is a model used in marketing that enables you to turn the data you have on your existing customers into future sales.

Recency helps you analyse how recently people visited your site and will allow you to figure out how to entice them back. If you have a client that hasn’t visited your site in a while, you might send them a “we miss you!” offer. A more recent visit might reveal a more engaged customer, so those are the ones you want to attract. 

Frequency is more about analysing purchases people are making, and sending offers and new product ideas based on the regularity of their buying preferences. Perhaps you’re a marketer at a telecommunications firm. Data tells you customers are constantly buying low-cost products. So, you should frequently send them low-cost offers communicating the percentage savings. (That said, if it’s costing more to reach out to them than you’re making back - you might want to reconsider whether you focus on that cohort at all)

If you have a customer that makes less frequent big purchases then you will want to make the most of this too by contacting them less frequently, at the time when you know they are most likely to make a sale.  

Monetary helps you discover who is a low spender and who is a high spender. These customers can then be categorised into life-time clients and one-off customers and be targeted in different ways. With people that spend less, personalised cross-sell and upsell strategies will help them spend more. Those that spend more are the ones to encourage towards your rewards program.

9. Automate the journey

Many of these strategies can be automated to free up resources within your business to focus on other areas of impact, such as product development. Sophisticated and seamless Customer Engagement technology with native AI features like Pendula can do exactly this.

10. Start a conversation

Customer service shouldn’t be transactional. Customer service needs to be a two-way conversation. When you engage in a conversation with your customers, you’re engaging them in your brand and taking them on your journey too, which means they’re much more likely to stay invested until the end.

Increase your customer engagement with Pendula

Customer engagement and retention is a challenge for all businesses moving forward into 2024 and beyond. Customers expect more, and businesses must deliver. Couple these higher expectations with the accelerating speed of digital transformation, and it’s clear that customer experience and engagement is the key to successfully navigating the landscape.

Pendula is here to help, offering the best customer engagement platform for conversations that power customer retention. As a no-code SMS digital communication platform, Pendula allows you to create automated workflows integrated with your customer data. The result is meaningful, personalised conversations and valuable customer insights.

Start a conversation with Pendula

When you’re ready to step up your customer engagement strategies, we’re here with the solution. Talk to an expert about how Pendula can make a difference to your customer retention and loyalty.