For all businesses, it’s important to have an appropriate onboarding process with an excellent customer success team taking care of the customer journey at each and every touchpoint. Even after customers are completely satisfied, it’s crucial to engage with them on a regular basis so that your company or brand remains on top of their minds. It’s important that customers are loyal and keep coming back to you to contribute to your brand’s growth. Isn’t this the entire idea behind running a business?

Also, when you are conducting surveys, for the process to have meaning, you need responses from real and responsive customers. If your customers don’t care about you or your product, they won’t take the time out to fill out a survey. The survey will be dumped deep inside their mailbox, like much of the other promotional emails. 

In fact, 63% of marketers agree that customer engagement includes renewals, repeat purchases, and retention and that engagement is driven by price (81%), quality (80%) and convenience (55%). They also believe that loyalty is about likability (86%) and trust (83%). So, to make sure that your customers still remember you and your services and also participate proactively, you’d need to keep your engagement game on!

Read on to see how you can do so.

Make your content more personalized

Very often, companies send out newsletters to existing and potential customers. And most often, this newsletter is the same for all the subscribers. However, be it for your blog updates or other information, it’s crucial that you segment your customers according to various parameters such as the source from which they had opted in, or the purchases they made recently. 

When you personalize your communication for your customers, your conversations are more relevant to them. The personalization makes them more likely to listen to what you are saying and engage with you. There are plenty of ways to personalize your communication with your customers. For instance, MailChimp is a useful tool that helps you create separate lists with personalized content for each one. 

Ask for feedback based on customer behaviour

According to research by Monetate, 83% of retailers that had a budget dedicated for personalization were able to exceed their revenue goals. You must design your feedback in a manner that is relevant to customer interests and purchase histories. 

Stitchfix, a clothing subscription box company, asked a short quiz to customers with questions like the kind of styles they preferred or whether they enjoyed shopping. Subsequently, based on their responses, it sent out personalized style recommendations suitable for each member.

While we’re at it, it’s important for you to be aware of the previous conversations that you have had with the customer. Nothing bothers someone more than repeated and redundant questions. Tools such as Salesmate help you keep track of all of the email interactions you have had with each customer so that you can provide them with relevant deals and solutions every time.

Let the rewards flow

We always want to have that little extra icing on top of the cake. It’s not a surprise, then, that there are companies running on the sole idea of providing coupon codes that offer a discount. People will respond more when you offer them something that they really like – it might be a discount or an added subscription on the product. Rewards will significantly boost your customer engagement strategy efforts, as people will be more keen to interact with you when they are getting something in return. 

Also, customers will keep coming back to your website for redeeming the offers, and you can perhaps ask them to share their feedback over social media. This will not only get you more results in your surveys but will draw in more referral signups. And, yes, sometimes a box of cupcakes with a thank you note sent to your customer’s desk does the trick as well. We’re after all humans!

Publish customer success stories on blogs and social media

This acts like a chain reaction!

Think of it like this. You interview a customer on how your product/service helped him achieve his goals and you publish the same on your blog and social media sites. In the process, you’ll certainly enrich your SEO and get more visibility. However, once your customer shares it on his social media profiles, you’ll get a larger audience who might be your target audience. User-generated content is the most trusted type of content among consumers. It is also the type of content that people engage with regularly.

Apart from the success stories, the content could be in the form of images, testimonials, and reviews. 

Show the real people behind your brand

Whenever we talk about brand attributes, we think about those things that the brand would represent if it were human. A customer might often wonder about who the excellent salesperson was that guided him through each and every step of the onboarding process, or who the customer success manager was who checks on his experience every other week. While most of the startups share their employee profiles on their website and often in the most unconventional ways, it is difficult for big companies to show all the faces behind their brand. 

In that case, some companies take the approach of having an employee section where they publish recent interesting employee news or employee achievements with images of employees. It increases the emotional connect of the customers towards the brand and often comes in handy to boost survey response rate.

These are some of the ways in which you can increase your customer engagement rate to boost survey responses. Anything else that you do? Do let us know in the comments section below.