Volumes have been written about customer engagement, which is an increasingly vital part of boosting sales, increasing membership, and satisfying both customers and prospects. While successful customer engagement requires a multi-level strategy, it doesn’t have to be complex... just thoughtful and complete.
At its essence, customer engagement can be described as sharing a pertinent message with an interested audience at the right time and frequency. And it’s not just from “you” to “them.” The very definition of engagement calls for shared interests and activities, which means giving customers and prospects the opportunity to engage with you.
Once your approach to engagement has been established, Dynamics 365 empowers you to execute your strategy efficiently and accurately measure your results for continuous improvement.
Why Engage?
Before we talk about technical and strategic customer engagement strategies, let’s look at the human side of the equation. Building relationships are at the heart of engagement: organization-to-organization, and person-to-person. Whether you’re buying, selling, or helping others deliver a product or service, it all comes down to collaborating with others to achieve mutual goals.
Consider balancing emotional and business considerations as you develop your messages. Your goal is to build valued relationships that:
- Encourage open, two-way communication
- Provide value to both parties
- Are built on trust and confidence
- Promote satisfaction and success
- Make everyone feel important
The more you align your customer engagement strategy with these principles, the more productive your relationships and results will be.
1) Your Message
By message we mean discrete information that you believe will benefit your audience. Your message should educate, illuminate, raise awareness and most importantly, contain something of value. For example, you could emphasize what readers will gain from using your product or service, or share insights that can be readily applied to improve individual and organizational performance.
The bottom line is your message should be persuasive enough to improve sales and upsell opportunities, satisfy customer wants and needs, and attract and retain different customer groups.
holds the insights you need to craft a compelling message. Stored within its data is a single view of every customer’s story: products they’ve purchased, problems they’ve experienced, prior responses to your communications and outreach, and insights into how your organization can fulfill their needs.
2) Your Audience
Once you’ve identified and developed your message, identify which groups are most interested in what you have to say. Dynamics 365 has a multitude of ways to your customer, prospect and partner data and create a targeted distribution list. This allows you to communicate in more personalized, purposeful, and powerful ways.
Before moving forward, make sure your message is framed around the language and priorities of your audience. For example, CEOs focus on organizational growth, profitability, reputation, and compliance, while marketing executives solve for brand awareness, lead generation and lead nurturing, and seek tools to monitor and improve their effectiveness.
Improve the results of your engagement activities by understanding and speaking directly to the needs of your audience.
3) Your Timing
Consider timing and frequency when developing a customer engagement campaign. Timing is simple: don’t talk about taxes in July or ignore buying or budgeting seasons when promoting products. For existing customers, Dynamics 365 can alert you to recent issues or tell you when it’s time to recommend an upgrade or the use of a complementary product or service. Engaging with customers proactively and anticipating their needs can have a positive impact on loyalty and satisfaction.
Frequency is another matter. If you’re executing an email drip campaign, you’ll want to communicate often enough to stay top of mind, but not so frequently that you increase opt-outs. And what’s the right rhythm for social media? Daily? Weekly? Although more is better when it comes to posting, it’s equally important that your posts are pertinent and have value. Be guided by your ability to create rich, compelling content on a consistent basis, and post at a frequency that matches that ability.
Engaging with Dynamics 365
All successful customer engagement combines business technology with the art of relationship, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the engine behind customer engagement.
Contact us and let’s discuss how InfoGrow can help you develop a robust customer engagement strategy boosts sales and builds profitable relationships with your best customers. Check out our pledge and take advantage of our expertise and commitment to your success.
Bob Sullivan - President, InfoGrow, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner
Today selling is all about relationships and customer engagement. Companies have to win customers’ hearts, reach out to their emotions and feelings to sell and cross-sell. Suspicious as it may seem at first sight, technology can indeed help to weave the intricate psychological aspect in interactions with customers.
To add some words to the topic, this recent article () also suggests some examples of how Microsoft-based CRM can assist in building customer engagement across a corporate group that holds multiple diverse brands. Cross-selling alone is a challenge, and if the task is to offer a quite distant product from the portfolio of the group’s sub-brands, the whole thing becomes even more complicated. Still, a combination of a good CRM strategy and a fine technology lets a company achieve their cross-selling targets by humanizing their marketing and sales messages, and this way build true relationships.