CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT IS A CHALLENGE, BUT IT’S KEY TO GETTING CUSTOMERS TO THAT FINAL POINT OF SALE.
Customer engagement is the motivating force that keeps customers in your sales funnel, steadily driving toward the final sale. This refers to the interactions that a business has with its customers that facilitate customer interest in and connection to the business; the stronger than connection with the customer, the greater your customer engagement will be.
In many ways, it’s the holy grail of business development. A highly engaged customer will do more business with you, more frequently, and may even evangelize your services to others.
But it’s not easy.
Only 28% of marketers are satisfied with their ability to engage with customers, even though over half (54%) say that increasing their engagement rate – the percentage of customers that actively interact with the business – is their top priority.1
Improving customer engagement means cultivating higher quality and more sustained interactions over time.
But a big part of what makes customer engagement challenging is that the tactics designed to drive it change as customers move through the sales cycle. Remember, a typical sales funnel generally includes in general four basic stages:
- Awareness: ensuring potential customers know you exist
- Evaluation: letting them know you can meet their needs
- Research: getting them to prefer you to your competitors
- Conversion: convincing them to become actual customers
This sales flow is called a funnel because it represents a process of winnowing. For every 100 consumers who become aware of your products, only a fraction – say, 30 – will move to the evaluation stage. Of those, maybe 10 will start researching with buying intent. And then perhaps 3 will actually purchase your CBD gummies, oils, capsules, or other similar products.
Even customer engagement tactics that you might deploy in more than one stage won’t necessarily be used the same way from stage to stage. For example, content marketing works in all stages, but the kind of content – the medium, the topics, the tone – will necessarily change.
So, what are the top tactics to use at each stage, and how do you use them in each stage? Those are the questions this paper will answer.
Let’s get started.
In This Paper...
1: Awareness
2: Evaluation
3: Research
4: Conversion
Engagement in the awareness stage means getting prospects to interact with your brand at all.
The goal of the awareness stage of the sales cycle should be self-evident: it is to generate awareness that your business exists and offers solutions in which the prospective customer is or could be interested. The key during this stage is exposure. In the language of online marketing, that means impressions, or simply getting eyeballs on your marketing and advertising efforts.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
For online marketers, SEO is foundational because it is the best way to get in front of people who are searching for terms related to your business. As discussed in the sidebar, it’s important to draw a distinction between demand generation and demand capture. For demand capture, you want your website to rank for search terms that signal intent. An online searcher that uses the phrase “best credit card processing companies” or “best point of sale systems” for example, is plainly expressing intent.
However, don’t stop there: also consider adjacent and related searches to generate new demand. For example, perhaps a potential customer is searching for “how to reduce operating costs.” If your service offering can help a business achieve a goal like that, you can optimize for that phrase and generate both awareness of and interest in your business. The goal of SEO is to rank near the top of the results for appropriate searches and, ideally, get customers to click.
Advertising
Advertising is the preeminent means of generating awareness. However, advertising is an extremely broad category, potentially including audio ads on radio or in podcasts; print ads in newspapers or magazines; commercials on TV; online ads via ad networks or in search advertising; and more. As a result, advertising can be very broad based (casting a wide net), or it can be highly targeted. The former is more effective at demand generation but will likely generate a low engagement rate, while the latter is perfect for demand capture and will, with an effective advertising program, often yield a high engagement rate. The goal for advertising is to reach as many people in your target audience as possible and, ideally, get them to take some appropriate action (visit your website, pick up the phone, etc.).
THE SECRET TO CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT IS DELIVERING AN EXCELLENT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, AND THAT STARTS FROM THE TOP OF THE SALES FUNNEL. PLAN YOUR CAMPAIGNS AROUND WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WILL EXPERIENCE.
Demand Generation, or Demand Capture?
During the awareness stage, you want your business to show up in two different situations:
- Demand capture: When prospective customers are actively looking for a service or solution like yours,i.e. you want to “capture” existing demand.
- Demand generation: When prospects aren’t actively looking, i.e. you want to “generate” demand where none exists.
Engagement in the evaluation stage means satisfying customers that you can meet their needs.
Once a prospective customer knows that your business exists, they have to determine if you offer the right solution to their problem or need. That’s what happens during the evaluation stage. Your job during at this step is to facilitate interactions with the customer that satisfy them that your products and services are a match for what they are looking for and then pull them seamlessly into the following stage (research and due diligence).
Educational Content
Start by developing “customer personas,” which are detailed descriptions of your ideal customers. This Content marketing actually works throughout the sales funnel, but the key is making sure you provide the right content for each stage. During evaluation, you need to provide materials that help them understand where and how your offerings will solve their problems.
That means educational, informational, genuinely helpful content is extremely important.
Within this genre of content, think about two different subsets. The first is content that focuses on your products specifically.
Here you might include fact sheets, tech specs, product descriptions and product guides. If you have a customer who is looking for a specific kind of payment or financial solution, you want content that says, “We have exactly what you’re looking for.”
The second subset is product agnostic and is focused on solving problems. Yes, it might mention your product, but the focus is on relieving your customer’s pain points. Content here includes how to guides, reports, white papers, e-books, presentations, etc.
For example, to get in front of a “how to reduce operating costs” search, you can write a guide or white paper offering helpful advice, which might include signing up for a service like yours.
User-Generated Content
Third-party review sites begin to play a major role in the evaluation stage. Reviews are considered a form of “user- generated content” because it talks about your business but is written by users rather than by your own team.
And that can be extremely powerful.
Eighty-three percent of consumers don’t trust advertising.2 In fact, people trust user-generated reviews 12 times more than corporate descriptions.3 As a result, this kind of content can be very influential in determining whether your business can meet their needs.
The key during the evaluation stage for user generated content is making sure potential customers see themselves and the problems that you can solve in the reviews.
One critical consideration: are your reviews visible?
Review sites function like mini-Googles, with many different providers competing for the top spots in the listing. With Google, 95% of searchers never go past the first page of results, and the top listing gets fully one-third of all clicks on the page.4 It’s a similar dynamic on review sites. Make sure your review listing satisfies the conditions for ranking highly, or pay to promote your listing.
Engagement in the research stage means convincing leads you’re better than your competitors.
As soon as a prospective customer determines that you offer a product or service that they need, the immediate next question they need to answer for themselves is: are you the best option?
Here, they begin directly comparing you to your competitors. It is during this stage that prospective customers do deeper research and due diligence into your company and its offerings. Because payment processing is an intensively competitive field – your potential customers have a lot of options – you must stand out during this phase. Further, if your service offering normally requires an ongoing commitment (e.g., a 12-month contract, or a major deposit), that’s a big ask that will make your potential customers scrutinize your business even more carefully.
Consequently, during the research stage, you need to focus on high- quality interactions. Focus on cultivating an exceptional customer experience that showcases your competitive differentiators and how friendly and accessible your business is. Help them start solving problems right away. Perhaps most importantly, you also need to start proving the sales claims you’ve been making as the customer moves through the sales funnel.
Trust Factors and Social Proof
Your services presumably make your customers’ lives easier and solve real problems for them. Perhaps you help them reduce fraud, increase operational efficiency, reduce operational costs, etc. Maybe you
even help them open up new markets through your financial services.
But can you prove it?
During this phase, use content that credentials accomplishments. Case studies and success stories are extremely impactful during the research stage. They showcase your achievements for other customers. They prove that you can generate successful outcomes.
User-generated content like testimonials and reviews also remains very powerful during this stage. In fact, reviews alone can often carry a prospect through the sales funnel. Ninety percent of buyers who read customer success content say that it positively influences their decision to move into the final sales stage: conversion and purchasing. 90% of buyers who read positive customer success content claimed that it influenced their purchasing decisions.5
Interactivity
Don’t limit your customer engagement efforts to passively consumed content and initiatives, however. This is the stage where you really want to push for tangible and meaningful interactions.
Additional interaction tactics here might include pop-ups that ask for emails, live chat options that offer immediate one-on-one interaction, quizzes or surveys that allow the lead to supply you with information, seminars and sales meetings that give your team a chance to answer questions and address objections, and more.
In fact, if you use separate marketing and sales teams, this is the stage when marketing should be handing off leads to the sales professionals to begin nurturing and cultivating.
Throughout, remember it’s all about the customer’s experience: make it easy, maybe entertaining, always helpful, and definitely impactful.
Engagement in the conversion stage means convincing leads to making a buying decision.
This stage in the sales cycle is where the rubber meets the road, and customer engagement means making a purchase or signing an agreement. The interactions need to facilitate that ultimate moment.
For example, special offers, incentives, and guarantees (like money-back guarantees and service-level agreements) can help to push many customers past the finish line. But the real key is to use Conversion Rate Optimization techniques to push previously discussed tactics to the next level.
For example, we already know that customer reviews significantly boost conversions; according to review management platform Revoo, reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales.6 But businesses can take active steps to make their reviews even more effective.
For example, the number of reviews makes a difference – having 50 or more reviews per product or service can increase conversion rates by 4.6%7 – so developing an active review request process that increases the overall number of reviews can help. Then, increasing the average review rating can make an enormous difference. For example, increasing from a 3.5-star rating to a 3.7-star rating can increase conversions by an astounding 120%, though in general every 0.1-star rating increase will yield about a 25% increase in conversions.8
Although businesses companies cannot dictate what rating their reviewers leave, they can make sure their customers are satisfied before requesting reviews. They can also reply to reviews; not only can replies actually lead many reviewers to change their reviews, one study found that locations that reply to at least 32% of their reviews saw 80% higher conversions than direct competitors.9
But this, of course, requires a deep level of engagement and active work from the payment processors and merchant services providers if they want to maximize conversions into new, paying customers.
Referenes
1 https://ziffdavisb2b.com/20-demand-gen-stats-that-you-cant-ignore-in-2020/
2 https://statuslabs.com/reputation-management-stats-2019/
3 https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Role-of-Customer-Product-Reviews/1008019
4 https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2013/06/20/no-1-position-in-google-gets-33-of-search-traffic-study/
5 https://dimensionalresearch.com/
6 https://cxl.com/blog/user-generated-reviews/
7 https://econsultancy.com/ecommerce-consumer-reviews-why-you-need-them-and-how-to-use-them/
8 https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/10/23/roi-of-improving-online-reviews-0-1-stars-can-boostconversion-25/
9 https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/10/23/roi-of-improving-online-reviews-0-1-stars-can-boostconversion-25/
