The challenge of customer engagements

Grant Leboff: So Dave, one of the keys, online, obviously is to engage with your customer base to keep them coming back, to keep their attention, in a world where attention is so precious. How does a business go about starting that?

Dave Chaffey: Well, I’m glad you asked about that long-term engagement, because often we’re just thinking of short-term engagements and getting the conversion, but actually the biggest challenge is getting that long-term engagement. So the starting point, as with a lot of my recommendations, is to measure engagements and to think – not on a short-term basis of how many people will open, or click on, an email campaign or who’s sharing your social media – but take it out to a longer time period. So, think about hurdle rates. That’s within a period of say, six months, how many people open, or click on, your email. And it can get quite scary because you can see perhaps only a quarter of your email list are actively engaged. Once you know that, you can then take steps to improve the content or the offers to make more people engage. Often it’s then doing some research to ask the people who are engaged what they like and then the ones who aren’t so engaged, find out why they’re not engaging. And look at the analytics.

I saw a nice case study from animal.co.uk the surfing/lifestyle brand, and what they did for e-newsletter is they looked at the demographics, male, female and by age of who was engaging with the newsletter. So for example, if females from 18, 30 aren’t engaging, there could be an issue with the newsletter for that audience. And perhaps you need to split the newsletter, male-female, to get a better fit.

Grant Leboff: What are the techniques you’ve seen that companies use to get great engagements? What sort of content, are there any themes and ideas that you see that tend to work better than others?

Dave Chaffey: Yeah, I think with content marketing it’s a blend of creating your own unique content, which people will return back to. Or offers, if it’s the retail space. But you can also do a lot, even if you’re a smaller business, with curated content. So, you’re adding value by distilling news information that can’t be accessed elsewhere. It’s really, the way I like to call it, the sell, inform, entertain, balance. It’s probably doing a bit of all of those that works for your audience.

Grant Leboff: When you get into the curated content space – because I agree, that’s really under utilized, especially with businesses that don’t have so much resource – then it’s about sort of becoming the hub, isn’t it, for your customers and the go to place? How do you think businesses establish that, for their database, for their customers?

Dave Chaffey: That’s part of the broader online value proposition, I would call it, which would help with customer engagements. So, it’s thinking for your personas, what will support them. If it’s a business persona, you’re helping them in their careers or to look good to their colleagues. And it’s really understanding the type of content that will help them do that. So what we do, at Smart Insights for example, we don’t send a newsletter everyday, we have a weekly summary which has got – rather than the fifty things Facebook did this month – the one thing you really need to take action on. And then for the consumer audience it’s about really having something that’s share-able and remarkable. I think it’s that ‘remarkable’ word that you need to try and find.

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