The importance of customer engagement

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement has many different definitions, but all with one thing in common; customer engagement is about the interactions with your customers and your brand.

Industry expert Paul Greenberg (HubSpot) defines customer engagement as “the ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.” This definition is great because it includes the idea that the customer is choosing to connect with your brand. This definition helps businesses to value the importance of customer engagement as a factor to help inevitably strengthen a customer’s emotional investment with a brand.

The importance of WiFi analytics

WiFi analytics are tools that can be enabled over an existing WiFi network. They can help you capture customer data including personal details such as names, ages and gender. WiFi analytics can also offer insights into frequency of visits and even a customer’s social interests.

WiFi analytics provide real-time data that can help your business push marketing campaigns and target potential customers. They allow you to reinforce all your marketing platforms, create marketing campaigns specifically tailored to your customers’ behaviours and obtain customer feedback.

WiFi analytics can also help with many aspects of WiFi marketing. To understand all things WiFi marketing check out our other blog posts here!

How to measure customer engagement

Activity time-

Activity time refers to how long customers spend on your WiFi. You can see this through basic analytics on the back end portal of your social WiFi infrastructure. With our platform you can see real-time engagement for users’ most popular time of day within your site and their most popular day of the week. This real time information can be used to help work out the best time to send email marketing campaigns, and when is most effective to provide offers to specific customers. The purple portal offers real-time information on visit count, age and gender and many more analytics. This combined with all the other information can be crucial to your business creating a perfect marketing strategy.

Visit frequency-

Visit frequency covers all aspects from how often customers use your WiFi, whether they are repeat customers or new customers, their ages, genders and many more. Visit frequency can help measure customer engagement as you can start to understand and control your customer retention rates. Using this information can help businesses to start to create controlled and monitored plans based on their customer engagement levels. This data can also help businesses to understand their level of customer engagement and analyse whether their existing plans are working.

Social media followers, likes, comments and shares-

Using a social WiFi platform allows your business to offer more opportunities for customers to visit your social media channels, whether this is from redirects or posting promotions. Once the social WiFi system has been in place you can analyse how your social media sites have been performing. If you have a business account on Instagram you can also use their insights and analytics to give you data back from your Instagram page. This will be able to tell you if you are you gaining more followers, the amount of visits to your page over the past week and many more. Using Instagram and your online portal combined can give your business a great head start to putting a social media strategy in place, one of the most important and hottest types of marketing for the 21^st Century!

The importance of measuring customer engagement

When customer engagement is properly collected and acted upon it can be used to improve a business’ products or services, refine marketing messages and portray messages from the sales. Pursuing strong customer relationships increases customer loyalty, therefore leading to high referrals for new sales opportunities and inevitably increasing sales and driving profits. 

Using customer engagement surveys allow you to have conversations with customers about their likes and demands. This understanding of your customer base allows room for a competitive advantage for your business. These insights received from customers can help your businesses to discover gaps within the market and utilise them.

Measuring customer engagement is also important as it can help to later create personalised promotions based on interactions mentioned in the previous paragraph. This means that your business can adapt its marketing to customers’ individual preferences allowing them to feel more valued when visiting your business.

Uncovering trends

Measuring customer engagement levels can help your business to understand behaviours of consumers and uncover any trends that may be fast approaching. Here are some key trends that have come from analysing customer engagement:

Loyalty programs-

Do you use an email marketing platform to offer loyalty schemes to customers in order to drive customer engagement? Loyalty programs do not have to be long processes; they can include offers for customers after their first visit. This offer still helps to increase your customer loyalty rates and will further help your business to improve customer retention levels. Loyalty programs show the customer that you are valuing their time and money spent in your business as well as their input for your future business decisions.

Technology improvements / trends –

Measuring customer engagement can also be done through surveys. Surveys can come in different forms, each providing different and valuable aspects of the customers’ opinion. Customer engagement surveys have provided the feedback that customers enjoy technology based experiences. A few examples of technological trends that have been discovered through customer engagement are:

• Providing QR codes that can help customers gain discounts or benefits in store.
• Using reviews to boost your business reputation and sales.
• Hospitality businesses allowing customers to pre order before they arrive in store.

Hyper-personalised experiences-

A huge trend that has come out of the last 5 years is the effect of hyper-personalised experiences. A report by Internet retailing says that 69% of consumers want to have personalised experiences and less than half of brands are offering one!

Hyper-personalised experiences combine behavioural and real time data that brands can extract from their customers. Using a social WiFi infrastructure you can extract this data at no extra cost. Brands can then use this to devise a customised marketing strategy. A great example of this is Starbucks; they produce personalised offers for their customers based on previous purchases and preferences. Their brand pulls this data from their loyalty app and it helps to understand the individual needs of customers. With this knowledge Starbucks can send personalised marketing and promotions to them.

Starbucks have not been the only business to use this trend; it has been adapted and used by many big brands such as Cadbury, EasyJet, Amazon and many more.

Hyper-personalised experiences are easier to create online and through digital marketing however using an in-store social WiFi infrastructure like ours can be the first step to helping you understand your customer analytics and get your business plan started.

The future of hyper-personalised experiences is vague, and with the introduction of artificial intelligence and virtual reality the boundaries are huge, so get your business up to date with the hottest trends today!