Rules of (Customer) Engagement

How to Keep Your Customers More Engaged and Less Annoyed

When it comes to marketing your brand and products to your customers, there can be a fine line between successfully reaching them and completely annoying them. The last thing you want to do is drive your customers, both current and potential, away, but of course, you need to do marketing to continue to grow your customer base and increase your profit margins. Let’s look at a few rules of (customer) engagement to consider marketing your brand without coming across as a persistent nuisance to your customers

Make Sure Your Customers’ Needs Are Priority Number One

The needs of your customers should always be your top priority. While it’s understandable that other aspects of your business may at times take precedence, it’s important to always come back to making sure your customers’ needs are being met. Ignoring the needs of your customers will almost assuredly result in losing them and losing customers won’t help when it comes to hoping to gain more of a customer base.

To make sure you’re always prioritizing your customers’ needs without crossing that line at annoying them, there are a couple of ways to balance prioritizing your customers’ needs without pushing the marketing of your brand too far.

First, always make sure you are genuine in your approach. If you’re more focused on selling your brand than on what matters to the customer, that customer may be put off and either ignore your messaging or try one of your competitors instead.

Next, it’s important to be aware of your customers’ buying habits, priorities, and desires. This can be done by analyzing behavioral data such as how often they visit your websites, social media sites, and engage in email activity. By being aware of the habits of your customers, you’ll also be able to pick up on what their priorities are. In doing so, you’ll be able to better effectively market to your customers according to what their priorities are. And that’s a solid way to establish yourself as a brand that make their customers’ priorities number one.

Don’t Overload Customers with Information

Whether you have a new product you want to inform your customers about, or have updates on branding and marketing material, keep in mind that sometimes less can be more. If your customers become inundated with too much information at once, they’ll be less likely to completely engage with what you’re trying to convey or sell. If a customer opens an email to see long paragraphs and lengthy text, they aren’t likely to read the entire thing thoroughly, if at all. This also applies to content, especially on your website. Content shouldn’t be long and lengthy. Instead it should be short and concise. When a potential customer visits your website for the first time, he or she should be able to immediately know what your brand offers and how it can benefit them. That means keeping your website clean, simple, and free from pop-ups and sidebars. And when it comes to putting out new content, whether it be results of a cases study or customer reviews of a new product, always be straightforward with your content. That will make it easier to read and comprehend.

Keep Your Messaging Fresh and Different

Some parts of the marketing world will have you believe that repeating a certain message over and over again will eventually make your customers give in and succumb to said messaging. Whether it be a link to click or a marketing ploy to try, the notion is that repeating a message over and over is the most effective way to get customers to respond. In actuality though, repeating messaging over and over is annoying to a customer. They’re more likely to tune your message out or completely ignore it all together. To avoid annoying your customers with a message you want to get across and instead of centering every piece of content around a sale, try providing valuable information to your customers.

This means that although you are hoping to sell your product or brand, you shouldn’t repeatedly drown your customers with the same content telling them how great you think what you’re selling is. Instead, be thoughtful in your marketing approach. There are ways to talk about your product that won’t come across as aggressive selling techniques. Be respectful of your customers and find ways to sell to them that are fresh and different.

Stay Away from Potential Inconvenient Surprises

No customer wants to be excited about your product only to discover later that there are inconveniences like hidden fees or extra charges for shipping and handling. You must make sure you are up front and honest with your customers when you are initially engaging them. If they find out later that they’ve been lied to about a certain product or service, not only will they most likely ask for a refund and not use your company again, they will more than likely tell others about their negative experience as well. And that will most definitely lead to a drop in sales and reputation for you and your brand.

Other inconvenient surprises can include things like broken links on your website or in your blogs, slow customer support response time, and payment processing errors. The bottom line here is to make sure that you’ve got everything in order before marketing to customers. All it takes is one mistake to send those customers over to your competitor.

Be Timely When It Comes to Engaging with Customers

The timing of your engagement with customers is as equally important as how you engage them. Timing can be everything when it comes to promoting a new product for your brand as well as marketing to potential customers. Many marketing strategies lean towards two types of timing categories, seasonal content and every day, relevant content. While this type of marketing schedule can prove to be effective, there’s also another way to make sure you’re communicating with your customers in a timely manner. As earlier stated, knowing your customers’ needs should be a top priority. And by knowing their needs, you’ll also know how to engage them with timely content.

Your customers’ needs aren’t always going to be the same and they aren’t always going to have the same needs at a certain time. That’s why paying attention to their needs will help ensure that you’re engaging with them in a timely manner with content that will be relevant to them at that time. By listening to the needs of your customer and tailoring your messaging to fit those needs in a timely manner, you’ll effectively be driving sales and more importantly, the trust and respect from your customers.

Remember that you don’t have to annoy your customer to have an effective marketing campaign. Stay attuned to their needs and priorities and respond with your content in a timely manner. In doing so, you’ll be more likely to see your branding and messaging flourish with positive response instead of withering because of over-marketing tactics that lead to annoyed customers.