Customer engagement: definition and key stages in the customer relationship

By Charlotte Goyard

Published: 26 October 2024

What is customer engagement?

Every company dreams of engaged, loyal customers who are brand advocates! While this brand/consumer relationship may seem idyllic, it is possible to achieve it, at the price of marketing efforts aimed at your customers.

In fact, customer engagement stems from a relationship initiated by the brand, imbued with listening, attention and a flawless customer experience, combined with good use of CRM. What if you were to embark on a passionate relationship with your customers and prospects?

See all software Customer Engagement

What is customer engagement?

Definition of customer engagement

Customer engagement refers to the ability of customers to become involved in their relationship with a brand. This commitment can take several forms:

regular consumption of its products or services
recommendation to friends and family
relaying the brand through various digital channels, particularly social networks,
responding positively to a satisfaction questionnaire,
participation in events organised or sponsored by the brand, whether online or in person, such as competitions, cultural or sporting events, etc.

At a time when shoppers are increasingly connected, zapping, and over-solicited, brands have a strong interest in creating engagement with a view to retaining their customers and not letting them escape to the competition. At every point of contact with the brand, on both online and offline engagement channels, they need to look after their customer experience.

This translates into a set of marketing strategies designed to increase interaction between a brand and its customers and prospects. To ensure that existing customers remain loyal and prospects are converted, the brand will gather quality information to better understand the consumers interested in its products.

The key factors in customer engagement

To achieve this, every opportunity for contact with the brand's prospects and customers will be used, with the aim of building a relationship that is :

progressive
individual
and personalised.

This marketing approach helps prospects to commit to the act of buying, supporting them throughout the customer journey and establishing a relationship of loyalty with the company.

The attention you pay to your customers is crucial to the success of your brand.

The benefits of customer engagement for your business

Investing time and resources in developing customer relations has a number of benefits for the growth of your business.

Customer loyalty and retention

An engagement policy increases your customer loyalty and retention rates, since an engaged consumer is, by nature, more attached to your products or services.

And when you consider that the costs involved in building customer loyalty are much lower than those generated by an acquisition strategy, it's a good sign that you're on the right track.s by an acquisition strategy, customer engagement offers significant advantages by contributing to your company's profitability.

Improved brand image

Engaged customers are more likely to speak (positively) about you to their friends and family, and to recommend you on various channels, including social media.

They become influencers for your products or services and help (free of charge!) :

promote you
and enhance your brand image.

Customer knowledge

Getting to know your customers well is one of the key factors in improving customer engagement.

Learning more about your customers and the nature of their needs has two benefits for your business:

On the one hand, you encourage them to make more purchases because you are able to make the right offer at the right time;
secondly, gathering their opinions is a valuable source of ideas for developing your products and services in line with their wishes.

Greater profitability

In the end, between :

the financial benefits of increasing your customer loyalty rate,
the prospect of increased additional sales,
the free publicity offered by your most brand-conscious customers,
and better relevance of your offer and its distribution,

customer engagement guarantees you greater profitability in the long term.

How do you engage your customers? 6 steps to follow

Dialogue and lead management

Once you've hooked a lead or prospect, you need to initiate a dialogue and build a relationship. At this stage, you need to be careful not to break off the relationship by taking sales action too soon! Stay user-centric, and focus on :

service
experience
providing content that will help them to make a purchasing decision.

From this stage onwards, segment your leads. You need to define the level of maturity of your prospects in order to provide them with the information they need to convert. Don't hesitate to provide quality content right up to the first purchase (lead nurturing).

Centralise information with a 360° view and determine which contacts are eligible, which prospects are the most qualified and ready to buy.

Using Smart Data

To make the most of your database of prospects and customers, you need to exploit the full potential of smart data.

To do this, the use of customer relationship management (or CRM) software seems unavoidable. These tools enable you to collect and intelligently sort the data generated by customers' various interactions with your brand throughout their purchasing journey.

This provides you with invaluable information for :

Improve your customer knowledge and identify the most promising profiles,
personalise your relationship with your customers and adapt to their expectations.

💡 Another way of getting to know your customers and their needs better is through a satisfaction questionnaire, an excellent lever for customer engagement.

By relying on customer feedback, you're gathering valuable data to boost your sales performance, and at the same time demonstrating to consumers that you're interested in them.

Optimising the customer journey

The customer journey should be as simple as possible... otherwise you run the risk of them becoming alienated from your brand as soon as they come into contact with it.

That's why you need to make interactions between your customers and your company as fluid as possible:

through the different channels you use and points of contact,
right from the first visit to your website.

Once again, it is advisable to rely on the customer data you collect. The aim is to identify the points where effort is needed, so as to remove all the disincentives that might discourage consumers from making a purchase.

At the same time, make sure you offer quick and easy access to information, using a dynamic FAQ for example.

Developing customer commitment

When your prospect reaches the buying stage and becomes a customer, don't celebrate! This is just the beginning of a relationship that needs to be nurtured. Your strategy should encourage the factors that drive customer engagement at this stage:

Initiating a relationship of trust and creating intimacy

The post-purchase phase is full of doubts, so don't hesitate to create welcome scenarios to reassure your new customer. Use relational and informational content to prepare them to use the product. Make them dream and capitalise on the positive feeling your brand enjoys after the first purchase.

Test customer commitment and identify other needs

Propose additional or extended offers from the brand to test the customer's level of commitment to the product.

Is it a compulsive/occasional purchase or a long-term relationship?

Building loyalty and up/cross selling

As we have already mentioned, it costs a company less to build customer loyalty through marketing than it does to acquire new ones. The average basket of an existing customer is 15 to 25% higher than the average basket of a new customer.

Your retention strategy enables you to combat customer volatility. It is based on :

customer behaviour (average basket, frequency of purchases, sales history, etc.) ;
improving customer knowledge
establishing a long-term, close relationship;
enhancing customer value;
a culture of brand loyalty.

Provide regular information on the extent of the brand's product range, offer recommendations and test samples to generate additional sales. Capitalise on key moments (birthdays, various celebrations, etc.) to reactivate dormant customers.

💡 Find out, thanks to our article, how to build customer loyalty in 7 key actions.

Recommendations, the sign of customer commitment

A brand ambassador testifies with such effectiveness and authenticity that it far exceeds all your marketing campaigns. For your customers to reach this stage, you need to continue the dialogue. If you can reduce the commercial pressure, never give the impression of giving up. Support and service will enable you to enhance your customers' experience and satisfaction.

Develop a sense of belonging to the brand. Your customers need to feel that they are known, understood and included in a community of customers, a tribe whose members share common values.

From then on, your customer will seek to enrich the conversation. They will talk about your brand and your products within their own network. He then becomes, in a moderate way at first, an ambassador for your brand.

💡 Identify ambassadors via questionnaires, customer reviews and discussions on social networks and develop sponsorship programmes to expand your customer base.

CRM: the tool to integrate into a customer engagement strategy

Customer relationship management software is essential for finding, capturing and retaining good customers. It enables you to centralise data from all your channels (online and offline).

This information needs to be collected, segmented and analysed. It's a job that's impossible to do manually, especially given the sheer volume of digital signals available on social networks.

Your CRM software will help you determine the most opportune moment to distribute content or follow up a customer based on the information recorded. It is an invaluable ally when it comes to analysing your customers' buying habits, making the data accessible to all your teams (sales, marketing, customer service, managers, etc.).

🛠️ CRM examples:

E-DEAL CRM offers a modular solution that can be gradually implemented according to your needs. Its interface is fully customisable, ergonomic and accessible.
Finally, it is quick to implement and can be linked to your website, your ERP or your invoicing solution in no time at all: by communicating with all the components of your IT system, E-DEAL is a very open CRM that helps you work on engaging your customers.
Sellsy is a French CRM suite for VSEs and SMEs, enabling you to manage the entire sales cycle .
With Sellsy, you can centralise all the information you need to get to know your customers better, so you can send them the most personalised messages. In particular, the software includes contact sheets with enriched data (email, telephone, LinkedIn, etc.) as well as the history of all your exchanges. And thanks to dynamic segmentation, you can target your marketing campaigns with precision.