How to retain your audience | 7 ways to boost customer engagement

In today’s hyper competitive landscape, to be successful, you need to be more than just a retailer, and you need to think of target customers as more than just customers. You need to think of them as your audience.

Today, people are looking to their service providers and retailers as more than just vendors. They’re looking for them to be innovative, to provide experiences, offer a seamless purchasing experience, and add value to their offering in various ways. Customer expectations are at an all time high, so it’s never been more important to know how to satisfy these expectations.

Here are 7 strategies for boosting customer engagement and retaining your audience.

1. Ensure you’re offering a great product and service

This might seem painfully obvious, but whether you’re launching your business, or you’re established and looking for ways to improve, this is your starting point.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Does your product or service stand above those of your competitors, or is it at least in the conversation?
• Do you have a road map for improving your product or service in line with, or going above and beyond, customer expectations?

If you answered “No” to either, you’ve got some work to do. You can’t retain an audience that isn’t there, and you can’t engage customers you don’t have.

If you’re a new business you need to think about and communicate the value you’re adding for early adopters. You want to try and create a community around your products and services, which can in turn help you to grow an audience.

2. Audit your approach to customer service and the user experience on your site

It might not be rocket science to run a bricks and mortar store or an eCommerce site, but the difference between the best retailers and the rest of the retailers when it comes to the customer service or the user experience can often be enormous.

When auditing your customer service and user experience, look for ambiguity in your processes and the potential for different staff members to take different approaches to the same problems and iron them out. You want to set as many “hard systems” as possible, by which we mean actions to take when specific scenarios occur. While some situations will require discretion, if you can automate as much as possible, and create as much consistency as possible throughout the customer journey, your business will perform better.

When coming up with these hard processes, look at your best performers, or the approaches your staff take that lead to the best outcomes. Don’t be afraid to also analyse how your most successful competitors deliver their customer experiences, as there might be lessons to be learned and gains to be made.

3. Create quality content that provides user benefit

If you have an audience, you can likely convert some of that audience into customers. By creating user-focused content that answers common user questions, either in the form of a blog or a podcast, you can broaden your reach, and gain more customers.

For example, let’s say you run a delicatessen with a focus on speciality meats. This is a niche area, with a lot of interest from foodies and slow food enthusiasts. A good podcast or blog could easily gain traction, particularly in more niche areas, and not only massively improve online trade, but put your bricks-and-mortar store on people’s radars if they’re passing through your area.

This can also be applied across your social media too. Think about how many Tik-toks and Reels are now micro-form helpful content? This format can be replicated across any industry, and serve to get your business in front of more eyes through people’s algorithms.

4. Create gamified experiences to improve interaction and maximise audience engagement

Applying play to tasks improves engagement as it offers users interactive content that can appeal to their competitive natures, their desire to win something, and their appetite for diversion.

You can create gamification experiences quickly and easily on Drimify to improve customer engagement in a number of ways. You could use instant win games to distribute promotional codes, create a Product Recommendation Quiz and embed it on your website to help educate and advise customers on specific ranges, and even build out longer form, multi-level games to tell brand and product stories in a more immersive way than traditional content.

All games created on Drimify also allow you to include a contact form for personal information and to give people the chance to opt in to your marketing newsletter – when people are engaged in an experience with opportunities to win or learn, they’re far more likely to submit personal information and accept marketing.

5. Use audience data to personalise your approach

Do you ever receive marketing newsletters that are selling the polar opposite of what you’re interested in? These create a very compelling case to opt-out, and create a situation where a business can lose a valuable email subscriber.

By analysing your audience’s preferences and behaviours, you can segment your audience, and tailor your marketing messages and recommendations accordingly. By addressing their specific interests, you’ll create a more personalised and meaningful experience, and have a better chance of engaging them in your content.

6. Optimise your omnichannel approach to deliver a real phygital experience

Omnichannel refers to retailers who are trying to create a seamless experience between both their physical stores and their eCommerce stores, and phygital is really looking to leverage the benefits of the physical store as well as the benefits digital can bring to the equation. If they sound incredibly similar, that’s because they are (contrary to a lot of hair-splitting articles on the subjects).

By allowing your customers to interact with and purchase from your business both online and instore, and adding value to both prospects, and looking to minimise friction between the two, you can massively improve the customer journey.

For example, you could create a Product Recommendation Quiz on Drimify, and embed it on your website in order to ask browsing customers questions about their needs and expectations from a product range, and ultimately recommend the most appropriate product.

However, if their needs are more complex, and not enough of their answers point to a most appropriate product, you could include a result where they’re advised to head to your nearest store to talk in more detail with a team member. In this example, a business can benefit from the digital advantages of an eCommerce presence and interactive product recommender, but it also recognises where a store visit might offer the most value to the customer experience.

7. Seek continuous feedback and improve

A business is a journey, not a destination. It’s all well and good arriving on the scene with an innovative new product that’s leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors, but eventually, they’ll catch up.

You may operate your service using some of the most effective and cutting edge technology on the market, but at some point, your competitors could adopt newer technology, and suddenly, you’ve rested on your laurels for too long and you’re behind.

Ultimately, it’s not enough to eye-ball the situation your business is in and make assumptions. You need quantitative and qualitative feedback from multiple sources.

Pro tip: On Drimify, you can easily customise and publish Surveys to seek feedback from your audience. Embed them on your website, make them accessible through QR codes in your store, or include the direct link in your email marketing.

Key takeaway

Retaining your audience and boosting customer engagement is an aspect of business you neglect at your peril. The modern business world is more competitive than it’s ever been, so you need to step up and be more than just a vendor of goods and services if you want to be a leader in your industry.

While each business’s audience and customer base is nuanced, experimenting with the 7 strategies listed above is universally a great place to start.