Customer engagement is all about engaging your customers with your company or brand and it can lead to increased order values, customer loyalty and word of mouth recommendation.

Given that a recession is around the corner or already upon us, keeping customers is something that any well minded company should be focusing a lot of attention on.

Yet, in a survey reported in Brand Republic last week it was revealed that just 51% of companies have placed greater emphasis on customer engagement as a result of the economic crisis. 

The survey uncovered that those planning investment in new customer engagement strategies planned to spend their organisations’ money on a range of techniques, including many so called ‘Web 2.0’ areas such as blogging, user generated content and feedback and review systems to name a few. 

These services offer great ways to engage your customers. Blogs give you the opportunity to share wisdom or advice with your audience. User generated content allows your customers to create value with your organisation. And feedback / reviews offer that word of mouth recommendation to your goods or services.

Implementing these types of strategies can vary in cost and other resources; however, the investment can be more than worth it if it results in better relationships with your customers.  

So where do you start?

Have a look around at what the competition are doing. Start with the market leaders and work your way down to your own level (presuming you’re not one of the market leaders). What do you see as innovative? What would your customers react well to? How can you see their ideas working for you? 

Once you have the basic research sit down and brainstorm some of your own ideas. Put it all together and look at the resources you have to hand; money, time, personnel and skills. 

Perform a basic cost to return analysis – run each customer engagement idea through this process, determining whether the benefits to be had, match or exceed the investment required. 

This may sound difficult to ascertain when looking at customer engagement but there are ways to get a basic idea. Here are some questions you should ask yourself when evaluating any potential changes:

What is the average order value? – Can you make changes that will lead to greater order values? How much greater would you expect order values to be after making any change?

How long do you usually retain a client for? How valuable is the average client over that period? If you retain a customer what value would you be retaining in the business? 

How many customers do you normally lose? What target would you set on retaining customers after any changes? How much value would the retained clients bring you?

What does it cost to gain each new client in the first place? How much is your marketing, advertising and PR spend compared to the number of customers acquired? What would the value of keeping clients be over acquiring new ones?

Armed with the information you can make informed choices on the customer engagement strategy that is best for your business. However, remember this is an evolutionary process and should not stop there. Record your progress and ensure that you tweak your strategy regularly to ensure the best results. 

If you would like help or advice on preparing your customer engagement strategy or implementing and integrating blogging, user content or feedback systems please call and speak to Aren on 01872 555933 or send an email using the contact form provided.

Sound familiar? Well if so, you need to get acquainted with goals and funnels within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to your website. Aimed towards marketers, rather than geeks and techies, it generates a host of useful reports on the behaviour of visitors to your site.

Most important to many businesses is the goal and funnel elements included within the package. These detailed reporting systems allow you to track which pages result in lost conversions and where your would-be customers go.

However good your site, you will find that a percentage of would-be customers disappear during the buying process. Understanding where they go, and why, can be fundamentally important in making your site more successful.

Referred to as ‘Web Cart Abandonment’ on ecommerce websites, the average percentage of customers lost during 2007 was 52.1%. These customers leave for a variety of reasons ranging from matters completely out of your hands such as wrong credit card details to those well within your control, such as technical glitches or difficult processes.

So what are goals and funnels?

The term goal is used to refer to an outcome that you see as a positive result from your customer’s visit. This may be a successful purchase, viewing a particular page of your website or using the contact form. Whatever the goal you are looking to achieve, you can use the Google Analytics system to set the goal and track its success.

Monitoring the results is made easier through the Funnel Visualisation provided within the options. This visualisation shows how your would-be customers proceed down a particular path, predefined by yourself, towards the desired outcome or goal.

A typical Funnel Visualisation

This allows you to accurately monitor where and why your customers are leaving your site, abandoning their purchase or potential interest in your services.

Armed with this information, you and your sales or marketing team (in smaller businesses you and the cat) can look for reasons within the data and make changes or tweaks as necessary to reduce the losses and increase business.

If you would like to find out more about setting up goals and funnels you can visit the Google help pages here or speak to a member of our team about our range of support packages on 01872 555933 or by emailing info@uknetweb.com.

The key to success in more troubling times is to work hard to attract a larger share of the market followed by aggressive retention strategies to ensure that you retain those new customers.

With the rise of digital marketing, and the growth of online tools such as social media and social networking sites, there are now many opportunities for businesses to promote their business without breaking the bank.

Areas covered in this section include:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• The Rise of the Blog
• Email Marketing
• Social Networking including Facebook Pages, Advertising and Networking

One major area to consider if you have a website, and let’s face it most of us do, is search engine optimisation (SEO).

There are two forms of SEO to consider; natural search listings and pay per click. The first of these is driven by a number of factors relating to a mysterious algorithm used by major search engine, Google. The second is a pay for service where companies bid for clicks on keywords or phrases associated with their business.

Chances are you have received literally hundreds of spam emails and telesales calls from agencies promising to get you to the top of Google but don’t be fooled! Unless you operate in a niche market, work within a small specified boundary or have a massive advertising budget, getting to the top of Google is not an easy task.

You need to start the process of optimising your site by making a list of all the words and phrases people are likely to associate with your business. Include all the variations you can think of and play around with regional identifiers as well i.e. soap, organic soap, natural soap, beauty products, soap Cornwall, soap UK. If you get stuck try out Google’s Keyword Tool.

Once you have your list, you need to start working out the competition for each of these words or phrases, after all, the phrase may attract 1,000 hits a day but there could also be 2,000 companies fighting for each and every one. The best way to track the number of searches performed against the competition for each word or phrase is to use a service such as Wordtracker which collates searches and the competition for them.

So now you have the list, what next?

This list of keywords or phrases now forms the backbone of your SEO strategy. They can be used to target customers through pay per click or written into the content of your site to improve your natural rankings. Further still, they may even affect the structure of your site with you deciding to dedicate whole pages or sections or your site to a particular area highlighted as a good search term.

The benefit of the SEO approach to marketing your business is that it gives you tangible, measurable results to analyse. This will mean having a suitable tracking code installed on your site, such as Google Analytics, which not only tells you how people arrived at your site by keywords or phrases but also how long they spent there, where they went, who referred them and much more.

This section is only an introduction to the subject of SEO. It is a big area on its own and you should take time to study the process in more depth if you plan to carry out the work yourself. Alternatively, you should consider hiring the services of a professional SEO consultant; recognised by Google and carrying the ‘Google Adwords Qualified Company’ mark shown above.

A weblog, or blog for short, is a website with regular posts or entries offering commentary, descriptions of events, advice or other materials on a regular basis. They can work for a business on a number of levels.

Firstly, they provide companies with an area to post regularly updated information as it becomes available in a way that traditional static websites just wouldn’t allow. This can be extremely helpful in building a dialogue with your market and will help optimise your site by proving to Google that you are keeping your site up to date and using lots of those lovely keywords and phrases you identified earlier. What’s more, many blog systems are geared up for anyone to use, thus you won’t need the help of your web developer every time you need to make an update.

Secondly, blogs become a means to open up conversation with your customers or potential customers. Many allow for comments to be made by the people accessing them, enabling them to interact with you and your organisation on a whole new level; posing questions, offering up testimonials or adding insight to your post.
If you don’t fancy writing or managing your own blog it maybe worth considering bringing in a professional blog writer, copywriter or marketing agency to help. If you want to have a go yourself why not try WordPress, a simple, free package available here.

Opting to send promotions and information to customers via email is a not only a very cost effective and measurable way of marketing it also helps protect the environment by saving paper and ink.

We wouldn’t recommend spamming (sending bulk unsolicited emails), but creating a list of people who would like to receive your information should be a top priority for any modern business.

There are a number of methods to start capturing interested people; however, the most popular is to offer newsletter / promotion sign ups on your website.

When it comes to actually sending and tracking your emails you can choose between: a back-end system on your website, an off-the-shelf package or hiring a dedicated email marketing company.

A popular low cost option for sending email communications is Constant Contact. This is a great way to test the opportunity this form of communication can offer and a 60 day free trial is available here.

Remember, don’t forget your existing customers. Retention of the customers you attract during these times is of great importance. Ensure you send regular information and promotions to your existing customer database, after all in many cases these are the people most likely to do business with you again.

Understanding how these networks can be of use to your business is still only just becoming clear, but we’ve done our best to highlight some of the ways the biggest, Facebook, can help you and your business.

Facebook Groups

If you have something to talk about why not set up a group? A group on Facebook is just like a group in the real world; it has officers or organisers, members and events. Setting up a group on Facebook takes just a few seconds and if you have something to share then it makes for an effective means of communicating for free with your audience.

You can publish events and even compile the attendance list for an event easily with the tools built into the application. You can message all members at the push of a button or post information or links they might want to read.

Facebook Pages

Facebook pages are like profile pages for your business. They allow you to upload company information, including opening times, contact details, links, pictures and logos. Like groups they cost nothing to build and have options to message all your ‘fans’ (the term for anyone who likes your page enough to link to it).

Every person that links to your page displays a neat little icon showing they adore you, what could be better! And, if you want to see just how effective it is, all the data relating to people visiting your page including; gender, ages etc is stored in the system for you to see.

Check out Facebook Pages here.

For an example of a working Facebook Page you can visit ours here.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook offers one of the most highly targeted forms of advertising around. Using the details stored on individual member profiles, the Facebook advertising system can target advertising to be displayed for your exact target market alone.

The system works on a pay per click or pay per impressions basis; with fees charged only when someone clicks on your ad in the first instance or for every display in the second.

Profiling options include: gender, location (right down to town), job title, interests, education status, relationship status and sexuality.

Ads can be used to promote a Facebook page, group or application; or a company website or micro-site.

For more information check out http://www.facebook.com/ads/

Networking

Chances are that most business people have undertaken a form of networking at some point or another. This may have involved going for breakfast with members of your local chamber of commerce or BNI, it may have been a speed networking event organised by a local company – either way networking on Facebook isn’t much different.

The principal behind ‘social networking’ is that through publishing a bit about your social activity you will find shared interests with friends or colleagues, helping foster a closer relationship between you.

This may sound all too frightening for many businesses; however, once you have spent a little time working out just what you want to share (and the bits you might want to keep private) it can prove an effective means of building stronger relationships with potential customers or partners.

Each profile comes with something called a ‘status update’ (see example below), this is a small one line statement detailing what you are doing, thinking about etc at the very moment in time. Using these to publish small sound bites about you or your company can present interesting results. Try experimenting with different statements and watch as people mention them the next time you meet or call.