How can you amplify customer engagement for your brand? Those who try ad-hoc methods know how stressful it can be. And since 83% of customers expect companies to engage with them immediately upon contact, you need a proper tool to do it right.
That’s why many companies have started looking for a customer engagement platform to solve their problems. For instance, Kaged Muscle uses the ambassador management software BrandChamp to handle its brand ambassador program. The result? The program increased sales tenfold and drives over $10,000 in referral sales monthly. Sign up for the BrandChamp.io demo call to see what it can do for your brand.
In this article, we will explain the importance of customer engagement platforms and their different types. We will also help you choose the best platform for your business and give you tips on how to implement and optimize it. Let’s dive in.
Why is Customer Engagement Important?
Customer engagement is essential for businesses to develop strong relationships with their customers, build customer loyalty and increase customer retention. It involves understanding customer needs, providing timely and relevant information, responding to customer queries, and providing personalized service.
15 types of customer engagement platforms
Most customer engagement solutions are designed to provide businesses with an effective way to interact with their customers, creating an ongoing dialogue that can help improve customer relationships and loyalty. These platforms can be divided into the following types:
- Customer relationship management (CRM)—Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho CRM
- Customer service management (CSM)—Zendesk, Freshdesk, ServiceNow
- Customer experience management (CEM)—Adobe Experience Cloud, Qualtrics, Confirmit
- Marketing Automation—Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems—Avaya, Genesys, Cisco
- Live Chat and Chatbots—Intercom, Customerly, Drift
- Social Media Management—Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer
- Push Notifications—OneSignal, Airship, Pusher
- Email and SMS Marketing—Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact
- Surveys and Feedback Forms—Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics
- Customer Community Platforms—Vanilla, Community, Telligent
- In-app Messaging—Appcues, Intercom, Mixpanel
- Knowledge Management Systems—Zendesk Guide, Help Scout, Freshdesk
- Collaboration Tools—Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana
- Video Conferencing and Webinar platforms—Zoom, Skype, GoogleMeet
Some solutions offer a combination of these types. Overall, most customer engagement platforms are designed to help businesses better understand their customers and create stronger customer relations. But one customer engagement solution has recently become increasingly popular: ambassador marketing software. Let’s take a closer look at this type of tool.
Ambassador Marketing Software
Brand ambassador management software is a customer engagement platform designed to help businesses create and manage their ambassador programs. This software enables companies to recruit, onboard, and manage brand ambassador activities, allowing them to build relationships easily and effectively engage with customers. With the help of this software, businesses can leverage the power of their ambassadors to spread the word about their products and services.
BrandChamp: Measure ROI & Keep Growing
One great example of this type of software is BrandChamp. It is created to form good connections between the brand and its promoters, leading to enhanced sales, greater brand recognition, and social interaction.
With Brandchamp software, users can efficiently onboard participants and incentivize participation, initiate campaigns, observe performance and give rewards.
This system has everything you need to initiate and manage your campaigns, so you don’t have to look into other platforms.
It is possible to make campaigns for ambassadors, track those doing well and getting lots of engagement, and sort participants with tags. For businesses that offer commissions to their ambassadors for referral sales, that can easily be tracked and issued, as well.
Benefits of using ambassador marketing software for customer engagement
Ambassador marketing software can have various features and tools to help businesses engage with customers. A good platform generally includes:
- Provides analytics tools that enable companies to track customer engagement levels and measure the success of their campaigns.
- Helps businesses to create personalized content that resonates with their customers and can easily be shared.
- Enables businesses to invite customers to create user-generated content for a more authentic customer experience.
- Helps to create incentives and rewards to encourage customers to engage with the brand.
- Helps businesses to interact with their customers on social media to reach a larger audience and build relationships with potential customers.
- Helps to create and manage social media campaigns to increase customer engagement.
- Provides businesses with an array of features that can help to increase customer loyalty. For example, companies can use the software to create loyalty programs and rewards to encourage customers to return.
Overall, ambassador marketing software is an ideal customer engagement solution for businesses. It provides powerful analytics tools and customer feedback tracking to help enterprises measure the success of their customer engagement efforts.
Many companies have seen how effective this kind of software is – let’s look at some examples of successful campaigns.
Examples of companies that have successfully implemented ambassador marketing software
Herbaland
Source: Herbaland Naturals
Herbaland is the largest manufacturer of nutritional gummies in Canada. Their products include supplements, vitamins, beauty and fitness products, and sugar-free candy.
The brand’s ambassador program first started on social media. Gummy amateurs who wanted to get involved in the program messaged the brand’s Instagram account. Needless to say, that meant a lot of manual work for the program’s managers and took plenty of time.
When interest kept growing, Herbaland decided it was impossible to do it manually any longer and started looking for a platform. That’s how they began with BrandChamp in 2019.
BrandChamp helped Herbaland to convert more people into customers and brand advocates, launch and expand Facebook groups, promote new product launches, and increase brand awareness.
With the platform’s tagging mechanisms, Herbaland could create multiple campaigns tailored to specific groups of brand ambassadors (such as “top influencers” and “micro-influencers”)and give them different rewards.
BrandChamp helps boost Herbaland’s ambassador program on many levels, from recruiting ambassadors via social media and newsletters and cultivating relationships with them to launching new products, tracking ambassador’s activities, and redeeming rewards.
Passion Planner
Source: Passion Planner
The creators of Passion Planner were drawn to BrandChamp when they looked for a customer engagement platform. “The customizable activities allowed us to create space for our ambassadors to engage with our product in the way that we intended people to engage with it,” says Marissa Huffman, Partnerships Lead of the company.
The platform’s automation features allow the brand to share activities and resources with multiple ambassadors via Slack and email. Their community now includes 900+ ambassadors.
BrandChamp also helps Passion Planner organize virtual events to better connect with the community and launch new products – ambassadors get a “sneak peek” of a new product before anyone else at special launch parties.
Through these events, the brand builds ambassador loyalty and boosts enthusiasm for its products. They appreciate the platform’s ease of use, affordability, automation, and customization features.
Other Popular Customer Engagement Platforms
Customer engagement solutions are available in many different forms. Besides brand ambassador software, the most popular ones include:
Social media management tools
Social media management tools provide a range of features to help businesses streamline their social media presence while increasing customer engagement. With a social media management tool, companies can schedule posts, monitor conversations, and engage with followers.
This type of software allows businesses to manage their digital channels more efficiently and reach out to more customers. It also helps analyze the performance of their campaigns, track customer engagement, and analyze user data on top social media platforms for influencer marketing like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Email marketing software
Email marketing software enables businesses to create and send targeted, personalized emails to their customers. With this software, companies can segment customers into different categories and send customized emails to each segment. It allows them to tailor their messages to create more effective campaigns.
Most email software also allows businesses to measure the success of their emails, track user engagement and customer purchases.
Live chat software
Live chat software is essential for contact centers and customer service teams. It provides a fast and efficient way of communicating with customers and can help to improve the customer journey.
With live chat, customers can quickly get the answers they need without waiting for a phone call or email. It can lead to better customer satisfaction and higher sales.
Companies that use live chat software can also get real-time insights into customer feedback and sentiment, helping them identify areas for improvement.
CRM software
Customer Relationship Management software is a comprehensive system that allows businesses to monitor and improve customer relationships, enabling them to provide better services and products.
CRM software offers a variety of features and tools. For example, Hubspot CRM contains tools such as task management, customer segmentation, email management, ROI analytics, lead capture tools, live chat, a ticketing system, and a customer support portal.
This type of software is an effective way to gain insights into customer behavior, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions.
CRM software is invaluable for businesses that want to manage customer experiences efficiently and effectively.
Customer engagement platforms: comparison
All of these platforms help improve relationships and manage customer experiences, with some key differences. Many modern customer engagement platforms offer multiple communication channels, including email and live chat, as part of a broader suite of tools for customer engagement. This allows companies to engage with customers through multiple channels, providing a more holistic and seamless experience.
Live chat software is excellent for quickly responding to customer inquiries and complaints and creating more personal interactions. Email marketing software is ideal for reaching a larger number of customers, allowing companies to send emails with promotions, updates, and other important information.
Social media management tools, in turn, help businesses to manage one type of messaging channel – their social media accounts – from a single dashboard.
The cost of live chat software, email marketing software, and social media management tools can vary, depending on the features and capabilities that a business requires. It can range from free to hundreds of dollars a month.
CRM and ambassador marketing software are more complex, all-in-one customer engagement platforms that can also include live chat, email marketing, and social media management tools.
While CRM software focuses on relationships with existing clients and improving the entire customer journey, ambassador marketing software is ideal for reaching new customers and converting them to advocates of the brand.
Both CRM and ambassador marketing software can be expensive but can also provide a great return on investment. These types of software can help businesses automate tasks and improve customer communication, leading to increased efficiency and better customer retention.
So how do you know which platform will best suit the needs of your company? It’s essential to understand certain key factors when choosing a customer engagement platform.
Choosing the Right Customer Engagement Platform for Your Business
Factors to consider when selecting a customer engagement platform
There a number of factors to consider when choosing customer engagement software for your company:
- Communication channels that the customer engagement platform offers. Depending on the specifics of your business and what you want to achieve, you need proper channels to reach your customers. You need to decide whether one channel, like email, is enough for you, or do you need different communication channels, like live chat and social media?
- Customer engagement tools that the platform offers. The platform should provide the right tools to engage with customers, such as customer surveys, or email marketing. These tools help to ensure that customer engagement is effective and efficient.
- Capabilities of the platform in terms of automation. Automation will help to reduce customer effort and make customer engagement consistent and effective. It will also save the staff time otherwise spent on manual tasks.
- Scalability – the platform should be able to handle an increasing number of customers, as well as the increasing complexity of customer interactions.
Considering these factors can help you that they select the right customer engagement platform for their needs.
Another vital question concerns the effectiveness of your platform.
How to evaluate the effectiveness of your chosen platform
To ensure that your chosen platform meets your needs and objectives, you must properly assess its performance. Here are some features that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your chosen customer engagement software.
- Data analytics capabilities. Ensure that the platform can provide comprehensive reports on customer engagement metrics, such as customer acquisition rate, customer retention rate, and customer lifetime value.
- Customer support features. Does it offer features such as live chat, email support, or phone support? Does it provide self-service functions such as FAQs, help centers, and video tutorials? Ensure that customers can easily reach out to customer support representatives when needed.
- Ease of use. Is the platform user-friendly and intuitive? Are the features and functions organized logically? Does the platform provide clear instructions on how to use each feature?
- Scalability of the platform. Is it able to handle increasing customer engagement activities? Does it offer features that can be customized or upgraded as your customer engagement needs grow?
By evaluating the effectiveness of your chosen customer engagement platform, you can ensure that it is meeting your needs and objectives.
Tips for implementing and optimizing your chosen platform
To get the most from your customer engagement software, there are a few tips you should keep in mind when implementing and optimizing it.
First, it is crucial to collect and analyze data to determine if the platform is meeting the needs of your business. Analyze customer feedback and use it to make changes to the platform as needed.
Next, it is important to ensure that your customer engagement software is integrated with other systems, such as your CRM or ERP. This way, you can ensure that customer data is shared across all systems and that customer interactions are tracked in real-time.
Finally, as more and more customers are using mobile devices to engage with businesses, your customer engagement software should be optimized for those devices – you want your customers to have a smooth and enjoyable experience when interacting with your business.
These tips will help you maximize the potential of your customer engagement software and deliver a better customer experience.
With the help of this information, you should be able to choose the right customer engagement platform for your business.
Conclusion
Cherishing customer relationships is the most important thing you can do to develop your business. Customer engagement platforms, with their analytics and automation, can give you a full picture of your customer base and its needs and help you maintain contact with your customers on multiple channels.
Which customer engagement platforms are best for you? It all depends on your needs, the size of your business, and what goals you want to achieve.
If you want customers to feel connected to your brand and build a base of loyal advocates, you cannot miss out on the power of brand ambassador software. BrandChamp will help you to build thriving ambassador communities, boost reach on social media, and increase sales. Sign up for a demo to learn more about the tool.
FAQ
What is a customer engagement platform?
Customer engagement platforms help businesses understand their customers and improve customer satisfaction. It helps companies to capture customer interactions, analyze customer data, and gain insights into customer needs. With this knowledge, companies can create personalized engagement strategies to ensure customers have a positive experience and remain loyal.
What are examples of customer engagement?
Customer engagement refers to the methods used to interact with customers and create a positive relationship between the business and its customers. It can include surveys, promotions, loyalty programs, and customer service.
What is customer engagement in CRM?
Customer engagement in CRM is tracking customer interactions across multiple channels. It helps companies identify potential issues and opportunities for improvement. This information can create better customer experiences, build brand loyalty, and increase customer lifetime value.
What is the difference between CRM and customer engagement?
The terms customer relationship management (CRM) and customer engagement sound similar, but they’re quite different.
CRM refers to businesses’ processes and strategies to manage interactions with customers and potential customers. It involves understanding customer needs, tracking customer interactions, and providing customer support.
On the other hand, customer engagement measures the connection a customer feels to a company and its products or services. It’s about creating a deep and lasting relationship between the customer and the business.
