What Should You Do to Attract Customer Engagement?

Any innovative ideas to foster customer engagement? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

There are tons of ways to foster engagement, but they all come from making a deep and meaningful connection– a real relationship. Engagement comes from loyalty and a love for the brand. If you loop your customers in to the things you’re doing, you’re way more likely to see increased engagement.

A few ideas:

1. Feature Them on Your Site

Featuring customers on your site is a great way to show your customers the love. Just remember, make the feature about them, not about you (boring!).

• Create a happy customers page where you can show off your customers and their businesses. A page like this also shows off the wide array of customers turning to you for your products and services.
• Show off their reviews. If customers write positive things on your Facebook wall or send praising Tweets, find a way to highlight them and share them on your site.
• Celebrate your customers on your blog or social media accounts. Feature your customers whenever you can. Focus on what they’re all about rather than how they see you. RunKeeperis great at this. They highlight their user’s athletic accomplishments on their Instagram account (the account syncs to their blog, so this image actually appears in a couple different places).
• Invite them to guest post on your blog. You’d be surprised how much your customers will appreciate this and the opportunity to reach a new audience.

2. Include Them in Stuff You’re Already Doing

We pitch the press all the time, but sometimes we see opportunities and press leads that are better suited for our customers so we’ll pitch them (with their permission!) instead.

Another example? For Halloween, our culture team planned a pumpkin carving contest at HQ. Instead of going out and buying a book of templates, we called Pumpkin Wow, one of our customers, and bought their pumpkin tattoos.
Ask yourself: What are you doing that you could keep you customers in mind for?

3. Pay Attention and Remember Their Stories

You’re a human being and– news flash!– so are your customers. Yet, for some reason companies still treat customers like numbers in the CMS rather than like pals.

If a customer mentions their son’s birthday, we send a card– that sort of thing.

I was really impressed by the postcard charity: water sent me. I was training for a half marathon to raise money for clean water when I got a postcard that made me feel like a rock star– the postcard basically said “you’re awesome.” I tweeted the card, followed charity: water, got excited about my campaign, etc. A total engagement win for them.

These personal touches generate tons of positive sentiment and inevitably make people think highly of you. When you do these things, people tell their friends. Sometimes they’ll even wind up writing about you, too—AKA increased engagement.

Contributed by Emma Siemasko Content Marketing Specialist