Every company is making efforts to add value to its customers. They create value but eventually fail to sustain growth. Why does this happen? Let’s uncover the rough roads from customer value creation to value expansion.

Engaging your customers lies at the core of all your marketing and sales efforts. Nevertheless, many companies fail to do it. Some of the factors contributing to these failures are a lack of accurate data, a lack of marketing expertise, or limited resources.

Understanding customer engagement

Before we tell you anything, let us explain the nuances of customer engagement. In simple words, customer engagement refers to how brands interact with their customers at every stage of their buyer’s journey. The engagement process often begins before a prospect turns into a customer, and it continues until a customer becomes a brand advocate.

Customer engagement starts with building good rapport with customers, creating meaningful experiences, and pushing them subtly into a new purchase (customer value creation). The process continues with making your customers fall in love with your brand, leading to customer loyalty, retention, and repeated purchases in the future, i.e., value expansion.

Putting it simply, when we create meaningful customer engagement, it maximizes our customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is an essential matrix because it lets you gauge how valuable your customer is to your brand throughout the customer lifecycle. Unfortunately, several organizations fail to measure the matrix, thus failing to assess their marketing strategy and make adjustments to improve it.

To measure CLV, organizations should have a well-defined data governance process and the right Martech tools. With clear visibility into CLV, brands can change their perspective to approach a customer.

Customer Journey and Engagement

For marketers and advertisers, it is essential to understand the impact of the customer journey on engagement. It is impossible to drive meaningful customer engagement if you fail to understand the end-to-end customer journey. It is because each stage of a customer journey has an impact on engagement. As you dive deep into the nuances of each stage of a customer’s journey, your team has an opportunity to personalize the customer experience. That is how you achieve meaningful customer engagement.

That said, better customer engagement is deeply rooted in how every department of your organization fulfills its responsibility towards the customer. It calls for shared collaboration across the organization, keeping customers at the focal point always.

Aligning sales and marketing is a fraction of what goes into moving from value creation to value expansion.

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The journey from value creation to value expansion

Even marketing theories reiterate that customer engagement is an ongoing process. It entails building relationships with customers and offering value with each customer interaction. Marketers navigate until this stage, but many of them lag behind when it comes to transitioning from value creation to value expansion.

Value creation is the initial proposition the customer is offered, but value expansion happens when customers become brand advocates. They start co-creating value for other customers unknowingly and help a brand acquire more customers.

So, how do we do that? Let us help you follow a simple 6-step procedure.

Deliver meaningful engagement.

Simply developing buyers’ personas is not going to help. You must understand the granularity of a buyer’s journey, put yourself in their shoes, and deliver meaningful engagement in every conversation.

Personalize the customer experience.

Personalization lies at the core of every marketing campaign today. You need to continuously deliver a personalized customer experience. The more you deliver, the more your customers will stay with you in the buying loop.

Provide a positive experience.

Strive hard to provide a positive experience for your customers. Whether it is an in-person interaction, website chat, social media, or email, ensure that your customers receive your message with a smile. Marketers follow plenty of innovative tactics to stay on top of customers’ preferences, and these are quite subjective to the industry you are working in.

Prioritize quality over price.

Whether you are offering low-priced or premium products, remember that a customer values your product irrespective of the price charged. To ensure that your customers keep valuing your offerings, you need to prioritize quality over price.

Pay attention to each piece of feedback received

Insights from the feedback and reviews help marketers turn around their strategies and onboard new prospects. Whether it is B2B or B2C, every customer relies on the feedback left by previous customers. Thus, as a marketer, you should follow the feedback loop. The moment you come across a dissatisfied customer, you should initiate the conversation and try to pacify the customer and turn his thoughts from negative to positive towards the brands.

Plenty of brands offer personalized discounts to customers who have left negative feedback. Such feedback can be used to improve your brand’s offerings.

Improve the buying process

Marketers must prepare their team to improvise the buying process. As we are talking about the transition from value creation to value expansion, you must be present at every step of the buying process. The buying process can be improved after every buying loop is completed.

As we anticipate the customer returning to the buying loop, the improvisation will further encourage him or her to continue the process.

Wrapping Up

As we stated earlier, creating customer profiles based on some information isn’t enough. Customers change quickly, the key lies in deriving real-time insights from your customers’ data and optimizing your customer engagement strategy continuously. Accurate data is instrumental to achieving the objective. Your team should learn the practical application of ML and AI to gain better insights into the full customer journey.

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