Customer Engagement Posts

The Top Ten for the Week of February 28, 2016

Every week we aim to make your life easier by compiling the best customer community articles of last week right here on our blog. This week, our favorite articles focus on providing our readers with tips to increasing their customer engagement.

The Socious Top Ten for the Week of February 21, 2016

Higher Logic has some great news! Call it a late new year's resolution if you will, but we have decided to bring back the Top Ten.

We know that you're busy and that the internet is a big place, so we have done all of the heavy lifting (or should I say reading) for you and have collected some of the best advice from around the web and put it all in one spot!

I’m a loyal Southwest customer - our relationship began in my broke college days as a means to find cheap flights for visiting family and friends. It was a small airline with nicer-than-normal customer reps available when I had to reschedule.

But over the years, my devotion to this small, quirky transportation company has grown from convenience to brand loyalty and a real sense of community.

If you have managed an online community at some point in your career, you know that the 'member to engaged member' ratio is a pretty widely adopted metric throughout the online community space. You also probably know that that metric leaves a lot to be desired.

In case you're not familiar, the numbers break down like so:

• 1% of visitors to your community register to join
• 15% of those who register actually participate
• 20% of those who participate will continue to be active in 6 months

Ever wonder how to get inside your members’ heads and motivate them to participate? Richard Millington can help, an expert with over 12 years of experience in community building. How does he do it? He uses basic, yet powerful, psychological forces -- tapping into what makes us human and what motivates us -- to excite and engage members in a deep, meaningful way. In his 2015 Super Forum keynote, he discussed these methods, touching on implicit bias, social attraction, self-disclosure and bonding theories.

What would it mean to your organization to have consistent insight into your customers' problems and ongoing feedback about your solutions? If you're like most businesses, this information would help your company make smarter decisions in a host of areas.

Helping businesses acquire this valuable data is why the $11+ billion U.S. market research industry is continues to grow. While some companies outsource their customer research, others handle it in-house.

For those companies that manage their customer research themselves, creating and sending a survey to customers is the easy part. It is getting customers to respond where businesses struggle. 

Step aside social crm and content management, there is a new buzzword in the world of business and marketing customer engagement. As the term grows in popularity, the definition of customer engagement is still evolving. 

At Higher Logic, we're heavily involved in what works and what doesn't in customer engagement strategies. We specialize in the areas of keeping people engaged in customer communities, user communities, and user groups.

However, community building strategies and other customer engagement approaches are still emerging as core business strategies, there are important customer relationship trends that business leaders need to pay attention to.

Real-time conversations aren’t always realistic in an online community—the 24/7 access communities provide inherently means collaboration is done on the individuals’ time. But occasionally you want to capitalize on a great event or recent hot topic, and the average discussion posts or resource sharing just won’t cut it.

Have you thought about how you can keep engagement up after a big announcement or a recent event? Consider giving your community members the opportunity to keep the conversation going with live chats, which offer both flexibility and spontaneity.

Recently, we discussed how capitalizing on the latest marketing tactics can help you keep customers or members engaged in your private online community. Specifically, we examined how remarketing can drive people back to your community by taking your normal calls-to-action that typically only exist within the walls of your community and extending them out into the rest of the Internet.

Often the to-do list at work is amended at a rate faster than we can complete. You do a lot in a day and sometimes is can be hard to stay on top of all of the great insight being published to help you plan, manage, and grow your online customer or member community.

We wanted to make it a little easier on you to stay ahead. We've gathered some of the top advice from the past month for you.