Customer engagement has followed a fairly predictable trend.
It's time to redefine customer engagement.
With a rise in competition and even more ways to reach customers through digital channels, the focus has always been on pre-sale engagement as opposed to after-sale customer engagement.
The logic is simple — building a relationship with a customer helps increase the chances that they’ll purchase your brand’s product over another. Once you’ve made the initial sale you can hope for repeat patronage based on the product quality, brand loyalty, or other factors.
But what if customer engagement didn’t stop after the initial sale?
What if there was a way to leverage the purchased product to strengthen your customer relationship, brand loyalty, and retention rates? Now, businesses can redefine customer engagement by leveraging purchased products to strengthen their customer relationships.
Redefining Customer Engagement: The Basics
After-sale engagement is defined as brands working to maintain and strengthen their relationship with customers post-sale by providing advice, recommendations, and other essential information to customers to improve the product ownership experience
Customers go through the process of onboarding, enjoying, and then caring for and maintaining a product, as a part of the product experience. This type of engagement anticipates the customer’s product experience in the long term and seeks to provide essential information to maximize it.
Many brands have sought to address customer needs post-purchase. However, these attempts focus on product repair, as opposed to enhancing the product ownership experience. This can be considered customer service, rather than engagement. Consider Apple’s prominent Apple Care services, in which customers purchase insurance through Apple for their Apple products.
This is a beneficial strategy for encouraging brand loyalty, but it fails to address the product ownership experience. Redefining customer engagement expands beyond providing just warranty and repairs. It prioritizes the customer’s experience with the product truly improving the product ownership experience.
4 Ways to Redefine Customer Engagement with Product Ownership
1. Post-Sale Marketing
When a customer purchases a product from a specific brand, the brand can recommend related products, accessories, and maintenance goods. This type of marketing is hyper-targeted and personalized because it only provides relevant product suggestions. There’s no need for the customer to sift through your website to find the item they need when the recommendation has already been sent.
There’s no need to send spammy advertising emails that will get ignored or increase your advertising budget. Once you’ve sold a product, you have a ready-made avenue for customer interaction and product marketing. In short, sell a product and increase customer retention rates.
2. Increase Customer Retention
The only way to increase customer retention rates is to address all the factors that impact them: customer satisfaction, high-quality customer service, and customer relationships. This includes:
- Sending out targeted recommendations.
- Providing detailed care and maintenance instructions to ensure a product lasts a while without diminishing in quality.
- Following up post-sale with questions and helpful advice.
- Helping your business build a reputation as a brand that cares even after the sale.
3. Help Customers Save Valuable Time
Investing in care and maintenance guides and content related to your products can help customers save time researching this information themselves. This is especially true for information related to troubleshooting, maintenance and care, and any relevant information that might not be needed until long after purchase.
Moreover, this can prevent customers from ruining their products by following general advice they found online. You know how to best care for and maintain your products. Sharing that information with customers is an investment that will pay off, especially when your products garner a reputation for longevity.
Care and maintenance aren’t the only topics of importance. You can also create customer guides to help with the process of onboarding and customer enjoyment. Your customers will thank you!
4. Maximize the Use of Third-Party Vendors
Many brands use major third-party vendors or big box stores, like Amazon or Walmart, to increase their product’s reach and sales. However, the result is that outside of purchasing your product, a customer never directly engages with your brand.
This can present a significant obstacle for brands that are trying to build lasting relationships with their customers. Prioritizing engagement after the sale allows brands to utilize third-party vendors without losing out on building a relationship with customers. This provides brands with direct access to their customers through a direct digital channel.
Product Ownership in Action
Let’s start with a guitar and assume that a customer has purchased the guitar with the intent of playing it.
After purchasing the guitar, the customer downloads the brand’s app, as suggested by the instructions included in the guitar.
- Onboarding: The brand provides the customer with a guide on tuning the guitar. The customer then begins to play their tuned guitar. When finished, they store the guitar on a stand near a sunny window.
- Real-Time Maintenance and Care Instructions: The customer receives best practices on storing the guitar and moves the guitar away from the window and out of direct sun. The guitar knows it’s happy and sends a “thanks” to the customer.
- Relevant Product Recommendations: The customer plays the guitar, and racks up hours of enjoyment. The brand sends information about the best replacement strings and information about polishing the body and oiling the fretboard. The customer immediately purchases the replacement from the brand and waits for its arrival.
- Advanced Post-Sale Guidance: The customer reads up on the guidelines provided within the app about preserving the life of their guitar, learns about proper storage like loosening strings and laying the guitar on its back, and is excited to improve.
Redefine Customer Engagement with Blustream
By redefining customer engagement, customers can fully enjoy their purchases and build meaningful relationships with their brands. From a business perspective, it can significantly improve customer retention rates, increase sales, bolster reputation, and more.
Technology has changed how products are bought and sold, why shouldn’t it change the way they are enjoyed?
At Blustream, we believe every company should deliver exceptional product experiences to their consumers. Our Product AI Assistant™ is an intelligent, adaptive messaging platform capable of sending personalized, automated messages to product owners at exactly the right time.
Consumer product and services companies across industries turn to Blustream to build innovative product experiences that drive revenue, retention and LTV.
To see how Blustream helps businesses redefine customer engagement, book a demo today.