By Adam Blair, Executive Editor
“Customer engagement” is in danger of becoming one of those overused buzzwords, one that effectively loses its meaning through overuse. Of course every retailer wants to engage with customers: in its broadest sense, customer engagement is as treasured as mom, the flag and apple pie.
Which is not to say that the concept of customer engagement isn’t important: it’s absolutely critical, especially for retailers striving to resonate with today’s easily distracted consumer. But what retailers really need are some specific strategies to translate consumer attention into customer engagement. The former can be grabbed, at least temporarily, with a splashy marketing campaign or a super-low price.
Winning the latter, however, takes well-thought-out tactics that are targeted to the specific needs of your customer base, and align with your business model and unique value proposition. Customer engagement strategies need to be carefully crafted and consistently executed (and reassessed) over time. You need to constantly test your efforts and gauge the success of these tactics, so that they can be refined even further for the next set of campaigns.
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This year’s #RSP16 Retail Strategy and Planning Webinar Series, Sept. 19-22, is the centerpiece of a full month of tips, tactics and insights designed to bridge the gap between attention and engagement. It’s being kicked off with a live Twitter chat, #RSPChat, on Thursday, Sept. 8, beginning at 3:00pm ET / 12:00pm PT.
During the chat, several of the webinars’ speakers — who are industry experts with a broad range of retail and marketing expertise — will tackle a cornucopia of topics that will undoubtedly help you develop, refine and optimize your customer engagement tactics. They include:
1. What retailers are doing right when it comes to engaging with current and prospective customers via social channels, and the hurdles they still need to overcome;
2. Best practices for engaging with customers following cart or browser abandonment;
3. Using location-based tools, including beacons, for maximum effectiveness;
4. How retailers can leverage referral marketing to deeply engage with their most loyal customers, potentially turning them into powerful brand advocates;
5. Tips and tactics for tapping the right data and analytics to deliver a truly effective omnichannel customer experience; and
6. New data security demands, including protecting internal data along with customer information, and ways to battle the “bad bots” that engage in price scraping and slow down online performance.
I’ve kept this article short so as not to strain your attention span. Please take advantage of all our offerings during September 2016, Retail TouchPoints’ Retail Strategy and Planning month, beginning with the Sept. 8 Twitter chat and including the #RSP16 webinar series. Registering for one webinar gets you admission to any and all of the others.
