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1 intro 2 4 5 6 7 8 social customer engagement for retail what does enaged look like? relationships, deep engagement how to build stong relationships with customers trust vs. relevance co-creating long-term value
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intro
Social engagement is not just about technology. Its about social customers themselves who have permanently disrupted the traditional, sales-based business model. The opportunities of this tectonic shift challenge retailers to engage their social customers with more than price alone. Market share now increasingly goes to brands that master the customer experience in stores and online mastering the social customer experience in stores and online.
Engagement is about nurturing prospects and cultivating customer relationships. It picks up what your social customer acquisition strategy delivers, and then ratchets it up to the next level. Taken together, your acquisition strategy and customer engagement form the tactics that sustain the social customers attention span and make customers want to stay with you rather than give their attention to other competitors.
$14B
US social commerce sales, 2011-2015 Sales of physical goods through online social networks will grow by 93% per year in the US, reaching $14 billion by 2015.
Source: Booz & Co.
$9B $5B
$1B
2011
$3B
2012
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Lets dig deeper into these relationships in the context of the customer experience and discover how brands can build strong, lasting and valuable relationships with their customers. Well unveil the essential differences between public social networks and communities highlighting topics like interaction, trust and relevance. Then well show why social networks are better for acquisition, but that channels like Facebook and Twitter have some deal-breaking limitations when it comes to customer engagement. Finally, well explore how to co-create value with and between customers, and how communities and superfans play special roles in winning the social customer experience.
80%
Try new things based on friends suggestions
74%
Encourage my friends to try new products
72%
Stay more engaged with the brands I like
42%
Share any negative experiences with brands or products
32%
Not buy certain products because I learned of a negative customer experience
Source: CMO Council
Truly engaged customers are more than enthusiastic fans. Theyre interactive participants in activities that help define your brands value. Consider the following social customer activities and behaviors: From consumption to co-creation, social customers engage at various levels of activity. To foster engagement, we need to find and nurture users inclined to progress through those increasing levels of activity until they are co-creating value with you. This process involves moving your social customers from simply connecting with your brand to interacting with it. social investment really pay off. So, while connections certainly have value, interactions (a much stronger form of engagement) have much greater value. Connections must interact with your brand and other customers in order to drive: 1. Influencethrough interactions, customer connections generate stronger, more trusted relationships, higher participation (support, help), and user-generated content (reviews, knowledge articles, or advocacy) that can significantly affect consumer purchase decisions. 2. Loyaltyinteractions build the stronger and deeper customer-brand relationships that lead to persistent consumption of your products and services. Your role is to empower your best customers to interact in ways that benefit them, you, and other customers. Those interactionsand their resulting relationshipsare what you are trying to make fun, easy, and mutually rewarding.
The goal of engagement is to build and strengthen relationships with and between your customers. Building any relationship, however, requires interacting with the other party. You cant bring your social customers home with you like a team of enthusiastic new recruits, run off to the office for a week, and then expect them to wear your jersey or go to bat for you. You must faithfully, consciously interact with them in order to get them to respond to you, know and value you just as you do in return.
Interactions are much harder to maintain than connections because they require persistent actions over time. Social networks determine who connects with whom, but they dont determine who interacts with whom, or how. Thats up to the social customers themselvesand what drives those interactive decisions is their own personal inspiration. Your job is to find out how to tap into that inspiration.
Here are the pillars of a basic social strategy for strengthening relationships with (and between) your customers.
1. Time
Time spent together increases tie strength. Most importantly, the desire to spend time together has to be mutual.
Strategy: Know when your customers want to spend time with you and be there for them.
2. Intensity
Intensity is the most difficult component to control. The intensity a customer feels for a brand will always be less than it is for a friend, however, when you tap into your customers passions, finding topics they care about, your chances for creating that intensity improve. Also, because people trust themselves, they tend to trust brands that co-create with them. Here were talking about two types of co-creation: passive co-creation (listening and collecting customer input), and active co-creation (crowdsourcing and collaboratively filtering customergenerated ideas).
Strategy: Appeal to greater causesthings that have higher meaning that your customers feel strongly aboutnot just for your brand.
Strategy: Create transparent and authentic communication channels to and among customers, and co-create with them.
3. Trust
Transparent communication channels create an environment thats more conducive to building trust. In this case were talking about two types of transparency: B2Cbusiness-to-customer (your outbound messages on social channels), and C2C customer-to-customer (peer-to-peer community discussions).
4. Reciprocity
Reciprocity means two-way reciprocal servicesboth from B2C, and from C2C. Your job is to make it easy for your customers to help other customers of yours, and then to reward them properly.
Strategy: Let your customers help youand one another! A small investment from the customer is valuable in building deeper relationships, but it must be voluntary.
Deep engagement requires both trust and relevance. When either quality is lacking, the odds of conversion plummet. Creating trust and relevance, however, are not equally possible over any social media channel. Social networks and communities have different strengths and an effective social strategy plays to them.
Heres where it gets interesting: It is vastly easier to build trust than it is to create relevance. Specifically, its easier to create trust within a community that already has relevance, than it is to create relevance within a social network that already has trust. We can build trust within a community, but relevance is very hard to createespecially among strong tiesunless it already exists.
A social network is there to maintain established relationships. A community is there to build relationships around a common interest.
Social networks have high levels of trust because theyre comprised of people we already know and trust. Communities, on the other hand, have high levels of relevance, because everyone gathers there around a common interest. Relevance is what gives you depthwithout it your engagement tactics will stall. Without relevance your nonphotographer friends might still look at the camera you recommended because youa strong tierecommended it over Facebook, but they wont actually buy it. They wont buy it if it isnt already relevant to their needs, interests and desires. Conversion requires relevance.
Social networks feature high levels of trust. Communities feature high levels of relevance. It is vastly easier to cultivate trust than to create relevance.
trusted, relevant content, where you can build and strengthen relationships, and where you can foster value co-creation between customers and the brand. Value for everyone means everyone wins.
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