Five Ways Companies Are Engaging Customers In Their Relationship Marketing Efforts

Knowing what customers choose to act on is powerful data if you listen carefully

An often overlooked but critical step of relationship marketing is engaging customers to find out what’s important to them. 

Sometimes companies jump from customer acquisition right into the hard sell without taking the time to learn more about the new customers they’ve acquired. But taking the time to understand an audience, across all channels, to determine the best messages and formats to reach them is the key to effective activation. That’s why Engagement is the second step of a relationship marketing strategy.

At CM Group’s recently held Signals22 conference, five companies in different categories and located in different countries all shared how they approach customer engagement in their relationship marketing strategies. 

The common theme between them was a priority on listening… monitoring how different customer segments interact with different types of content. 

Take Brilliant Earth , which sells a wide range of jewelry. It needs to understand which of its customers prefers what category of product. While purchase habits can provide some information, there’s less to analyze with new customers. So Brilliant Earth simply asks. 

“The daily newsletter is the place where we can really get creative and start finding moments to key into what the user is interested in,” said Kim Turano , Email Marketing Manager at Brilliant Earth. “We can introduce a new collection or highlight specific pieces of jewelry, and then when users start to engage with those pieces, they're giving us little breadcrumbs of what they're interested in. 

Women-led, inclusive sports media brand, The GIST, has a similar goal. Team affiliation can be as diverse and broad as product preferences. But generally, fan communities tend to cluster in the locations where the team is based. So The GIST takes a very localized approach, measuring engagement based on local benchmarks rather than a single standard. 

“We're looking at our open rates in Canada versus the US versus different regions,” said GIST Head of Content, Ellen Hyslop . “Those consistent kind of open rates, as well as click-through rates, are definitely something that we are looking at and seeing how our content is resonating… We know you get inundated with spam emails or too many emails from your manager or your boss. We want to be that email that you actually want to open.”

The UK’s The Football Association shows how listening to contacts creates better marketing results. Because the number of overall fans it serves is far greater than those who actually pay to attend games, it has very little transactional data to rely on. So it’s all based on engagement. 

“If we're to learn more about those people, we need to understand their interests, what their drivers are, why they love football, what they do in football, what they want out of football,” said Paul Brierley , CRM & Membership Lead at The Football Association. “Zero-party data is the way that we look to do that. We've already seen huge uplifts in email open rates when we personalize subject lines based on the team someone supports.”

While asking customers what they want is a valid tactic, so is watching what they do. That’s the lesson from UC Santa Barbara, where testing is a priority. 

“Just because you think you’re a great designer, or that you have a great design team, doesn’t mean it’s going to work the way you think,” said UCSB Senior Digital Communications Strategist, Jane McTaggart . “You have to test it, test it, test it. That’s our mantra—test, test, test.”

Bram Scholten , Email Marketing and Automation Specialist at MS Shippers, agrees. The company tests not only to optimize the content it produces but also to help segment its customer base based on the actions taken. 

“I find it very useful to see that you can really see where people clicked and who clicked where to see and what segment they end up in,” he said. “ You can create some very specific target groups, and then we follow it up with surveys or customer panels.”

So there you have it. Five different companies in five different categories with a common approach to engaging customers in their own way. The lesson learned here is that no matter what your product is, or who your customers are, listening to their preferences (through both words and actions) is a critical component to understanding their needs. Engaging with them in multiple formats creates that all-important feedback channel. 

To learn more about the Engagement stage of Relationship Marketing and how relevant engagement can help your efforts, visit the Signals22 website to watch the Sessions and many others available, now on-demand.