Ideas on How to Retain and Engage Customers as Covid Declines

Every company has faced struggles and difficulties during the era of covid. Fortunately, we are witnessing the decline and, hopefully, the end of this era. Now it's time for companies to adapt and focus on retaining and engaging customers in new and unique ways.

During Covid, we were all forced to adapt and discover the power of online marketing; now that the 'Analog' world is opening up once more, it's time for us to find ways to integrate the two worlds. Let's explore four ways to boost your engagement and retention in the upcoming period.

Reconnecting & Creating In-Person Events

The first step toward creating a powerful engagement and retention marketing strategy is to focus on reintegrating physical events that bring individuals together in the 3D world. After the long slump of covid, people are craving the human connection and want to connect to each other and their favorite brands in person. There is a variety of ways in which you can create events regardless of what sector you are operating in. Here are some ideas:

1. Educational Forums
2. E.g. a Fintech company or app can create a forum educating clients on their product, or on an area, they struggle with technologically/financially
3. Live Events
4. Everyone is craving the fun of a live event, a fashion brand can create a sustainable fashion runway event for a recent release and combine it with live music for added impact
5. Retreats
6. A unique idea is for a company to create a retreat and invite some of its top clients. A short 2-day health and wellness-oriented retreat will demonstrate just how much you care for customers and provide them with tremendous health benefits.

There are many more ways to get creative with creating in-person events, one powerful way to bridge the analog world and the digital is to reward them with Gameball points during in-person events. You could reward them for coming to the event, participating in certain activities, or making purchases in-store.

Developing More Personal Connections with Customers

Covid left most of us feeling disconnected from being human, everyone was forced to live in a way that made us lose some of our connection to fellow humans. Bringing back more personalized experiences and making personal connections with your customers is critical to improving your retention and engagement.

Most companies rely on templates and automated messaging to reach their customers, these automated messages are in a way necessary in the modern-day. Writing each message to a client by hand is next to impossible for larger corporations, that being said, using tools like Gameball's Messages and Alerts would allow you to create hyper-personalized messages that reach customers and connect with them deeply. The more connected and understood a customer feels the more they will stay loyal to your brand.

Rewards, Gamification, and Creating A Unique Customer Experience

Customers have spent almost two full years dealing with their favorite companies and brands almost exclusively online, the best way to recapture their interest and engage them online is by creating a unique customer experience. There are many ways to go about creating a unique experience, one of the most powerful tools for engagement is creating rewards programs and gamification.

Gamification is the process of creating a gamelike environment that rewards your customers for taking the right actions, this is done through custom coding or by integrating an app like Gameball into your website and app. It is a tried and tested method to improve your engagement, customer loyalty, and long-term brand interest. Let’s look at some of the ways gamification is used to create this unique environment for your customers:

1. Creating a points rewards system that can be redeemed for discounts, unique perks or free shipping
2. Creating badges and challenges that engage customers and drive them to take certain actions on your website, not to mention, they’re incredibly fun 🎉🥳
3. Rewarding customers for referrals and bringing more friends into the ecosystem

Create a unique, creative, and playful presence to engage customers

Our final tip is to create a creative and playful presence, it’s essential for you to stand out as a company and show your customers that you are unique. The more unique your presence the more loyal customers will be because they won’t be able to find anyone like you! A terrific way to begin creating these types of experiences is by creating hybrid and omnichannel experiences.

The experience for your client shouldn’t stop with purchasing a product, there should be a continuous dialogue that keeps them entertained and engaged. Using a tool like Gameball you can reward customers for their birthday, you can utilize omnichannel messaging to reach them with unified messages during interesting events or time periods and you can reward customers with badges for following you or sharing your social media.

That's not all, you can utilize even more creative ways to make your presence really stand out, combining digital and analog in unique ways such as:

1. Creating clothing with barcodes that scan and provide customers with a story or special surprise
2. Art that has music associated with it
3. Providing small tokens, gifts, or stickers with each product purchase
4. Creating unique brand products to provide customers when they use your service (for example cool T-shirts if you are a fintech brand! 😎)

The struggle Covid brought upon the world has not only been a frustrating challenge but also a tremendous opportunity for us all to grow and expand. Our tips will help you retain customers and engage them on a whole new level. So, get ready to grow 😉