When we think about engaging with customers, we often imagine being in the same room and entering a conversation face-to-face. However, many new and innovative ways to connect with customers do not require a commute. In this blog post, we'll explore some of the best ways to engage with customers from a distance. Whether you're working remotely or just trying to reach more customers, these tips will help you connect with your audience effectively. Once you’ve learned the best way to interact with your audience, your sales and marketing teams can hit the ground running.
Sales and marketing professionals are always looking to improve their engagement with potential and current customers. However, it can be difficult to achieve significant improvement when working with the same strategy you’ve always used. With this in mind, we will discuss some ideas that can help sales and marketing teams engage with customers from a distance and still come out on top.
Technology that Empowers Sellers
It may seem counterintuitive to develop engaging connections from a distance, but it could make all the difference if you utilize the right technology. The benefits of digital are that the seller can interact with the prospect anytime, anywhere. Once the seller gets notified that a prospect has engaged with a piece of content, they can follow up and send more content in line with what interests them most. Engaging from a distance can be more beneficial than in-person because the rep can jump in right when the prospects’ interest is at its highest.
Connecting Cross-Channel Interactions
It’s hard to communicate through several different platforms. That’s why cross-channel marketing could be a game-changer for your company. It’s a strategy that allows multiple channels to be controlled by a single campaign or platform. The days of cold calls and static emails are gone—customers and prospects are expecting tech-savvy approaches to grab their attention. That means personalized, engaging experiences across all platforms. For example, if you're presenting a product virtually, customers are looking for a digitally immersive selling experience where they can engage with the message or product. This can be accomplished by connecting with prospects via live interactive video and then receiving notifications on the same platform to follow up on the elements in the video they interacted with.
Additionally, you should give buyers a choice in how they consume information. There’s a chance that viewing your live videos won't fit into their schedule, so you can send an interactive video or a personalized site directing them to content that you want them to view. Keep in mind that the different information formats can differ depending on the buying stage. That’s why we recommend presenting your most important information through several different formats and mediums. Take advantage of virtual interactions and engage your audience in their preferred way.
Managing Customer-Facing Content
For marketers and sales enablement professionals, it’s a priority to make sure all content delivered to customers piques interest and adds value to how the company presents itself externally. That means improving how they manage customer-facing content and evaluating its use in the sales process. The first step in this process is putting content in the sellers' hands to deliver it to prospects. From there, marketers can see how the content is used and whether it receives interaction to create more or less of that kind of content. For example, we’ve noticed that video tends to get higher view rates than text-heavy documents, so creating more videos that discuss important product information could be strategic in increasing your bottom line.
Increase Conversions with Data
Another benefit of confining all of your virtual sales interactions to a single platform is the ability to track both customer interactions and sales team members’ engagement. Using data generated throughout the customer journey allows you to make informed decisions in the future. For example, if your prospect only views content on a specific kind of medical device, you should follow up and discuss that product’s benefits and see if your prospect has any questions. From there, sales leaders can track how effective the reps’ follow-up strategy is and apply it to future training.
Foster Engagement
Having control over the management of your cross-channel interactions and constantly delivering personalized content increases your engagement with prospects and customers. Allowing sales teams to get creative in their interactions with customers online and consistently finding new ways to sell are powerful ways to keep your engagement strategies fresh despite the distance.
Create Tailored Experiences
Once you have customer data and have established cross-channel communication, you can gather any information gained from your customer interactions and treat it as customer insight. Then, you can use these insights to develop your engagement from a distance strategy by creating tailored, digital-first experiences for incoming prospects and customers. The keyword here is personalized: the best way to increase conversion rates is by tailoring your interactions to each customer and prospect so you can ensure they keep coming back.
With the right tools, you can engage with your customers from a distance. You no longer have to be in the same room for successful interactions to happen. Creating personalized customer experiences is possible if you integrate data into a single platform and create a customized experience for each customer and prospect.
The future of marketing is knowing how to engage with customers across channels virtually, without needing to meet in person. With digital transformation comes a new set of challenges that can be solved with data-driven insights and sales enablement solutions. Prospects expect to be wowed on their first interaction, which means you need a virtual strategy to engage them with your product when their interest is at its highest. Our solution for managing your customer-facing content is by making it an individual experience.
It’s simple to engage your prospects and customers from a distance with the verbTEAMS platform. Reach out today for a demo of verbTEAMS to learn more about how this will look for your company.
