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As businesses continue to compete for customers’ attention and sales across multiple channels, it’s become more important than ever to develop effective strategies for customer engagement and conversion. Whether you’re running an online store or a brick-and-mortar business, finding ways to connect with customers and encouraging them to buy is key to boosting your revenue.
Here, 16 Forbes Agency Council members share illustrative examples of how their businesses have successfully improved customer engagement and converted website traffic into sales. From personalizing email campaigns to running social media ads, you can use the actionable tips below to help your business turn prospects into loyal customers and increase the bottom line.
1. Engage Regional Business Journals
Engaging regional business journals is a targeted way to get in front of local decision makers. We work with a client who sells into municipalities, and we secured coverage highlighting the company’s value proposition of generating revenue for cities via its technology platform. This led to an expansion of the client’s contractual revenue in that city. Regional earned media is a solid option to drive sales. - Ethan Parker, Treble
2. Blog About Hot Topics In Your Industry
Find a hot topic that is unique to your industry and blog about it. For example, the solar industry’s hot topic has been NEM 3.0. We wrote a blog six months prior to changes happening with NEM 3.0, which increased our SEO rankings for this topic. When customers were ready to learn more or buy, we were already ranking on Google and top of mind because we had positioned ourselves as the experts. - Marilyn Cowley, PREM - PR & Social
3. Focus On Customer Relationship Management
In 2023, we are focusing on CRM for real this time. As business becomes harder and harder to acquire, it’s now time to continue the conversation across platforms—whether it be through remarketing efforts online or email marketing. What is true for the tough times is that the clients you have, you need to keep. - Gino Sesto, DASH TWO
4. Personalize The Online Shopping Experience
An e-commerce site we recently designed uses micro-interactions to create a personalized shopping experience. When the user hovers over a product image, a small animation pops up showing the product from different angles. When they add an item to their cart, a subtle animation confirms the item has been added, along with a message that says, “Great choice!” This helped with conversion rates. - Goran Paun, ArtVersion
5. Share Authentic Customer Experiences Via Video
Let authentic customer journeys in Web video, Reels and Stories sell themselves. Nothing is more powerful than listening to a customer experience that is real, relatable and honest (including the pros and cons). Having documented an aesthetic procedure of real people’s journey and their “why,” before and after results have helped increase our clients’ sales quickly and significantly. - Monica Alvarez-Mitchell, Pulse Creative, LLC
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
6. Use A ‘Reach-To-Loyalty’ Framework
We have a specific “reach-to-loyalty” framework. The framework mainly emphasizes a reach video ad on social media—since you can capture all people viewing it. We use these audiences for remarketing to a landing page to capture emails in exchange for some value, such as a report, e-book or checklist. This framework is regularly scoring with 100% leverage in converting traffic into sales. - Honza Borysek, advertia digital
7. Blog, And Always Provide Extra Value
For the top of the funnel, it sounds simple and boring, but blogging always increases website traffic. Every time we start blogging, we quickly double website traffic. If we double our client’s blogging, the website traffic doubles again, and again and again. To engage and convert that additional traffic, you must provide additional value, content and resources. Always follow SEO best practices. - Jason Mudd, Axia Public Relations
8. Optimize Campaigns With High-Impact Video Content
Customer engagement and high-quality traffic often aren’t aligned. High engagement can lead to low-intent-to-purchase customers. One effective strategy is to optimize campaigns for engagement (focusing on thumbstop rates, click-through rates and three-second video views, for example) with high-impact video content. Then, retarget those video interactions with direct response content that includes an incentive. - Stephanie Sprayregen, Spray Marketing
9. Take A Full-Funnel, Cross-Channel Approach
We drove a popular beer brand’s 90-day rate of sale to a three-year high by launching a “Beer Finder’’ search on their website. A full-funnel, cross-channel approach strategically guided our target audience from beer name recognition to conversion. Eye-catching awareness ads, Google Search campaigns and “Add-to-Cart” conversions improved the sell-through rate, Web traction and brand strength. - Reid Carr, Red Door Interactive
10. Leverage Your Dedicated Brand Ambassadors
We leveraged our community of dedicated brand ambassadors by asking them to take their online love to the physical store. We invited them into a new store for a shopping appointment in exchange for social coverage. The program drove more than 40 ambassadors to shop and share, resulting in over 24 million impressions across popular platforms and incentivizing consumers to shop. Sales increased by 50%. - Christine Faulhaber, Faulhaber Communications
11. Implement CTAs To Download Free Content
We recently added an e-book to our website that solved a problem a lot of our clients face. We implemented a call to action for the e-book in multiple spots around the website. After a visitor would download the e-book, we would upsell them into booking a call and signing up for our service. The result was that with the same amount of organic traffic, we signed nine new clients in one month. - Eroslav Georgiev, Orange Trail
12. Leverage User-Generated Content
By leveraging user-generated content, we have increased customer engagement and conversion rates. For example, we launched a photo contest on social media and used user-generated images to create targeted ads, resulting in a 30% increase in conversions and a 25% increase in engagement. - Kenny Tripura, Edkent Media
13. Make Contact Forms More Accessible
We changed the location of a contact form on a client’s website to be more readily accessible to visitors. Conversions increased by 30% simply by making it easier for clients to send a message, rather than having to click several times to get to the contact page. This small website change makes a huge impact on the customer journey. - Hannah Trivette, NUVEW Web Solutions
14. Take A Behavior Sequencing Approach
Increasing customer engagement and converting it into sales requires more than just a basic blocking and tackling digital strategy. For example, we have taken a behavior sequencing approach to customer engagement with a car wash brand. That strategy has helped the brand triple its number of locations by directly connecting our behavioral SEO strategy to the number of visits each month. - Roger Hurni, Off Madison Ave
15. Invest In Your Landing Pages
Your landing page should have high-quality content that is user-friendly and mobile-optimized. The key to having a well-optimized landing page is testing! Constant testing of different elements, headline options and CTA positions will help you develop an optimized landing page, which in turn will increase and improve lead quality and conversion. - Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day
16. PM Customers Who Engage With Your Social Media Content
In the last few months, I have increased customer engagement and converted traffic into sales by creating high-quality Reels and social media content, then private messaging customers who engaged with that content to convert them. The best part about this process is that this technique can be easily repeated over and over again. - Rudy Mawer, Mawer Capital LLC
