Everything you need to know about online community.

Innovation is easier said than done. If you need some inspiration, look no further than enterprise brands and how they use crowdsourcing innovation. Here are 7 awesome crowdsourcing examples that will help you innovate.

How LEGO uses community to invent new products and reduce time-to-market from 2 years to 6 months, and how you could do the same.

There are many ways for brands to tap into the power of customer co-creation. In this article, we outline the top 6 ways that a co-creative community can help transform and improve innovation and marketing efforts.

There are many reasons why marketing and customer experience professionals should launch a co-creative community for brand fans. From gaining deeper insights to co-designing new products that are instant hits, this article will explore the four biggest reasons to take your customer engagement strategy into new co-creative territory.

Learn the latest digital trends shaping market research and consumer insights. From AI and social insights to customer co-creation, these are biggest areas for insights teams to capitalize on. Our list also includes practical tips for how best to leverage these trends to support innovation and marketing efforts.

Learn what a real consumer insight really means, with unique perspectives from various market research and brand marketing leaders. Discover what it takes to realize that A-ha moment, which can make all the difference between a breakthrough innovation or failed product launch.

The insight that normal folks like you, me or your neighbour Joe can become so deeply and enthusiastically committed to a leader or cause is a compelling one.

The best time to launch a community was 5 years ago. The second best time is now.

Smart and accessible short reads on community, marketing, customer engagement, consumer insights, innovation, co-creation, crowdsourcing and a bunch of other interesting topics.

Resources on employee engagement, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your employee engagement efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Resources on customer engagement, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your customer engagement efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Learn how to build a community using these resources, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your community building efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Resources on innovation, co-creation and crowdsourcing, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your crowdsourcing, innovation, and co-creation efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Resources on insights, market research and testing, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your insights and testing efforts, and practical tactics you can employ today. It's time you understood your users and customers better.

Resources on marketing, including articles, videos, ebooks and more. Discover strategies to support your marketing programs, and practical tactics you can employ today.

Employee engagement can be difficult to navigate, especially when considering the current demands of today’s workforce. Increasingly, employees are pushing for more flexibility, greater work-life balance, and have become unsatisfied with meaningless work and employers who aren’t willing to take a stand. As employee attitudes and preferences continue to evolve, it’s important for brands to develop and grow purposeful employee engagement strategies that address the needs of their employees in relevant and meaningful ways.

In this article, we provide the info you need to take your employee engagement initiatives to the next level with helpful context, actionable strategies, and measurement advice. Read on to learn more about:

What employee engagement is (and isn’t)

Two effective employee engagement solutions

Employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to an organization and the achievement of its goals. It’s what occurs when employees are deeply invested in the success of the organization and embody its core values and mission.

Employee engagement is no longer about well-designed co-working spaces with contemporary fixtures, ping pong tables, and free not-so-great coffee. True employee engagement goes beyond surface-level offerings and works to build a real connection between the employee and the organization.

Although it’s likely that engaged employees are also satisfied with and happy at work, employee satisfaction and happiness are not the same as employee engagement. 

Employee Satisfaction: Employee satisfaction is the level that someone is content with their job, whether that be their role and responsibilities, their people leader, or something less directly related like, “I’m just grateful to have a job”. Someone who is satisfied with work shows up each day, completes their tasks on time, and checks out. While “satisfied” is enough to get the job done, it’s not enough to produce exceptional results or foster employee loyalty. Satisfied employees might show up every day, but it’s not likely that they’re going above and beyond or feel considerably passionate about the work they’re doing.

Employee Happiness: Ping pong tables and free coffee might be enough to keep your employees happy, at least temporarily, but it’s not enough to create employee engagement. Happy employees should be a goal for organizations, but it’s important to remember that, like any emotion, happiness is a fleeting feeling and difficult to measure and benchmark between employees. Happy employees also don’t guarantee better performance in the same way that engaged employees do.

There are three general characteristics of an engaged employee: involved, enthusiastic, and committed. We took it upon ourselves to add a fourth: empowered. 

Involved: Engaged employees are highly involved in their organizations. Beyond their own responsibilities, they understand what’s happening throughout the company at a high level, and are often deeply interconnected with other teams. They might even take on extra tasks like running committees or organizing employee events. 

Enthusiastic: Not to be confused with happy or satisfied employees, engaged employees are enthusiastic about the work they’re doing and excited to make a difference. Engaged employees may experience the regular ups and downs of everyday life, but remain passionate and eager about upcoming projects and collaborations.

Committed: Engaged employees are not only committed to their organization and leaders, but to the core values and mission of the company as a whole. This level of dedication means they have a real stake in your brand and are willing to go above and beyond. It’s also unlikely that these folks will be tempted with competing job offers.

Empowered: Empowered employees are engaged employees. When organizations activate their employees in meaningful ways and provide them with the direction and autonomy they need to do great things, they become empowered to make a difference in ways that impact the entire organization and its stakeholders. 

Getting the best out of your employees starts with giving them your best. If you want to enable a workforce of passionate and loyal employees, you need to make sure you’re recognizing them for their contributions and providing them with what they need to be successful. We’ll chat more about this later on. 

Employee performance has a direct impact on the success (or failure) of an organization. Companies that invest in employee engagement programs will continue to outperform competitors that neglect to realize the importance of fostering an engaged team.

While there are many reasons why employee engagement is so important, we’ve decided to focus on four key areas:

Engaged employees are 18% more productive than their unengaged counterparts. This is thanks to a few factors working together simultaneously. Typically, engaged employees are healthier, experience less stress and anxiety, and miss less work, which all play a direct role in overall productivity.

Additionally, engaged employees are often given more autonomy and trust from their employer, which allows them to work when, how, and where works best for them, leading to more efficient outputs.

Lastly, employers who prioritize employee engagement often invest in the proper training, development, and resources that employees require in order to improve their performance and productivity on an ongoing basis.

In April of this year, 4 million Americans quit their jobs in search of new opportunities that align more closely with their personal and professional values. As employees continue to demand more from corporations, employers are struggling to fill positions. Many are already calling this the Great Resignation. 

So, what does this mean for organizations? Well, beyond offering more competitive wages and better treatment, it means that companies need to invest more heavily in purpose-driven employee engagement strategies. 

When employees are thoughtfully engaged by their employers, they are far more likely to be committed and loyal to the organization. Research has found that engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their organization and that organizations with top-performing employee engagement practices experienced 43% less turnover.

According to research conducted by Harvard Business Review, 92% of executives believe that organizations with highly engaged employees have happy customers. Additionally, research shows that those in the top quartile for employee engagement saw a 10% increase in overall customer loyalty and engagement.

Focusing on employee engagement has a direct impact on customer engagement, which in turn, has a direct impact on your brand’s reputation and bottom line.

Related: How Customer Engagement Impacts Brands (And How to Improve Yours)

Not surprisingly, organizations with engaged employees see 23% higher profitability. This is a result of: 

Organizations having to spend less time and money recruiting and training new employees because of higher retention rates

Satisfied and engaged customers spending more money, buying more frequently, and continuing to choose your brand over competitors

Increased productivity leading to quicker and better results, allowing organizations to accomplish more in a shorter time frame

According to Gallup research conducted in 2020, only 36% of employees consider themselves engaged, meaning that essentially two-thirds of workers are highly likely to move jobs, or are checked out from their current job. 

In the next section, we’ll show you how you can boost employee engagement and unlock more value.

Earlier on, we mentioned the four characteristics of an engaged employee: involved, enthusiastic, committed, and empowered. In order for organizations to tap into these defining traits, they have to provide their employees with the proper tools, support, and agency. 

Below, we’ve highlighted four effective ways that employers can engage employees in meaningful ways. 

The first way senior leaders in an organization can improve employee engagement is by setting a clear direction for their teams and the organization as a whole. This requires leadership to craft and communicate a vision for the future, and articulate the path to get there.

Direction goes beyond creating a 5-year vision and regular OKRs. Deep engagement requires purpose. Research has found that companies that are purpose-driven are more successful. Building a work culture around purpose takes more than hanging a mural in the lobby, and requires action. Purpose is personal, at the end of the day, so leadership needs to support their people in living the purpose of the organization.

Giving employees a clear direction for the future empowers them with the knowledge and reassurance they need to be successful in their positions.

Secondly, co-creation is a critical part of engagement activities. Co-creation in the context of employee engagement means that across the organization, folks are getting the opportunity to contribute to initiatives that inspire them and improve the organization.

This could mean giving frontline employees the chance to share feedback from customers across the organization or allowing factory workers to collaborate with head office on new products or policies. Or it could mean employee-run teams tackling diversity, equity and inclusion challenges using Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).

Providing employees with the opportunity to co-create and contribute encourages them to really get involved and connect with people outside of their core teams.

A strategic approach to career progression is important for employee engagement as well. People leaders should be working with their reports to understand their aspirations, and there should be clear progressions through the company.

Organizations can empower their people to form ERGs as a way to connect, make an impact, and build their networks, helping them progress through the organization. Additionally, whether it’s taking action on social issues or standing up for greater inclusion and belonging, employees are increasingly agents for social change, and they want their workplace to support them. 

Showing a commitment to your employees’ development and career progression, as well as their passions, gives them the confidence they need to fully commit to your organization over the long term.

Empowering people to do good and create positive change in their local communities improves the employee experience and connects your workforce around meaning, impact, and hope.

Organizations can run employee giving and matching campaigns in support of causes that are important to team members, or regularly host volunteer opportunities to give back to the communities where they operate. Engaging with your employees through social impact is a great way to foster enthusiasm and ignite passion.

As employee standards and expectations continue to shift beyond the individual and towards the greater good, organizations that engage with their employees in prosocial behaviour will not only see higher engagement rates but will be more trusted by their employees as a result. More and more, employees are looking to their employers to do the right thing.

Edelman’s 2020 and 2021 Trust Barometer reports reveal that people’s trust is directly tied to an institution’s dedication to doing the right thing to improve society. Businesses that are genuine and committed to building a better world stand to earn and retain the trust of their audiences. 

It can be challenging to find a single solution that helps support each of the four key ways to boost employee engagement, but there are some platforms out there that do a pretty good job of covering each. Here, we cover two software solutions for meaningful employee engagement:

The Chaordix Community Platform allows People and Human Resource teams to align employees around the vision and purpose of the organization. It connects senior leaders with folks across the company in a social way that feels much more personal than email.

In addition to being a great communication tool, the Chaordix Platform allows teams to launch co-creation challenges and host employee resource groups. Admins can craft briefs and then allow employees to submit their best ideas and get feedback and support from across the organization. Photo sharing, polls, and discussion forums empower ERGs to create rich connections.

For workplaces that fail to foster this sense of connection and belonging, employee engagement suffers by up to 30%.

Spark, Benevity’s Employee Engagement Solution, allows organizations to highlight volunteer opportunities, facilitate employee giving and employer matching, and encourage prosocial behaviour using gamification. This single destination is flexible so companies can highlight causes that are important to their purpose while also providing broad choice so people can take action on the issues that matter to them – no matter where they are in the world – for greater impact and meaningful engagement. 

Benevity has found that companies who use their tools to engage their employees in giving and volunteering reduce turnover by 57% and see an average of 22% in program participation in the first year. 

Depending on the program or solution you have in place, how you measure employee engagement might look slightly different.

With the Chaordix Community Platform, our reporting dashboard allows you to measure and track user participation including logins, activity stats like submissions, comments and much more. Using Groups, administrators are able to segment members by departments and track engagement on a team-by-team basis. This gives organizations the ability to better understand individual participation as well as monitor which teams are the most active (or most inactive). 

With Spark, employers are able to track employees’ volunteer hours and gain insight into participation rates. Similar to Chaordix, reporting in Spark allows employers to view top participants on an individual, department, and store level. Being able to compare these various subsets allowed organizations to continuously improve their engagement programs. 

Additionally, out-of-the-box and ad-hoc reports provide guided analysis into how employees are engaging with the program on a granular level.

If you haven’t decided on an employee engagement solution quite yet, there are a few other ways you can measure engagement at your organization. 

Employee Engagement Surveys: A well-designed employee engagement survey can help people leaders better understand engagement at an organizational level. These surveys can be filtered by teams to help identify any gaps in employee engagement efforts or recognize the most engaged team members. It is important to make sure these surveys are comprehensive and ask the right questions.

Pulse Surveys: Pulse surveys are great for collecting real-time feedback from your employees on specific topics. These surveys can be especially useful during times of uncertainty such as an ownership change or navigating a back-to-office plan. They’re also a great way to show your employees that you really care about them and value their feedback. 

Lifecycle Surveys: Lastly, lifecycle surveys can be conducted at specific points during an employee's time at your organization. New hires can be asked about their onboarding experience, long-time employees can be asked what makes them stay, and employees moving on to their next adventure can be asked about their experience at the organization and why they’ve chosen to move on.

With so many ways to measure employee engagement, it’s important to pick a solution that works best for you. Larger organizations might find success in electronically distributed surveys and smaller organizations might be able to schedule one-on-ones and casual conversations. What’s important is that whatever approach you choose keeps the best interests of your employees in mind.

As workforce expectations continue to evolve, it is important for organizations to invest in systems and strategies that continue to prioritize the well-being of their employees. With engaged employees offering better and faster results, happier customers, and higher profitability, the brands that encourage and support employee engagement will continue to outperform their competitors in significant ways.

If you’re ready to start engaging your employees in more meaningful ways, visit our employee engagement page or check out our friends at Benevity. 

Take your employee engagement initiatives to the next level with helpful context, actionable strategies, and measurement advice.

Navigating Employee Engagement: How to Engage Employees in Meaningful Ways

Whether you’re a seasoned community manager or just starting out, gaining support for your community project can be a difficult task that requires various levels of approval, a commitment of resources, and a dedicated budget. While this may seem daunting, with the right process in place, you’ll be sure to secure and maintain community investment in the long run. 

We’ve provided five steps to help you win the necessary budget (time and resources) to develop and support a thriving community for your organization:

Understand Cross-Functional Stakeholder Needs and Concerns

Gaining support for your community becomes much easier if you can demonstrate how the community aligns with the organization’s broader business strategies: 

Understand the problem(s) your organization is trying to solve. What are your goals? Areas of improvement? How does community fit in?

Determine how the community can benefit the organization in both the short and long-term. Imagine the time and money saved by product managers being able to receive feedback from the community before a product launch. 

Connect with teams across your organization to better understand how each team could be impacted differently by the community. Marketing, Legal, IT, and Customer Support are a few of the departments you should be sure to include in your rounds. 

Navi Vaid, VP of Business Development here at Chaordix, shares some examples of the types of conversations you should be having. 

Ask Market Research how they’re conducting research or inviting feedback. Tell them what you’re thinking of doing and ask them how they would like to use the community.

If you’re approaching the CX team, ask them what the current retention strategies are and how those numbers can be increased.

This is also a great way to simultaneously find and build internal support, with the possibility of securing internal champions for the community as well.

You can also gather your own secondary research to further your case for community. There are plenty of community-focused organizations conducting valuable research to better understand and prove the ROI of community. The Community Roundtable, CMX, and Commsor are just a few that come to mind. 

Learn more: The Impact of Online Communities

Now that you’ve done your research and connected with different teams across your organization, it’s time to take it to the big guns. 

By now, you should be able to answer the following questions: 

Where in the organization does the community add value?

What teams will be the most impacted by the community?

How does the community help achieve different business objectives?

Who should be involved in the creation and management of the community?

What types of people do we want to invite into the community?

It’s important to make the value-add clear from the start—no matter how well researched or inventive your solution is, if the value isn’t obvious or persuasive, you won’t obtain funding or any other necessary support. Be sure to emphasize not only how the community can help the organization achieve its current objectives and plans, but the potential opportunities community brings as well. 

Additionally, it is much easier to gain executive buy-in if you understand what unique motivations each stakeholder has. This may appear time-consuming at first, but it can substantially boost buy-in to a project, and will actually save you time and energy in the long run. Individuals and teams in the same organization may be driven by entirely different perspectives. Forming a connection between the community project and business goals, as well as between stakeholder values and motivations, is critical to achieving overall buy-in.

According to Vaid, this can take the form of “helping stakeholders understand how the community could potentially benefit them, what toolsets are going to be involved, and how they can extract information to capture important metrics.” You need to identify the team members who will be building or moderating the community, the tentative timeline, and the expected outcome or value achieved at the end.

Three: Understand Cross-Functional Stakeholder Needs and Concerns

In the previous section, we mentioned the importance of addressing stakeholders’ individual concerns in order to gain supporters (and potential advocates). Here are a few key ones to focus on:

Attach a dollar figure to the benefits of community, such as the cost savings by offsetting cost centres or driving up brand value.

Look up previous presentations and their outcomes. If previous projects have had any problems, you should have a response prepared.

Determine beforehand what the technological barriers for the implementation of a community could be and what departments need to be involved.

Consider providing decision-makers with a sneak peek at your presentation ahead of time and soliciting their feedback. You may then integrate their suggestions into your presentation, increasing their stake in your success. If you give the decision-makers the impression that they helped produce your content, they will not only support you but also feel empowered as ambassadors—they will feel as if they’re championing their own concept.

Now that you’ve won your first budget and you’ve started getting some wins for your internal departments, the question becomes how do you continue to grow the community investment from the company? 

This is your opportunity to communicate the value and growth created by the community and start connecting outcomes to different activities within the community. Vaid suggests following up with the functional leaders you originally involved and ask them: “How did that project go? I gave you those data points from the community—how valuable was that for you?” Then, take those data points and grow them.

Not only will you have a strong business case to back you up when you need a larger budget or team to grow the investment, but you’ll also be able to incorporate more functional areas and use cases into your community—creating more value overall. 

When community is used as a micro-marketing exercise to encourage your raving fans, members, or customers to actively engage, the possibilities are seemingly endless across functions.

Lastly, it’s important to establish a process and routine around how you’re championing the community in order to maintain awareness and investment. Communities are often public-facing spaces that are accessed by a broad cross-section of users, so it is important their distinct voices are heard. Be sure to go back on a regular basis and communicate: this is what we’re accomplishing and this is what we can achieve if we continue to invest further.

Getting a new idea approved at the executive level can be a nerve-wracking process, especially when that idea requires time, resources, and a healthy budget. To improve your chances of securing the proper resources for your project, you’ll have to prove to them the value of the idea you’re suggesting. This involves making a strong business case, finding and building support internally, staying results-oriented, and taking those results back to the individuals who supported you on a regular basis.

We hope this article provided you with the necessary steps, examples, and overview to take your idea to the next level. For more useful resources check out our Learn page.

Five steps to help you win the necessary budget (time and resources) to develop and support a thriving community for your organization.

Engaged customers are oftentimes the difference between a thriving, successful business and a total bust. These customers do more than buy your products and services, they share your content, recommend you to friends, and are the first to go to bat for you online. Their support means more than just the dollars they spend.

This explains why customer engagement is such a hot topic among marketers and their teams. Read on to learn what exactly customer engagement is, how to improve customer engagement at your organization, and why community should be at the centre of your customer engagement strategy.

Depending on the products or services you sell, customer engagement can look different, but at its core are two main components: relationships and interactions.  

These interactions can take place in-person or online, but regardless of whether you’re engaging with your customers at your storefront or through social media, every interaction should aim to strengthen the relationship between your brand and the customer.

Learn more: How to Increase Brand Engagement in the Modern Media Landscape

The key to customer engagement is making sure you interact with your customers in a way that resonates and makes sense. While Costco’s free and fresh samples do a great job of engaging the people that are physically in store, it wouldn’t make much sense to try and ship these same items to online shoppers (though, it might be interesting to test how well cooked Bagel Bites travel).

It’s important to not only consider where your customers are interacting with your brand (in-person or online) but also when and at what point they are at in the customer journey (which we will talk about in a little bit). 

To really engage your customers, you have to get to know them first - their tastes and preferences, buying habits, how they want to be communicated with, and, most importantly, what they find valuable. 

Now that we’ve established what customer engagement is, we can take a closer look at why it is so important. 

Customer engagement allows you to offer your customers value beyond just the products and services they purchase. Although your high-quality artisan cheeses (can you tell I’m hungry?) might be enough to get people in the door, you then have to think about what’s going to make people stick around and keep coming back for more. 

Personalized experiences, tailored content, and meaningful interactions deliver higher levels of value, and in return, your customer will provide you with more value as well.

Spend more & shop more frequently (revenue)

Recommend your brand to others  (advocacy)

Help you build better products and services (co-creation)

Learn more: How to Build a Customer Value Flywheel

It should come as no surprise that customers who feel like they’re getting real value from a brand will continue to purchase from them. Studies have shown that engaged customers buy 90% more frequently and spend 60% more per transaction. 

This is the clearest example of how generating value for your customers can turn into direct value creation for your brand. 

Not only do engaged customers spend more on your products and services, but they also spend less on your competitors. The same study found that engaged customers were five times more likely to indicate that they would purchase only from that brand in the future. 

Customer engagement and relationship building go hand in hand. When you can prove to your customers that you care about them beyond the money they spend - their needs and interests - you can create sustainable, long-lasting relationships that out-perform transaction-based approaches.

Additionally, outlets like Harvard Business Review have determined that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Investing in an exceptional customer experience that builds engagement means you need to invest less in marketing and sales. 

A truly successful business creates customer experiences around their products and services that are so tailored, meaningful, and memorable that their customers begin promoting on behalf of the brand. 

When people genuinely enjoy what your company does, they’ll want their friends and family to share the same experience. This is why word of mouth (WOM) marketing is considered the most valuable form of marketing.

Establishing customer engagement touchpoints that are worth sharing is an effective way of earning this type of marketing while establishing stronger relationships with current customers.

Increased revenue, loyalty, and advocacy are some of the most common ways engaged customers can benefit your business. An outcome of effective customer engagement that is not talked about enough is the ability to create better products and services with these customers. 

The concept of collaborating with your brand’s users is called co-creation. Engaged customers know your products best, making them the ideal people to help you improve your offerings. Not only do these customers want to help you create better products because it means they can enjoy those products themselves, but also because your engagement efforts have made them feel like they have a stake in your brand.

Customer Engagement, Experience, and Journey

Before we dive into how customer engagement, customer experience, and the customer journey are all connected, we first need to define what a customer journey is.

Effective customer engagement goes beyond transactions and traditional customer service. Customer engagement ensures your brand is adding value at every touchpoint along the customer journey, across channels, and is tailored to unique preferences. It’s no longer enough to serve your customers generic ads, sell them a product, and send them on their way. This also allows you to identify how, when, and where your customers are interacting with your brand, giving you the opportunity to segment users based on their purchasing preferences and habits.

Amanda Moloney, Director, Client Engagement

Our Director of Client Engagement, Amanda Moloney, defines customer engagement as “everything your team does to make sure the customer is getting the most out of your products and services'' and that the customer journey is “more of the outline of these experiences that you adjust based on what you see happening in real life.” She emphasizes the importance of learning from your customers and constantly improving each touchpoint along the customer journey to match their preferences.  

While every business might have a slightly different approach to customer engagement, there are a few sure-fire ways to improve your customer engagement strategy.

We mentioned earlier that successful customer engagement strategies include effectively engaging your customers at multiple touchpoints along the customer journey before, during, and after their purchases. One of the best ways to achieve this level of comprehensive engagement is to build a community around your brand. 

Learn more: What Is an Online Community? Everything you need to know

Communities are created by brands to engage their customers on an ongoing basis. Often online, they provide brands with the space to connect with their customers and biggest fans, share important information, encourage co-creation, and give customers exclusive access to the brand they love. 

Learn more: 10 Examples of Online Communities from Brands You Love

Communities help support every stage of the customer journey. New customers can ask questions and read reviews before committing to a purchase, current customers can discover new and more efficient ways of using products, and brand fans can share their knowledge easily and be rewarded for doing so. 

Ultimately, building a customer community is one of the most effective ways to tap into the four benefits of engaged customers that we mentioned earlier (increased revenues, loyalty, advocacy, and co-creation).

Learn more: Why the customer experience journey needs community

If you’re not ready to dive into the world of online communities just yet, there are several other ways you can start improving customer engagement for your brand. 

Personalized content and experiences are the simplest ways to communicate to your customers that you listen to them and take action, inherently letting them know you care. 

Personalization goes beyond adding your customers’ name to an automated email. It is about delivering the right type of content, at the right time, in the right place. Does this customer respond best to blogs or videos? Do they read their emails in the morning or at night? Do they even check their email to begin with or would a text be more effective? 

Learn more:  4 big steps to engagement marketing

These are all things to consider when establishing your customer engagement strategy and will allow you to form deeper connections with your customers because you’re meeting them where they are on their own terms. 

An online community is a great way to build these catered experiences, as Groups allow members to be segmented manually or automatically based on their characteristics, and your brand is able to serve these folks personalized content.

It might seem like a no-brainer, but in order to improve customer engagement, you should be encouraging and rewarding customers for their engagement. 

This might look like identifying super users and giving them behind-the-scenes access to an upcoming launch, compensating customers for writing reviews and sharing user-generated content, and launching campaigns that get your customers involved in business processes. 

Online communities make it easy to encourage and reward customers that are actively engaged and participating. Gamification allows you to assign badges, prizes can be given to challenge winners, and community members can earn status and praise from other customers. 

Effective customer engagement comes down to the value you are adding for your customers, and where you are adding that value.

Learn more: How to Drive Member Engagement

Two Successful Customer Engagement Examples

Whether you are a brand that sells colourful square blocks or durable spray paints, there’s a customer engagement strategy that is certain to deliver value for both you and your customers. 

LEGO has earned titles like “world’s most loved brand” and their customers are often more accurately labelled as superfans. But this level of success did not just happen. Instead, it was all thanks to thoughtfully crafted customer engagement strategies that put their customers and the LEGO community at the centre. 

Learn more: How can you drive engagement by aligning brand purpose with customer passion?

LEGO products are used and enjoyed by a diverse range of people from all around the world. When dealing with such an expansive customer base, it is important to recognize that each of these customers will likely have different engagement preferences, which is exactly what LEGO does. Beyond engaging with customers in person at their storefronts or online through social media and e-commerce channels, LEGO also has a series of other significant touchpoints. LEGO CON, LEGO Videos, and Legoland are all examples of different engagement touchpoints that serve to cater to different customer needs and to improve the overall customer experience.

The LEGO Ideas community, filled with over 1.8 MILLION members, serves as the ultimate hub for LEGO fans to connect and share. Members are encouraged to share their own LEGO kit designs and vote on submissions from others. They are rewarded with the opportunity to see the very best ideas come to life as sets they can add to their collections.

Learn more: LEGO Co-creates Crowd Favorites on a Global Scale

Similar to LEGO, Rust-Oleum is a well-recognized brand serving a diverse customer base. But unlike LEGO, Rust-Oleum didn’t always have a direct connection to their customers. Often sold through third-party retailers, Rust-Oleum was looking for a better way to connect and engage their customers. 

Rust-Oleum’s Creator’s Studio community serves as the optimal customer engagement strategy. It allows Rust-Oleum to connect directly with their customers and gives Rust-Oleum customers direct access to the brand they love as well as other people who share a passion for crafting and DIY. Through the community, Rust-Oleum can empower brand advocates, foster loyalty, and source user-generated content and insightful product ideas from the people who use their products the most. 

Learn more: Rust-Oleum Gathers DIY-lovers to Test Products, Gather Insights, and Engage Customers

Depending on your brand’s approach to customer engagement, how you measure engagement will likely look different, but there are a few metrics that can be applied across the board.

Learn more: The ultimate customer engagement plan

Earlier on we mentioned that one of the ways engaged customers provide business value beyond their dollars spent is by being a brand advocate and recommending your products and services to others.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that is used to measure how likely your customer is to recommend your brand to a friend, family member, or colleague. It often appears as a single survey question that asks customers to rank their likeliness to recommend on a scale of 1-10. 

NPS can help brands determine engagement on the basis of brand advocacy and loyalty. 

Do you remember the stat we shared about how customers who are engaged buy 90% more frequently? 

Well, if engaged customers are known to purchase more often then a great way to measure customer engagement is through their Purchase Frequency (PF). Simply put, this is how often a customer makes a purchase at your store, on or offline. 

One last memory-testing question. How much more do engaged customers spend per transaction?

This makes Average Order Value (AOV) another excellent way to measure customer engagement. AOV is the average amount a customer spends per purchase and can be easily calculated by dividing revenue by the number of orders placed.

Tracking NPS, PF, and AOV together will give you a good foundation for measuring how engaged your customers are.

Engaged customers are at the heart of every successful business. They are the ones who recommend your products to friends and family, eagerly write online reviews, comment on your posts, and consistently choose your brand over your competitors (even when there is a massive sale). But this level of loyalty does not just happen. It is the result of hard work and a commitment to creating tailored and meaningful experiences for your customers.

The best way to create these types of experiences at scale is to build an online community focused on your brand and the people who love it most. By designing a dedicated space for your brand's biggest fans to connect, ask questions, and learn from others, you’re able to provide more value for your customers while getting more in return. 

Learn more:  Why the most valuable customer engagement is happening outside social media

If you are ready to make community a part of your customer engagement strategy, check out our community platform or book a demo.

Make community a part of your customer engagement strategy and discover how to empower your most valuable asset: engaged customers.

How Customer Engagement Impacts Brands (And How to Improve Yours)

Modern brands use communities to connect with their customers. These communities come in many different forms, but often they are built online. These online communities are digital spaces created and owned by organizations where people gather and connect over their love of a brand, whether it be the brand’s products, services, or mission. Other times these communities are used to connect employees, investors, or other stakeholders. 

Whether you are building a community using mainstream social channels, like Facebook or Reddit, or you are using a community platform, like ours, branded communities can be powerful tools for marketing and other departments. Organizations that launch branded communities are building deeper and more meaningful relationships with their customers. 

When done right, branded communities allow your organization to:

Gain direct access to your customers, get to know them better, and create better experiences

Shape the conversations happening about your brand

Conduct less-costly and faster market research

Boost brand awareness, loyalty, advocacy, and positive brand sentiment

Articles

Navigating Employee Engagement: How to Engage Employees in Meaningful Ways

How to Win Resources for Your Community

How Customer Engagement Impacts Brands (And How to Improve Yours)

10 Examples of Online Communities from Brands You Love

What Is an Online Community? Everything You Need to Know

Explained: The Customer Value Flywheel + How to Build One

[Infographic] The Impact of Online Communities

How to Manage a Thriving Online Community

How to Launch an Online Community

Essential Articles

What Is an Online Community? Everything You Need to Know

How Enterprise Brands Do It: The Best Examples of Crowdsourced Innovation

When Community Clicks: The LEGO Ideas Story

6 key areas for customer co-creation and brand collaboration

The Benefits of Co-creation: 4 Reasons your CX Team Should Co-create with Customers

6 digital trends shaping consumer insights

What is a consumer insight?

What the Commune Can Teach Us About Community

This website is not optimized for Internet Explorer.