It is a well known fact that customers leave if they are poorly treated or if they don’t feel connected with your brand. Accenture finds that 52% of consumers substituted or stopped buying a brand due to poor customer service, resulting in roughly $1.6 trillion losses in the U.S. itself. The only way to prevent such churn is to provide exceptional customer service and engage your customers at every touchpoint in the customer journey. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you keep in touch with your customer at all times. Blog posts can be very effective at engaging your customers. While the internet may be inundated with blogs, that doesn’t mean your business shouldn’t have one. A super-useful, result-driven blog has the power to increase your bottom line and drive customer loyalty. Are you unlocking its potential? If you have a blog, then take the necessary steps to ensure this content is relevant and meaningful for your customers.  Remember, one of the main reasons you have a blog is to engage, inspire, and create opportunities to have more organic dialogue with your most valuable customers.  This drives increased customer retention.  

Your blog content should always have a comments section for customers to provide thoughts and/or feedback.  This allows your audience to become a part of the conversation. It’s important to track customer engagement by testing different types of content to gauge what is most appealing for your customers. Content topics will vary and some topics will perform better than others but the goal is to constantly be relevant so your customers connect and engage with your brand in a positive manner.

Try and make your blog content fun and interactive by incorporating a survey question, videos, photos, customer testimonials, photos and infographics:

• Quizzes
• Videos
• Photos
• Infographics

Case in point, 21st Street, the Forever 21 blog is quite popular for its strong visuals. The blog covers background stories about wallet friendly items and mixes in interviews with designers and creators to keep their target audience engaged and intrigued. It also features street style posts from time to time and numerous fitness posts.

Regularly posting quality blogs can forge long term relationships and foster customer engagement and satisfaction.  When drafting content, always be mindful of the following: 

• Refrain from using sales pitches in your blog posts. Having intriguing and informative blogs and sharing them with your customers show that you want to provide value beyond a product or service. 
• Your blog is a trusted source of information for your customers. Provide facts on current trends, news, events, best practices, etc. 
• Be sure and identify your most valuable and profitable customers and find ways to celebrate them. Give them something to share in social media.  
• Improve your offering with posting useful how-to-guides, tips, advice and self help blogs or video tutorials. Don’t leave them confused and frustrated, having a blog is a great customer engagement solution which enhances their experience. 
• Use customer feedback to further understand their desired behavior. It’s also a conversation starter, it builds credibility for your brand and encourages people to check out what you do and offer.
• Reward customers for engaging with your content.    

Finally, your blog content should be designed so that it can be easily shared on social channels, on email and in a customer newsletter.