Using Interactive Marketing to Build a Lasting Customer Connection

Good business practices are always built on a base of strong customer relationships. Northsail is committed to ensuring that we always develop strong, long-lasting relationships with our clients.

When we begin talking to new customers, they know they can trust Northsail to always deliver on-spec, on-time and on-budget, because we're not afraid to turn down projects that we don't believe we can complete to our top-quality standards.

Building trust and loyalty with customers is the goal that every business strives for, but achieving this is impossible if your brand doesn't excite and inspire your customers.

One of the marketing methods that consistently engages and involves your customers in your promotions is interactive marketing. This engagement builds stronger connections with customers, because the marketing materials invoke emotional triggers through feelings of excitement, eagerness, and enjoyment.

Business is a battlefield. Every year, people are scrolling through social media faster. They skip more ads. They delete more and more content from their feeds, without even bothering to check them out.

Did you know there are more than 2 million blogs posted every - single - day? And yet, 3/4 of these blogs are shared less than 10 times through social media. That's a lot of content being ignored.

So, how do you get people to pay attention to your marketing? Unfortunately, there is no one right answer. Business is always changing, and it moves exponentially faster than it used to, due to constantly evolving digital technologies.

These advancements have led to innovative marketing strategies that create new avenues through which business owners can connect with their customers, such as social media marketing.

One of these methods involves leveraging interactive communication techniques to build interactive marketing campaigns into your customer engagement strategy.

Interactive content is effectively using technology to engage with people on an individual level. It creates a personalized customer experience for them by reacting to their choices in real-time, and allows you to gauge how well you're meeting your business goals, such as building brand awareness and brand affinity.

Interactive marketing is a way to utilize interactive communication to promote your brand, products, services, or messages directly to your customer base. In essence, these digital marketing tactics create a personalized experience for both new and your existing loyal customers.

It can also be a fantastic way to learn useful information about your existing relationships with customers, how they think, and what they're really looking for from your business.

In the end, if you use interactive marketing tactfully, you can increase your customer retention, digital customer engagements, as well as your overall customer satisfaction. It's easily one of the most powerful tools in your marketing strategy toolbelt.

Let's discuss some beneficial ways you can take advantage of interactive marketing in your next campaign.

There are a number of factors that should always be taken into account when you're designing an interactive marketing campaign.

The campaign has to feel relevant to your business, it has to be fun or helpful to use, the design needs to be appealing to your customer base, and it should be versatile enough to function on multiple social media platforms.

1.) Contests

Arguably, contests are the form of interactive marketing that have been around the longest.

As we've discussed in some of our previous articles, there are a number of different ways that you can frame contests. But the one consistent thing that exists between virtually every contest, is that they need to offer some sort of prize, and it absolutely must be relevant to your brand.

Contests are a great way to inject some fun into your marketing; especially if you're offering larger, more lavish prizes. Customers can get excited about potentially winning something they wouldn't normally purchase, or items too costly to splurge on for themselves.

Because everyone loves to get something for free, contests are a fantastic way to immediately engage, excite, as well as spur action from your customers. They're also an effective method for expanding your list of customer contact emails, which you can utilize later for email marketing purposes.

We have some helpful contest prize ideas, you should check out.

You should also try incorporating contests into your social media platforms. These platforms give you the opportunity to collect real customer stories about your products. They also help you gain valuable content, like customer insights, into where your interactive content may be lacking.

2.) Emails

While this form of interactive marketing is often sorely underestimated by certain businesses, it can be a challenging thing to use effectively.

Of course, it's important to note that email marketing gets harder each year, as people delete out more and more of their inboxes, without bothering to even read the emails first. However, there are still ways to get their attention.

Using some of the methods we're going to talk about next, such as opinion polls, quizzes and calculators can be a great way to get your customers to stop what they're doing and give you a few crucial seconds of their time. One way to do this is to make sure the subject line of your email is personalized, so that it doesn't come across looking like spam.

Once you've gotten them inside, make sure the interactive marketing elements (quizzes, polls, etc.) are created to be as engaging as possible. If you can incorporate things like animated GIFs, interactive buttons or hovering images, they'll make it that much easier to grab your customers' attention.

If you want to learn more about some helpful email marketing ideas, you can build those into your digital marketing strategy.

3.) Opinion Polls

Everyone wants to be heard, and opinion polls are a great form of interactive marketing for making your customers feel like you value their opinions.

Opinion polls also provide the customer with both immediate engagement and results. This not only satisfies our needs to share our thoughts, but it gives customers a sense of instant gratification.

In many cases, customers will choose to participate in polls, because they're curious how other people would answer the same questions. This allows them to gauge how their opinions fall against the averages.

Polls can be an invaluable way to gather certain kinds of information from your customers, which you can't evaluate based on website traffic and sales statistics alone.

Planned properly, polls can provide insight on how to frame future promotions based on actual customer behavior, in order to make future interactive experiences as effective, engaging, and wide-reaching as possible.

It also provides you with useful user-generated content that you can save to add credibility to your future campaigns.

4.) Quizzes

Relevance is absolutely critical to the success of quizzes. If your business is service-based, rather than product-based, quizzes can be a great way to show prospective customers that they could benefit from using your services.

From a promotional perspective, just think about the viral quizzes that you can find on Facebook. While you may not immediately see the value in asking potential customers what character from Friends they relate to the most, it can be an invaluable way to get an insight into the way that your customers think, as well as how they see themselves.

If you're tactful in how you prepare quizzes, they can not only be enjoyable and engaging, but they help customers make a personal, emotional connection with your brand.

Best of all, you can do all of this, while gaining invaluable knowledge about your current customer experience, and how your brand is either meeting or falling short of customer expectations.

5.) Calculators

If you provide a range of services or products that require personalized quotations, calculators are a fantastic way to excite your customers.

These give customers the chance to price out a number of different options, without ever having to interact directly with a sales rep. This gives customers a feeling of freedom, and in some cases, encourages them to consider a wide range of purchasing options from you.

Not only do these tools help to qualify sales prospects, but it can also be a way to entice customers by comparing your prices to your competition. This is an important part of providing all-inclusive digital experiences for your customers, which in turn creates stronger, long-lasting customer relationships.

Providing supplementary information regarding the budgetary benefits of using your services is a huge motivator for a huge range of different customer demographics.