The season of love is upon us! This Valentine’s Day, focus on making your customers fall in love with your business all over again. The business to customer relationship really isn’t all that different than a relationship between friends, so it shouldn’t be too intimidating to maintain. People want to feel known and understood, and your consumers are no different. 

Providing your customers with a negative experience is the leading cause of losing those customers to competitors. Lack of engagement is one of many ways to create a negative experience for your consumers. Luckily, there are several creative ways to engage with customers and make them fall in love with your business:

Take them Behind-the-Scenes

It’s always exciting for people to see how things are done behind-the-scenes. When you’re engaging with your customers on social media, provide content that is intriguing and valuable to them. Take your viewers with you on a job and show them part of your process, and provide helpful tips along the way. If you have employees working with you, consider employee spotlights on your social outlets so consumers feel that they know who they’re working with, making interactions more comfortable. 

Including a behind-the-scenes segment in engagement emails is creative and interesting for consumers. Keep your content relevant to your industry and only share the parts of the job that would be exciting to an outsider!

Personalize Interactions

Small businesses have to keep up with the personalization trends of companies like Amazon and Netflix. Consumers are learning to expect a certain level of personalization when it comes to interactions with businesses, yet 80% of consumers say that businesses are not tailored to their needs. Personalize interactions with your customers by including their name in your communications and keeping record of their purchase history with you. When you know someone’s name, they automatically feel more comfortable with you and will place more trust in your business. 

Keeping track of a customer’s transaction history with your business gives you the ability to engage with them about services that spark their interest. 

Host a Digital Q&A Session

You’re the expert in your industry, and it’s your job to make sure that consumers know that. In order to build trust with customers, you should be engaging with them through valuable and exciting content. Who wouldn’t want free pest control, plumbing or HVAC advice from an expert? You can easily host a Q&A session through Instagram or Facebook for your loyal followers, but it can also be done through email engagements. Send out an email asking for customer questions and invite them to follow your social pages to get the answers. You’d be surprised how willing people are to engage with businesses when they’re directly invited to. 

Creative customer engagement invites more conversations with your loyal customers, which helps create loyal relationships for your business. Try out some of these engagement ideas and watch your customers fall in love with your business!

For more insights on marketing strategy that actually works for small business, connect with Jay Bean, Founder of FreshLime and Small Business Marketing Expert on LinkedIn and Twitter. If any of these tips have helped you or if you have anything to add, please comment below. We’d love to hear from you!​