Remembering Customer Engagement with the Four C’s

There are many acronyms and initials used in marketing and business. It often helps us to keep focus on or remember the most important areas. One of the classic and most popular acronyms is the four P’s of Marketing:

• Place
• Price
• Promotion
• Product

There are now the “new four P’s of marketing”, which especially apply to digital and email marketing and exist alongside the original four P’s they are:

• Personalisation
• Preference
• Permission
• Privacy

Personalisation is not just addressing customers and clients by name, but also knowing what they want, what they have purchased in the past, and offering relevant products and services based on your knowledge of them.

Preference means accommodating customers according to how they wish.

Permission is very important in today’s marketing operations. Your company needs permission for certain marketing communications, specifically SMS mobile and email communications. If your customers want to be contacted via those channels, they need to opt in. If they do not wish to be contacted via those methods, that’s ok too. There are other channels that you can use to communicate with them. Obtaining permission leads to happy customers.

Privacy is another very important aspect of marketing. Obtaining permission is part of privacy, but respecting the privacy of your customers means being responsible in protecting their information.

Today we will be exploring the four C’s of customer engagement. Customer engagement focuses more on the individual customers rather than the marketing aspects of what your company does. Much of customer engagement involves thinking about service from the customer or client’s perspective. The four C’s of customer engagement are:

• Choice
• Customisation
• Connect
• Communicate

Choice means offering the customers different options so that they feel accommodated and comfortable with the selection.

Customisation means modifying your products or services to be useful for each customer.

Connect means that you engage your customers in the matter in which they wish. It is the when, what, why, where, and how of communicating with them. It might be in person, email, phone, or on social media.

Communicate means explaining details, answering questions, and being transparent with the information you deliver about your company.

There is actually a 5^th C of customer engagement (in addition to the importance weighed in by the actual customer or client) is content. Consumers today crave content and businesses can deliver a service by providing that content in the form of answers to questions, special offers, how to details, and general information that customers need to know about the company, product, or service. They say “content is king” and that is very true. The more information you build and provide for your current and potential customers, the more satisfied they will be when they want to know information about you and your company.