Ten Tips for Engaging Customers and Employees

As a career marketer and now an experienced entrepreneur, I’ve had the opportunity to learn some of the best (and worst) ways to keep people engaged. From optimizing time in-person to ensuring you’re earning rather than demanding your customers’ attention, these are my top 10 tips for engagement.

Tips for keeping your team engaged:

1. Allow employees the flexibility to work from home or the office, optimizing in-person time for collaboration and creative meetings. Working in a hybrid environment allows employees to access the space they need for the work they’re completing on their terms, which is conducive to an engaged and productive team.
2. Hire bright, experienced VPsto own career development, coaching and mentorship. Time and time again, I’ve heard from colleagues and friends that the reason they chose to work at a startup over a larger company is because of the access they gain to experienced senior team members.
3. Foster a company culture that is genuine and supportive of your teams’ values. How? Enter: the Knakolade award. At Knak, we like to reward employees for aligning with our core values by acknowledging one individual at the end of each all-hands meeting with this award. Implementing something like this with your team is a recipe for success.
4. Give employees the autonomy to craft what they want to, and what they are interested in, without the limitations of outdated platforms or code. When it comes to marketing teams specifically, no one wants to become a glorified data entry clerk. Implement technology that allows your marketers to be creative again.
5. Collaboration is key. Our team is dispersed because I believe that we hire the best talent, regardless of location. This comes with challenges in regards to collaboration, which is why as we continue to grow, bi-weekly all-hands calls have been integral to our success.

Tips for keeping your customers engaged:

1. Write impactful copy—keep it interesting, convincing, and always simple to understand. Folks only typically pay attention to 20% of the words on the page, making short-form, impactful copy critical to delivering your message.
2. Think mobile-first. Over seven billion people around the world own a smartphone, so it’s paramount to ensure that your emails and landing pages are engaging for a mobile audience.
3. Accessibility and responsiveness are also major factors in keeping your customers engaged with your content and, ultimately, bought into your product or service. Did you know that 80% of online visitors will watch a video versus the dismal 20% that read text?
4. A careful balance between written and visual elements can also work wonders to keep eyeballs on your content. Everyone knows the golden rule from back in grade school for presentations—cut the words and focus on imagery. With emails and landing pages, it’s understandably a bit different, but the premise is the same: blocks of stale copy are not engaging, break it up with images and graphics!
5. Constantly update and add new product features to ensure your customers are receiving the best product or service possible. Unsurprisingly, we’ve found great success in constantly re-evaluating and upgrading our offerings and integrations, but you would be surprised how many people simply don’t do this enough.

As you can see, there are a lot of options when it comes to techniques to keep your audience interested in what you have to offer, whether you're focusing on your talent or your customers. The most important thing I want you to take away from this article is that creativity is king—people love to look at beautiful, interactive content and they will spend the most time doing just that when given the opportunity.

Written by Pierce Ujjainwalla, CEO and Co-founder of Knak, the codeless email and landing page creation platform for enterprise marketers.

About Pierce: Pierce Ujjainwalla has years of experience as a CEO, entrepreneur, and marketing leader. He has lived in the marketing trenches at companies like IBM, SAP, NVIDIA, and Marketo, and he launched Knak in 2015 as a platform designed to help Marketers simplify email creation. Visit his personal blog, Unsubscribed!, for more of the insight he’s gained as founder and CEO of Knak.