Keeping your customers happy is a difficult task for many online companies. Thus, you have to spend more than ever on customer engagement strategies.
That’s because using the right customer engagement strategies is vital whether you’re starting an ecommerce business or running an existing one. Moreover, many ecommerce companies don’t make as much revenue as they should because they hardly engage with customers.
This post will walk you through easy customer engagement strategies to apply to your prospects and existing customers. Doing so will allow you to stand out from the rest of the pack. Let’s walk you through them:
1. Engaging your customers in real-time via live chat
Live chat offers excellent value in engaging customers in real-time and boosting satisfaction since it allows customers to get an instant response from queries.
Here are some ways how live chat can boost customer engagement:
- Engages customers: For people who go to your site to browse and compare prices, proactively engaging with them increases the chance of converting them into paying customers.
- Know your customers’ pain points: Live chat allows you to tap into your customers’ pain points and will provide the best solution.
- Know more about your customers’ behavior: You can get insights from your customers based on the pages they visit. Post-chat surveys are a great way that you can gather instant feedback while getting relevant information at the same time.
- Increased mobile sales: Smartphones have revolutionized the ecommerce industry, with more and more people preferring to show on mobile devices than purchase goods online. You can integrate a live chat feature in your mobile chat window. This allows you to guide your customers in their buying journey.
2. Use social media more
Including social media in your digital marketing strategy allows you to boost your revenue. It’s one of the best ways to use social proof to your advantage when you start your ecommerce website or business online.
Moreover, a solid social media presence lets you slice and dice the content that you make and reach out to your audience through it.
Thus, you’ll create content that matters to your audience, give them a format that’s easy to digest, and then share it.
Here are some of the best practices for engaging users on social media:
- Post regularly: Keep your brand on top of social media feeds by creating engaging and entertaining content. Regular posting lets you stay visible to your customers, letting them know that you exist and have something interesting to say.
- Utilize images: Images significantly enhance interaction rates across all social media platforms.
- Utilize social listening: Engagement is always a two-way street. You need to be aware of what people are saying about your brand. Similarly, you should also respond to criticism in a constructive yet positive way. If someone has a valid complaint, don’t merely acknowledge them. Instead, address these pain points in the best way possible.
- Social monitoring: You can utilize social monitoring tools to track metrics such as likes, retweets, keywords, and shares that are associated with your brand. Doing so lets you know who’s looking at your social media posts and how they respond.
- Offer value: Offer people ways how they can improve their lives in the form of guides and templates. You can also invite them to any upcoming events or webinars that you’re using so that they can learn something new.
3. Offer some customer loyalty rewards
These reward programs impact purchase frequency, lifetime customer value, retention, and referrals. The best part is that loyalty programs allow customers to buy often and spend more on their purchases.
Loyalty programs can take several forms. But generally, they have a system wherein points are accumulated over time to enhance the buying power. This can be a combination of exclusive discounts, early product releases, free gifts, points for redemption, and more.
4. Create Engaging Content
In the world of customer engagement strategies, relevant content is vital. So, ensure that you deliver insightful, engaging, and relevant content across all social media platforms, blogs, and other channels. Your content should be relevant to your brand if you want to add value.
If your customer engagement program has prospective content, this can be a significant differentiator when it comes to product sales. It’s also a great way to attract new customers. Your customers need to know how to use or get value from what they bought based on your content.
Here are some tips:
- Create customer-centric content: One of the best ways to target content for customer engagement is by creating consumer-focused content. It should be a type of content that your customers want to see and they’re happy with.
- Know consumer pain points: Know your audience demographics, customer needs, and pain points. It allows you to create content that keeps customers hooked and is relatable.
- Segment your target audience: Send abandoned carts to those who left items on their carts. Doing so allows you to increase engagement by offering real-time user reviews via email.
5. Optimizing your checkout process
Shopping cart and checkout abandonment rates are fairly common in online shopping.
There are strategies that you can apply to prevent this from happening:
- Keep it simple: Decrease the header and footer in your checkout pages. This gets rid of any distractions.
- Decrease the number of navigations at checkout: The goal is to create an engaging checkout flow in which users won’t feel lost.
- Provide live chat support: This reassures prospects that you can provide immediate answers to their queries.
- Avoid hidden shipping costs: One of the best ways to do this is offering free shipping. If you can’t afford to offer free shipping, then tell your customers everything about shipping costs.
Over to You
So there you have it. Although implanting these strategies may seem daunting, your company doesn’t have to do everything all at once.
You can start with one or two strategies you’re comfortable with and then expand more strategies as you gain more experience. Ecommerce website security should also be considered when building an online store. Excellent customer service and interaction would lead to more leads and higher ROI as time goes on.