As an e-commerce or online retailer, you might think that your products are already engaging enough for your consumers. After all, shopping online is all about the products, right? In e-commerce, if you are not providing opportunities for customers to engage with your brand other than making purchases from you, you are likely losing out on a large volume of customers.
For those with an e-commerce website customer engagement should be a top priority. By not engaging your customers across multiple points during their customer journey, you are not providing an optimal experience with your brand or your website. If this sounds a little confusing or time-consuming, below we give some top tips on how to improve customer engagement for e-commerce.
Allow Customer Feedback
One of the best ways to improve customer engagement is to allow for customer feedback. This could be in the form of reviews on your social media channels, on your website itself, or on your Google Business Listing. The comments could be about the products they have brought from you or about your customer service, but be sure to answer each review or comment in the best way possible. Negative reviews should not be deleted, but you should try to provide a positive resolution to them as quickly as possible.
Create Unique Content
You know that your products are great, your customers know that your products are great, but…that might be all they know about your brand. E-commerce retailers need to think of their consumers as a community of people rather than just prospective buyers. Customer engagement can be improved by brands creating unique content such as blog posts about your products, social media content about topics relating to your industry, and even video content to entertain your customers.
Offer Incentives
E-commerce retailers often assume that return customers will return without any encouragement on their part. The reality is that, in order to continue customer engagement, you need to provide incentives to your customers. These incentives do not have to cost your business anything and can be as simple as providing a discount at checkout or a voucher on a customer’s birthday. These incentives encourage your customers to buy from your brand and improve the engagement on your website and boost your sales, too.
Optimise On-Site Engagement
Optimising the on-site engagement of your e-commerce website is often an area that is overlooked by retailers. With today’s unique tools, you can look at the geographical location of your customers, track their behaviour on your website, and even find other demographics using their tracking preferences. This information can be used to optimise on-site engagement, such as showing a pop-up for a special at a branch of your store in their geographical area or advertising a sale on a product they have purchased before. This personalisation will impress customers and show them that your brand is listening to them.
Make Information Easy To Find
Customer engagement should not only focus on content and social media. While these are important aspects, you should also look at improving and optimising the content on your site. For a positive user experience, make sure that all important information is easy to find for when customers need it the most. You can also have an FAQ page for the most frequently asked questions, as well as a clearly defined contact page with emergency numbers listed in case of an urgent query.
Enhance E-Commerce
Customer engagement is a vital component of any successful website and business, and this is especially true for e-commerce. You should always allow for customer feedback and be sure to respond to it, concentrate on creating unique and valuable content, and be sure to offer personalised incentives.
You should look at improving your on-page engagement too, but using consumer demographics strategically. Showing pop-ups based on location can be highly effective, and you can also use previous behaviour for messages, such as sales on items previously purchased or viewed. If you would like to improve the customer engagement of your e-commerce website, contact NetMechanic today to find out how we can help you.