How To Increase Your Customer Engagement (For Ecommerce)
When online selling first came up, the only thing brands needed to prioritize was getting a sale. Now, a transactional relationship isn’t enough. For brands to sustain their growth, they need to think of providing a customer experience beyond just the sale to build an emotional connection with them for long-term brand loyalty.
In this blog, we’ll discuss customer engagement and strategies for effectively increasing customer retention and turning them into repeat shoppers.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is how a brand engages with its customers or target audience throughout the customer journey. It redefines the brand-customer relationship beyond the transaction and focuses on how the brand communicates, deals with customer interactions, and builds a relationship with the customer.
Why you need to prioritize customer engagement
When you put customer experience or user experience first and prioritize ways to engage with them, you build a rapport with them, establishing a relationship that shows them it's worth investing in your brand.
Higher customer satisfaction
Since customer engagement strategies are designed to make the customer feel heard, valued, and understood, it's bound to increase the positive experiences that your shopper has with your brand.
Increased customer loyalty and brand advocacy
Customers satisfied with their experience are sure to come back to shop. When they have a requirement, they will continue to choose your products over your competitors.
Feeling loyalty towards a brand makes customers proactive about how they engage with it— they leave positive reviews, talk about the brand on social media, and even recommend it to others— and even become brand advocates without any incentives in place.
Competitive advantage
When more customers feel loyal to your brand, you can be assured that they will stick to your brand and your products and even bring new shoppers in. This kind of customer loyalty gives you a huge advantage, especially since you already have a lot of competition from other brands like yours.
What sets a successful brand apart is having quality products and a customer-centric approach to growing the brand.
Valuable insights to improve your brand
Maintaining a customer-centric approach to your growth is also easier when you have a well-engaged customer base loyal to you. They will be proactive when you reach out to ask for feedback, sharing what they like and what they don’t.
Such honest insights can help you improve your brand, products, and customer experience, ensuring continuous improvement and only the best for your customers.
Better conversions and retention
The right customer engagement strategies help your bottom line. Customers become repeat purchasers who will then bring in new shoppers. These shoppers will then enter the cycle of being engaged by your brand in all the right ways, becoming loyal customers.
This cycle will continue to help you bring in sales, convert shoppers, and retain them effectively.
Goals when picking customer engagement strategies
You can implement a successful customer engagement plan by picking strategies that fulfill one or more of these 4 goals:
- Prioritize user-friendliness
- Add interactivity
- Provide personalized experience
- Build a relationship with shoppers
Strategies to Increase Customer Engagement
1. Seamless on-site journey
How easy and engaging is your on-site journey, and how likely is it that a potential customer will stick around and successfully checkout?
By analyzing your on-site journey, you can identify points of friction, fix them, and ensure that your shoppers are engaged at every point of your site journey, reducing drop-offs and driving them to checkout.
How do you do this?
- Test the on-site journey yourself, from your homepage to checkout.
- Record your users’ experience on-site using tools like Lucky Orange
When testing and analyzing the user journey on your site, these questions can help you:
- Is navigation easy? If not, where do shoppers get stuck?
- Is your search functionality powerful enough that shoppers find it helpful?
- Is your site responsive across devices, especially mobile?
- Does your site load fast?
- Do product pages have all the information shoppers need?
- Are there any dead zones (like at the end of a page) where shoppers end up dropping off?
- Do you have clear CTAs, and are shoppers using them?
2. Easy checkout experience
When testing your on-site experience, analyzing your checkout experience is equally important, if not more.
When it comes to checkout, shoppers want a simple, quick, and convenient experience. If your checkout experience is overcomplicated or time-consuming, shoppers are likely to drop off without purchasing.
Here are some best practices to ensure that checkout is a breeze for your shoppers:
- Allow guest checkout so that new customers can opt to purchase quickly without needing to register.
- Provide multiple payment options. Customers have different preferences for the payment option they pick, so giving them more options makes it more convenient.
- Enable the auto-fill feature within your forms so that customers don’t have to spend time typing out their details.
- Set up minimal form fields to reduce time spent filling out information that isn’t necessary.
- Provide clear progress indicators to show how many steps are left. This way, customers won’t be left guessing the next step or how long it’ll take.
3. Good and timely customer support
Great customer service is a basic necessity for any ecommerce brand. It can make or break your brand’s success and marketing efforts. Research says that 73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences.
Here are some best practices to follow for a customer support experience that your shoppers will rave about:
- Responses should be under 5 seconds. The longer you keep your customers waiting, the more likely they are to go to your competition.
- Hire multiple support agents around the clock to ensure that customers get undivided attention.
- Train your team to ensure they have the knowledge and tools they need to resolve issues effectively.
- Document common phrases and responses so that your support team can easily copy and paste them without losing time.
- Use an AI chatbot that responds to common issues and ensures 24/7 support. The support team can take on more complex questions, ensuring their time is effectively spent.
Intercom has a set of customer support guidelines that every team needs to read and follow.
4. On-site personalization
When shoppers browse your site, they're constantly looking for products that feel relevant to them and valuable information. Many shoppers end up dropping off because this kind of personalization is missing.
Here are a few ways you can elevate the experience on your site so that your customers stay engaged.
- Recommendations
Placing product recommendations at the right touchpoints across your site can encourage customers to engage and continue browsing rather than drop off. For example, recommendations at the end of a product page showing other similar items will smoothly take the visitor to products they are likely to be interested in.
If a loyal shopper or a returning customer is browsing, you can even set up dynamic recommendations that show products based on their browsing history.
- Reviews
Why should shoppers buy this product? Is it even right for them?
Displaying customer reviews on your product page gives shoppers enough information to make the right purchasing decision. Online reviews also add credibility to the products you're selling, especially helpful for new visitors who are looking for reasons to trust your brand.
- Dynamic messaging for returning customers
The easiest way to keep returning customers hooked on your website is to tailor the content on-site to them. Since you already have information on them, you can show them exclusive offers, remind them about their loyalty points, and even celebrate their birthday right on your site.
Such personalized details on your site will improve your customers' on-site experience and their relationship with your brand.
5. Gamify the experience with a loyalty program
Hugely successful brands like Sephora and Tesco have branded loyalty programs in place that incentivize shoppers to continue engaging with and purchasing from the brand.
With a loyalty program, you can give shoppers points or credits for shopping from you. In turn, shoppers can use these rewards on future purchases, ensuring they get a good deal on every order. Shoppers who sign up for your loyalty program can also unlock exclusive deals like early access to new products, special perks, and additional discounts.
By giving your repeat customers such incentives, you show them how important they are to the brand and create a long-lasting relationship with them. Many shoppers are even eager to refer the brand to family and friends, allowing you to set up a referral program that rewards them for their brand advocacy.
One brand, Patchology, saw a 23.37% increase in their repeat purchase rate in just 4 months of setting up a loyalty program.
Looking to set up a loyalty program on your Shopify store? Install Rivo.
6. Delightful and relevant email marketing
If you play your cards right, your email marketing strategy is a conversation with your customers. Unfortunately, the standard email marketing plan is too ‘salesy.’ It’s not designed thinking of what will make the customer want to read and engage with the email.
- Make your product and collection launch exciting.
Why should customers care? Does your product or collection have a compelling story? Is there a problem it solves?
Use your launch emails to introduce your vision and help your audience understand why your products are worth buying.
- Use segmentation to personalize emails.
Are you more likely to click on an email addressed to a general audience or one that recommends and promotes products based on your interests?
When sending emails, it’s always best to segment your audience based on their interests and tailor your messaging to them. In fact, segmented campaigns have 14.31% higher open rates and saw 101% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns.
So, for instance, you can target shoppers who bought from a specific category and let them know that a new collection similar to it has launched. Or, you can target discount shoppers and promote your sale exclusively to them.
- Automated emails for tailored and behavior-based emails.
Most email marketing tools let you set up automated emails that are sent based on behavior or information about a shopper. These emails can be set up based on your customer's preferences and actions, like their browsing history, past purchases, and even information like their loyalty program status or birthday.
So, with automated emails, customers could receive an email wishing them a happy birthday and unlocking a discount during their birthday month. You can communicate a message that is personalized to them right on time without doing any of the manual work.
7. Build a brand community that customers want to be a part of
Not every brand needs to build a community, but for many, it’s a great way to sustain relationships with your customers, foster a sense of belonging, and become an authority in your space.
With a brand community, people can use the space to share and ask for information about the products, talk about their experiences, and support each other. And it’s proven to be a value add for customers. 40.9% of consumers say their involvement in online communities will increase in the future.
DRMTLGY is a skincare brand that prioritizes science-backed formulation. They’ve set up a Facebook group where their community of 98K members ask questions about the products or what suits different skin types and even share their experiences, like how a product worked for them or their skincare routines.
8. Social media presence that customers want to get involved with
Just posting that product photo won’t cut it. Similar to your email marketing, your social media campaigns are an opportunity for you to have interactions with your customers and make them feel like they are a part of the brand’s journey and, sometimes, even your decisions!
Here are some ways to make your social media more engaging:
- Create and share content that is fun and/or helpful.
Customers relate to a brand better when they see it have some personality, whether it’s funny, snarky, or educational.
Create content that shares who the brand is, showing stories of how it came to be, what a day in the life of a team member looks like, and talking about why you’ve launched certain products.
If it fits your brand, you could even share educational content around the topics you sell products for on social media platforms or via email and your website. For instance, skincare brands could educate customers on skincare routines and ingredients.
Hims is a telehealth brand sharing content around men’s health on social media.
- Use your platform to host polls, ask questions, and take feedback.
The most successful brands reply to comments left on their posts, even creating new designs based on customer messages.
Popflex Active is an activewear brand that does this well, even taking comments and criticism as a way to redesign and launch new products based on the needs that customers have shared.
- Leverage user-generated content!
People are actively creating content around their lives and showing the brands they use through it. So, it’s easier now than ever before to reshare your customers’ videos and show your audience how they use your products.
Your existing customers will feel more valued, and your audience will get an authentic look at your products. It's a win-win!
9. Shoppable videos on-site for an immersive experience
One of the reasons for website drop-offs is that visitors don’t find the site engaging enough. Social media, particularly short-form videos, are to blame, causing shorter attention spans.
However, you can leverage this as a brand by providing the same experience to your site visitors. You can add the same short-form vertical video format on your site so that visitors can browse through videos that show the product, how it works, and even how to use it.
If a specific product catches their interest, visitors can click on the product widget next to the video to learn more about it or even add it to their cart directly.
This way, you make your shopping experience more immersive while helping visitors find the right product.
Cosmix is a supplement brand with a video widget that plays a video of the founder. As visitors browse the site, they can also engage with similar videos from customers sharing their experiences with different products.
10. Feedback loops to continuously align with customer expectations and quality
Feedback loops can help you understand how customers are responding to your brand and use this to your advantage. You can double down on what’s working and improve on what isn’t.
Here’s how you can set them up:
- Ask for customer feedback.
Do you know how your shoppers feel about your brand? Set up post-purchase surveys, emails, and even social media polls to ask and collect customer feedback from your shoppers.
Let them know you’re on a mission to deliver the best and want to know how they feel about the brand experience. You can ask specific questions, from the on-site experience to the product and its quality to brand communication and gather customer data.
- Analyze data to understand problems on-site.
You can also gather feedback from your shoppers without asking them for information. Use heatmaps and user journey flows to understand how shoppers are interacting with your site.
These would help you better understand shopper behavior and pinpoint exactly which part of your site journey has the highest friction. You can use these insights to make changes.
- Communicate the changes you’ve made.
Many brands share how they’ve developed a new product or changed an existing one based on customer suggestions. This simple act lets your shoppers know that you prioritize delivering the best for them, making them eager to choose your brand.
Read this extensive guide by Shopify on feedback loops.
Better customer engagement, better conversions
These customer engagement strategies effectively put your customers at the forefront, ensuring that you’re providing exceptional service and maintaining a relationship that they will want to keep coming back to.
Loyalty programs are one of the easiest ways to build a mutually beneficial brand-customer relationship. You can use a Shopify app like Rivo to create a branded loyalty program that lets your customers earn points for purchasing and engaging with you. They can then use these points to get a better deal on their next order. The gamified experience of a loyalty program also makes customers excited to keep earning points to “level up.”
Install Rivo and set up a loyalty program on your store to increase customer engagement.
