12 eCommerce Customer Engagement Strategies 2022

Since keeping customers is such an arduous task for online companies, they must spend more than ever on customer engagement strategies. So, what are the strategies that eCommerce companies should use to improve the customer engagement process?

Using the right eCommerce customer engagement strategies is important regardless of whether you’re starting a new eCommerce business or running an existing one.

Many eCommerce companies don’t make as much money as they can because they don’t engage their customers as much as they should.

In this article, you will find how to increase customer engagement in eCommerce with 12 easy and effective practices that you can apply to engage the potential and current customers and to distinguish your business ahead of your competitors.

Let’s figure them out…

Top 12 Customer Engagement Strategies eCommerce Recommend

1. Know Your Customer

A top-tier of customer engagement strategies is learning more about them. While your prospects are familiar with the business relationship, it’s important that they shouldn’t believe it’s the only aspect of your communication.

What are your options for avoiding this? 🤔

Make use of brand managers!

Your team’s Brand Managers should be in charge of communicating with their appointed consumers. Your consumers will feel as though they are the only customers if you recruit the best Brand Managers.

They accomplish this by being available to take calls, respond to emails promptly, and serve as a point of contact for your customers.

Overall, the Brand Managers should strive to maximize profitability while still serving as constructive representatives of your company’s community. 😎

2. Adopt Customer Feedback

Encourage reviews from your eCommerce customers as one approach to enhance customer engagement. Using a support desk ticketing system, you will get real-time customer feedback.

It allows customers’ questions, problems, and requests to be converted into tickets. Use the ticketing system to keep track of customer problems and make sure no tickets are left unattended.

You may also include a comments section on your eCommerce website to collect customer reviews or have them rate your company. Part of your work involves having a platform for your customers to express themselves. To fulfill the communication cycle, you should then show that you listen to and respond to your clients.

3. Get Closer to Your Customers

Although it is simple to find a standardized method to obtain information regarding your customers’ needs, the more creative you can be (while still being user-friendly) the better. You don’t want to come across as a one-size-fits-all company. Getting close to your customers is such a recommended strategy on the list of customer engagement strategies. But how?

Using a customer onboarding form to allow your customers to tell you about themselves is one way to get around this. These digital forms add new insight to the mundane phase of data collection. For new consumers, novelty, ease, and comfort go a long way. One of your new clients’ first experiences with your business might be onboarding. Take advantage of any opportunity to show your uniqueness; this is a very useful asset for customer understanding.

Gather the information. Understand what engagement looks like in your particular industry. Find out about the context of engagement from your customer’s perspective, besides gathering operational data like loyalty program statistics, social shares, likes and comments, and support issues. Collecting experience data from clients via surveys, intercepts, and other feedback channels can help you figure out what inspires them to connect with you.

4. Allow Access to Information

Another effective user engagement strategy is giving them something to hold on to, a little more of what you’ve got. For higher customer engagement marketing, eCommerce businesses should build their own online stores for two types of visitors: those who know exactly what they want to buy and those who just want to look around.

🗝 The key is to improve the usability of the eCommerce quest.

For your users, create a high-performing search experience. The first group of prospective customers who know exactly what they want must identify the appropriate details as quickly as possible. They can purchase the same product or service from another online retailer if they are unable to quickly locate what they are searching for.

Navigation menus are typically used by casually browsing eCommerce users who just like to search the online store and compare your products and services with the same offered by others. Customers in this category skim through product types and websites.

5. Host a Virtual Engagement Event

Many businesses have been conducting online events for years, but the COVID-19 epidemic brought even more people online, forcing businesses to step up their virtual events. Companies can keep in touch with clients from all around the world via online engagements. However, online events should not be a carbon copy of your in-person experience. Each customer interaction should be deliberate and purposeful. What is your rationale for holding the event? What do you want to achieve?

The answers to such questions will help you create an outline for an engaging virtual event that increases your brand value, raises awareness about your products, and most importantly; engages your customers on a regular basis.

Also, while making a plan for your virtual engagement events, bear in mind that your customers’ engagement should be long-termed. Instant engagement is cool, but it won’t create a steady company-customer relationship. What you’re looking to achieve by this strategy is to “Bond” with your customers. Creating hooks that they look forward to and wait for.

6. Self-Help Is Essential

Employees in retail stores are qualified to provide assistance to customers as soon as they reach the shop. Despite their good intentions, research reveals that over 80% of shoppers choose the “help yourself” approach before asking for assistance. This also applies to the eCommerce industry.

In this case, you should assist clients in assisting themselves. What do you mean by that? Customers are shifting toward a technologically empowered, fully linked environment. In every encounter in their purchase experience, they desire immediacy, connectedness, and simplicity.

Businesses that can create relevant and flexible customer journeys will set themselves apart from the competition. Self-service is already supported by most businesses, which have the necessary expertise and services in place. They just require a focused approach and the appropriate technology to bring everything together in a customer-friendly manner and provide the greatest possible customer experience.

At least 90% of online shoppers are said to look for details on an eCommerce website before contacting customer service. This means that the ease with which consumers can access details on your eCommerce site affects your conversion… Click To Tweet

Create a self-help hub with online tools for customers. FAQs, user manuals, buyer guides, documents, among other options, should be included in the portal, as this is a major practice of customer engagement.

7. Special Days for Customers

Your online shoppers expect to be treated differently. Reach out to your customers with a greeting message on their wedding, graduation, or some other special occasion to provide personalized attention.

This type of personalization is the most efficient of customer engagement strategies, as they love being indulged and giving special attention. Recognize that if it hadn’t been a special day, they would not have bought anything from you. Consider offering a special deal, such as a discount on their special day, to entice them.

The most important thing to consider is that your bid should be genuine and go beyond a suggestion from a friend.

Your customers love the fact that you host giveaways. Promoting giveaways on your website and social media is a completely different type of branding operation.

This branding action contributes to the expansion of the email list. Encourage guests to share their email addresses with you by providing them with lead magnets such as mini-courses, ebooks, models, tools, and more.

8. Persuade Customers to Check the Products

Persuading customers is one of the most talked-about on the list of customer engagement strategies. And to convince them, you need to learn more about what disengages them. for example; an important aspect of customer disengagement is cart abandonment. Customers who abandon their carts are valuable to you because they showed a sincere desire to purchase your product. Despite this, the majority of online shopping carts are abandoned.

The most common explanations for cart abandonment are shipping costs and hidden fees. Customers hate being charged extra fees of any kind while they are checking out. Because of delivery costs or hidden transaction charges, nearly 42% of shoppers abandon an online order in the middle. However, this does not imply that you must have free shipping on all orders.

Another reason for abandoned carts is that customers’ experience is not as customized as should be. As Smart Insights deducted; “86% of consumers will spend more if it involves a better customer experience”. 

Personalizing client interactions make dialogues more relevant, and customers are more inclined to listen to you and connect with your business as a result. Things like product recommendations based on a customer’s purchase history and personal preferences, push alerts for marketing messaging, and special discounts on significant days like birthdays and anniversaries are all smart strategies to improve consumer engagement.

9. Unsatisfied Customer Review

Customer agitation can cause serious problems for your company, and solving this can help you increase revenues by 125%. However, many dissatisfied customers do not always inform your staff. They actually switch destinations to another company elsewhere.

According to statistics, for every consumer who files a complaint, 26 others remain silent, but share their negative interactions with their families, friends, and on social networks, before they leave for good.

Thus, customer engagement is so important for this group of dissatisfied customers. After your buyers have completed their transaction, consider performing a fast survey.

In such a case, customer engagement marketing examples vary; as customer reviews can be captured using real-time online surveys and NPS (Net Promoter Score) KPI. You learn where your customers are having problems with your product or service, and what changes can lead to more leads.

You can also use a survey tool to create a survey that is tailored to your target audience’s responses. You can slice and dice data and gain insights into consumer choices and preferences until you have survey results, surveys, and other related data.

Read Also 👉 My 13 Favorite eCommerce KPIs

10. Create Relevant Content

Relevant content is the go-to in the world of customer engagement strategies. Ensure that you deliver insightful, refreshing, and relevant content through your social media platforms, blogs, and other channels, in addition to comprehensive product details on your eCommerce store. To add value to readers, this content should be relevant to your brand.

When it comes to product sales, if your customer engagement program has perspective content, it can be a huge differentiator and an excellent way to attract new customers. If a customer will learn how to use or get more value from their purchase as a result of the content you offer, you’ve just added another interesting motive to buy.

Customers don’t purchase things; they purchase solutions. Customers are more likely to look for answers to common issues or challenges than they are to look for your unique product. Your organization will be seen as a solution if you provide useful, real materials to fulfill these demands. Distribute information across several media to reach your whole client base. Create movies, blogs, and social media postings that give tried-and-true ideas and tricks that your clients will appreciate.

Producing relevant material will keep you at the top of people’s minds. Existing clients, for example, can benefit from being alerted to important feature/product upgrades or industry news. This will guarantee that they continue to turn to your business for solutions. Make sure you’re always monitoring content performance to gauge client response and, if required, adjust your strategy.

11. Hook Them with Freebies

Another hit in customer engagement strategies is hooking customers. In such a strategy, you reward clients for being loyal by providing them with something for free, not flash drives that carry your brand logo, but anything that they genuinely require. 

Provide customers with free knowledge on how to get the most out of your product or a cost-benefit analysis resource. Freebies are another technique to entice new clients. Give prospects a taste of what you have to offer without giving too much. If your clients are new business owners, consider offering a free webinar on planning and resource management, or if they work in the manufacturing industry, consider offering a white paper on new industry rules.

Another way to apply this strategy is to design a loyalty program. Simply, it provides free points to consumers to top up their points balance. These free points, which are usually only available for a limited time, might provide your shop with that much-needed boost at the start of high-spending times. When you unveil your new seasonal collection, for example, you should consider filling up your clients’ points balances. This will increase demand and remind inactive clients of your program’s perks.

It doesn’t have to be a full course or a big booklet to qualify as a freebie. By definition, a freebie should be a “quick win”–something your subscribers can read or do right away. They are more inclined to engage with it right away if it is quick, rather than putting it on their to-do list.
We want them to interact with your material so that they will be on the lookout for future emails from you. They’ll do it if they sense you’re delivering something worthwhile.

12. Bring It to Their Pockets

One of the best customer engagement strategies is to be in their pockets and minds! Such a strategy suggests that you take a social perspective to engage your customers. As people use social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to communicate their dissatisfaction with a company or to appreciate it. These technologies allow you direct access to your customer’s unfiltered thoughts and feelings in either case. To foster an even deeper relationship with consumers, respond to comments, repost user material, demonstrate support for a cause, and give useful information.

And this strategy differs from “Unsatisfied Customer Review” as you’ll not only use such a social perspective to only reach unsatisfied customers, but at the same time, you’ll communicate your brand values with them. Your way of responding to their complaints, answering their questions, and communicating with them on a personal level are the three golden rules to establish stable and strong relationships with your customers; that will eventually turn into a proper engagement. 

This strategy -at the first sight- may seem like an axiom. But if you look closely, it’s not only about “Being present on social media” but it’s more about making your customers feel such a presence and having an urge to react with your brand.

As you can see, the free points technique encourages customers to purchase seasonally while simultaneously motivating them to spend more to take advantage of the free points they’ve got.

As a Final Point

Any company’s performance is determined by its ability to attract customers. Customer retention is based on customer engagement, which is especially important when starting an eCommerce company.

Customers have the choice to switch to other eCommerce websites since this is very of human nature. So, you need to create a clear customer engagement plan.

And while implementing the above-mentioned customer engagement strategies can seem daunting, the company does not have to do so all at once. You can begin with one or two strategies that you are most comfortable with, then expand to include more strategies as you gain experience.

Excellent customer service and interaction would almost definitely result in lead generation and higher returns on investment as time goes on.

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