How To Increase Customer Engagement In eCommerce
Updated on October 31, 2022 in Ecommerce by Alifiya Mustafa
Customers are the backbone of your eCommerce business. For every eCommerce store owner, the primary goal is to earn profits by maximizing sales.
Hence, to improve sales, you’ll ultimately be needing more potential buyers who can keep coming back to your business.
However, it isn’t easy to increase customer engagement in eCommerce. People can be easily distracted by every new trend that breaks the market, forgetting the last one.
Though, it’s the same story for every business and not just eCommerce.
Then how do you increase customer engagement in eCommerce? How do you stop them from getting distracted or turning to your competitors?
Well, all your questions and worries will get the solution in this article.
I’ll be telling you 5 simple secrets that can not just keep your customers engaged with you, but also bring in more new customers. Now, let’s begin.
5 Secrets That’ll Help Customer Engagement In eCommerce
The 5 things that I am about to tell you are all that you’ll be needing. No hassle, no stress, just necessary efforts.
1. Create a Remarkable first Impression
‘The first impression is the last impression’, we’ve all heard it before. This doesn’t only imply to the owners who’ve just started their eCommerce website, but also to those who’ve been running it for years and want to increase customer engagement in eCommerce.
How do you create a first impression online? It starts from your website where your customers ultimately land – your landing page. Your eCommerce website is the face of your online business, and you’ve gotta make sure that it’s captivating and eye-pleasing.
Blinding colors, unintended uneven proportions, cluttered layout are all the factors that ruin your first impression and disturbs customer engagement.
There are a few things you’d want to make sure of to increase customer engagement:
Your website
- Like I said, your website is the face of your online store, so make sure that:
- Your website is not taking more than 2 seconds to load
- Your website layout is user-friendly
- The position of elements like the search bar, filters, sorting options, and all must be easy to spot and accessible
- The color scheme used is eye-pleasing
- The images used must have uniformity in terms of color scheme, proportions, and the overall look
- Your website is mobile-responsive
Other platforms
Your customers meet you at many other places apart from your native website.
They might see you over social media, other websites where you might’ve run your ads, and even interacting with your website on other devices counts equally.
On such platforms, you must make sure that your customers aren’t losing engagement. Provide an engaging and powerful Call To Action if you’re looking to drive traffic to your website from other platforms.
For example, if you’re asking for people’s email addresses for a newsletter, rather than writing – ‘Sign-Up’ write ‘Yes, I’m in’ or ‘I’d love to get updates’.
Such interactive CTAs help you increase customer engagement and people tend to subscribe more. Powerful CTAs are the key to convince customers to do what you desire.
2. Leverage Social Media to enhance Engagement
Social media is one of the greatest ways to increase customer engagement in eCommerce. There are more than 4.8 billion social media users around the globe.
This makes social media the biggest opportunity to have a wider reach and engage as many audiences as possible.
Most people are addicted to social media. Constant new feeds, enchanting offers by the brands, and interactive live videos are all responsible for the high rate of increased customer engagement over social media.
You must be familiar with how a simple video like a cat drinking milk gets millions of views on Instagram effortlessly.
Let’s talk about a few in brief:
Facebook has 2.45 billion users. Brands that create business pages, post regular posts and run FB ads get an amazing level of engagement.
In fact, you can sell your products on FB Marketplace and FB Shop if that pleases you. However, as far as engagement is concerned, FB is amazing to catch the eyes of the people.
Though there are not as many Instagram users as compared FB – 1 billion monthly active users – the engagement rate of Instagram is way too higher than Facebook.
People of all generations are crazy about Instagram, especially the young and millennials. A record shows that more than 8.95 million photos and videos are posted on Instagram daily.
You can’t deny this powerful tool if you want to increase customer engagement in eCommerce. With features like Instagram reels, Instagram Live Shopping, Instagram Ads, and even the usual posts and videos are great to increase eCommerce customer engagement.
I’d highly recommend that you be consistent with posting over Instagram and you’d realize that bringing in customer engagement in eCommerce is a breeze!
Pinterest is the #1 visual search engine that has the highest engagement rate after Instagram. You can easily increase customer engagement in eCommerce with the help of Pinterest Marketing.
Interactive video pins, buyable pins, and compelling images are the tools you can leverage over Pinterest.
Showcase your products or services over such social media channels. The algorithm is simple, the more the people see you, the better the eCommerce customer engagement rate you have.
If your major is B2B, then taking advantage of LinkedIn and Twitter can be just as useful.
3. Provide a seamless Customer Experience
It’s proven in the studies that customer satisfaction is bound to surpass the product quality and pricing for customers. Simply put, people prefer better service over better products or pricing.
Hence, it’s important that the complete shopping journey of your customers is seamless, hassle-free, and easy.
Here, your website speed, your ads on social media, your checkout page, the performance of product pages, and the availability of all types of online payment options come into play to increase customer engagement in eCommerce.
To get a complete insight into what ways you can provide a seamless customer experience to your customers, I’d highly recommend you read – How to Make Omnichannel Commerce the Growth Strategy for Your eCommerce Industry?
4. Bring in Personalization to keep them stick with you
There could be nothing better and satisfying than a personalized experience for a customer. When you personalize things, it instantly boosts customer engagement in eCommerce.
Here’s what and how you can personalize your customers’ experience:
Website
You can provide a remarkable personalized experience when a customer comes on to your eCommerce website.
If the customer is new, you may personalize the things based on his location. For example, showing beachwear at discount in the month of August to a person living in New York would make no sense, but the same would be perfect for customers living in California.
Similarly, you can make changes in delivery charges or currency if you ship outside your country.
For older customers, suggest to them the options based on their last purchase or things that they might be interested in.
For example, it doesn’t make any sense to share t-shirt suggestions for men with a female customer.
You can also personalize the suggestion like suggesting rugged jeans if your customer has last purchased a biker jacket. Such suggestions are complementary to your customers’ recent purchase which makes them feel more attended with personalization.
You may personalize your emails by addressing each customer with their name. But that’s where your competitors would stop. You’ll want to take a step ahead.
I’d suggest that you add a little conversation in your emails to add a touch of personalization.
Talk about how long it’s been that the customer has registered with you or talk about their recent purchase, tell them how much you miss them since their last purchase which was a long time ago.
Adjust your email based on for what purpose you’re inviting them. It’s even better if you could provide them with personalized discounts.
For example, if you have the birthday information about your customers, wish them a happy birthday and give them an exclusive discount on the products that they usually buy or they might be interested in.
If they haven’t returned to you for long, tell them ‘Our store misses you, here a 15% discount coupon only for you to welcome you back.’
For better ideas, I’d recommend you read – 11 Powerful eCommerce Newsletter Ideas for Proven Success
Social Media
Since we already spoke about increasing customer engagement in eCommerce using social media, let me tell you how you add personalization.
When retargeting your customers with FB and Instagram Ads, show them the ads relevant only to them. Research for what every customer has been looking for specifically or what they have purchased recently.
For example, John has been looking for Premium Arabica Coffee, targeting him with this product’s ad. Add a discount on this product if required or show some similar products if you’re out of it.
If John has recently purchased a bag of raw durum wheat pasta, suggest the arrabbiata sauce or a pack of cheese that compliments his last purchase.
Showing him the makeup products out of the blue can leave John frustrated as that is not something he might be interested in given his recent searches or orders.
You can bring personalization to many other touchpoints that your customers usually come through. It depends on what industry you’re in and what type of customers you handle.
5. Create a buzz about your Products, Campaigns, and events
If you’re starting something new and want your customers to know about it – Shout out to them!
Create a buzz about the things you do, the products you launch, or the campaigns you’re running. Let them know what you’re up to.
Customers love when brands involve them and allow them to participate in their campaigns. As per the statistics, customers who subscribe to newsletters want brands to keep them updated with new offers and events.
Shoppers on social media want brands to show personalized suggestions and love to get engaged with anything that the brand is planning onto.
If there’s a new product launch, take benefit of the points mentioned above to increase customer engagement in eCommerce. Put a banner on your website, create Instagram Reels about it, post videos on social media, and hype up your launch almost a week before.
If you’re running discounts, send an email, use social media, and display the same on your website too.
You can create a buzz by using the phrases like ‘Hurry Up!’, ‘Last chance to grab the offer!’, or putting a countdown timer everywhere you advertise your offers.
Such buzz creates FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) among your customers and brings in a huge wave of increased customer engagement on your eCommerce website.
This hype helps generate more traffic which ultimately leads to increased sales and better conversions.
BONUS READ!
There are several ways in which you can increase customer engagement, and the best part is, you don’t necessarily need money to bring them in.
Though you may choose to invest in ads and create other changes. The best I’d suggest is to be consistent with whichever approach you take.
Stay in constant touch with your customers. If you decide to roll out emails once every 2 weeks and take care of social media every Friday – Stick with this regime religiously.
Such consistent efforts are bound to increase customer engagement in eCommerce and boost your online business growth.
Which secret did you enjoy reading the most? Would you be trying any approach? Do let me know in the comments!
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