10 [+1 Bonus] Strategies To Build Customer Engagement For Ecommerce In 2020

One of the biggest challenges eCommerce businesses are facing today is

“Every consumer wants a different experience when shopping and that ‘experience’ has become the differentiating factor for many successful business models”.

However, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to predict what consumers want as their expectations continue to change. To understand the customer’s expectations better, it is very important for eCommerce businesses to engage with their customers at every point of interaction in their purchase journey. If you are looking for some strategies to increase engagement on your eCommerce store, this article is for you.

Here are the 10 [+1 Bonus] Strategies To Build Customer Engagement For eCommerce In 2020. Let us begin.

1. Understand What Drives Your Customer

The first and foremost step in building customer engagement is to understand the intentions behind their decisions related to your products. Answer the most important question of “Who needs your product and why?” Once you have the answer, you will know exactly where to put in your efforts and get the best results. This strategy works best when it is paired with extensive customer research.

You can begin classifying your customers into different categories based on their shopping habits such as “Big spenders”, “Luxury shoppers”, “Budget shoppers”, and many more. You can also group your customers based on location, language, and age. This intent-based grouping can help you customize the eCommerce experience for your customers and build better engagement on your eCommerce store.

2. Personalize Customer Communications

With automation and online stores, customers miss the personal touch in shopping and value it quite high. Adding a personal touch to your communications and showing the emotion of empathy to your customers can go a long way. There are many ways for eCommerce companies to make their communications personal at all points. For example,

a. Live Chat Assistance

Providing your customers with the ability to directly chat for support works really well in building engagement on your eCommerce platform. It is always preferred to have a real person available in the live chat to engage with customers and help them throughout their buying journey. You can also set up a bot, but make sure you do your research and set it up well.

b. Personalize Email Communication

Instead of sending generic emails about offers and notifications to your customers, make sure to personalize them. The “knowing your customer” strategy world hand in hand with this strategy so you can reach out to the customers with products and offers they prefer. Also addressing them by their name adds a personal touch.

c. Behavior-Based Notifications

You can help people in the purchasing journey by sending them behavior-based notifications. There can be multiple triggers and your message needs to be customized accordingly. For example, you can send notifications to users who have abandoned their carts about limited stock left.

3. Create Value-Adding & Shareable Social Content

Social media is built on a core human longing for sharing their experiences. When people see meaningful & engaging posts on social media, they share it. Hence, to build engagement with customers on your eCommerce platform, you need to create engagement on social media with relatable and sharable content. You need to bring your products in front of your customers and make them a topic of their social conversations. You can do it easily using Statusbrew’s social media planner.

Read more about how Social Commerce is the future of eCommerce on mobile

4. Humanize Your eCommerce Brand

Your eCommerce brand can not be just another website in the mind of your customers. Your brand needs to be recognizable. It needs to connect with customers. Hence, it is important to present your brand as a member of society and show participation. You can use online and offline channels to achieve this.

To start off, you can first focus on your industry events and then scale further to the more public voice. Social media will become a key component of this strategy. You can also try being witty and humorous if it is suitable for your customer profiles.

5. Win That First Impression

On the internet, the attention span of an average user is such a small window, that if you lose them on the first impression, chances are you will hardly get them back. Hence, it is really important that you make each visitor count. Here are the three ways you can make your store more engaging.

• Design and customize the pages for your customers
• Motivate users to click on products
• Assure the customers about help and provide them when they need it
• Manage comments on social media with Statusbrew

6. Announce Products and Accessories Strategically

When you have new products and their accessories in your store, it is very important for you to strategize how they are introduced to your new and existing customers. You need to also take into account the ROI and the advertising costs when you are planning to run ad campaigns. In this, customer grouping and their spending habits need to be a major factor. You can also take into account the purchase history of a customer to notify them of the new products. For example, you can always notify customers of a smartphone when you have a new case for their phone in your store. Create social media posts in bulk with Statusbrew.

7. Showcase Your Product’s USP And Unravel The Details

You don’t need to display everything in the first view. We did not mean this when we told you to make the first impression count. Rather, use the first impression to hold the user’s attention. This can be done by showcasing the Unique Selling Point of your products on the homepage of your eCommerce store. And when you have the customer’s attention, show them how your products can add value to their lives along with reviews, testimonials, and assistance assurance. This is the easiest way to influence a customer’s buying decision in the right direction.

8. Engage With The Customer During Trial/Return Period

If you offer a return or a trial period for some products in your eCommerce store, this strategy is a must try to help you maintain a loyal customer base. The key point of this strategy is to maintain a well-intended engagement with new customers in the trial or return period. Talk to them and make sure they are having the best experience with your product. Ensure that you are committed to good service and assist them if they need any help. This kind of engagement enriches your customer’s experience and converts them into brand advocates for your eCommerce business.

9. Carefully Monitor Feedback

There’s hardly anything more valuable to an eCommerce business than customer feedback. It is not only important to collect customer feedback but also to analyze it and create product strategies and reshape them in real-time. There are many ways to collect customer feedback, such as feedback forms, surveys and more but the most engaging form of customer feedback is the social media comments and reviews. It might seem difficult to analyze hundreds of comments and reviews on social media and reply to them manually. Statusbrew’s comment analysis and management tools are designed to help you understand your customers better and build engagement.

10. Train Your Team For Customer Experience

Along with your social media profiles, and your eCommerce store to be customer-centric, you also need to make sure that you train your staff to follow a customer-centric approach. It is always a good strategy to invest in staff training regarding customer experience and how the support staff needs to go out of its way to make sure the customers have valuable experience at every interaction with your eCommerce brand.

For better results in engagement, you not only need to change the outlook of your support staff. You also need to imbibe great customer experience in your working principles. This strategy would definitely show high returns when all your operations are centered on customer experience.

11. [Bonus] Visual Assistance & Co-Browsing

This bonus strategy for increasing engagement on eCommerce stores is also the upcoming technology and future of support on eCommerce. Co-Browsing helps you interact with your customer’s web browser, screen share, and use annotations to guide them. This greatly reduces the communication gap and makes providing support to your customers way better than chat or calls. You can guide your customers with filling in forms, checkouts, filing for returns and so much more. Using co-browsing for support cuts the long conversations of sharing details and allows your team to reach directly to the customer’s problems. This strategy will definitely increase your customer return rates and reduce abandonment in the funnel for your eCommerce store.

In conclusion, these are the latest strategies for eCommerce businesses to increase customer engagement in 2020. If you find any of these helpful, share your experience in the comments below. Your suggestions are always welcome.