If your company isn’t hitting its sales targets, there could be a number of reasons responsible for these shortcomings.
However, all too often, companies aren’t profiting as much as they should because they’re not engaging customers as much as they should. This is an especially prevalent problem in ecommerce. Without any face-to-face opportunities, far too many companies are dropping the ball when it comes to customer engagement.
How do you increase customer engagement in ecommerce?
1. Enable feedback from customers
Have you ever felt what it’s like when you’re talking, but no one’s listening?
It doesn’t feel great, does it? So one easy way to improve your customer engagement in ecommerce is to let your customers give feedback. Provide them with a comments section or let them leave your company ratings. Optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) page can help with this. Let’s say you’re a lawyer—using law firm GMB SEO, you can offer a space for current or former clients to leave reviews that will appear in Google search results.
That said, letting your customers speak is only half the battle. You also have to make it clear that you’re listening. Otherwise, this strategy will only prove to your customers that you pretend to listen but don’t really care.
2. Pair Requests with Rewards
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One really effective way to prove that you’re actually listening is to reward customers for their feedback and requests. Of course, people love free stuff, so that’s a great incentive for utilizing this method, too. You can use personalized pop-ups, live chat, and emails to gain reviews from your customers. Then, leverage ecommerce personalization to pair their feedback with coupons, rewards, or other types of special offers.
3. Immediately Engage Unhappy Customers
Unfortunately, unhappy customers don’t always let companies know before deciding to take their business elsewhere. For every 1 customer that complains to you, 26 don’t say a thing. Well, they don’t say anything to you. Their friends, family, and social media following on the other hand….That’s why you need to engage unhappy customers before they turn away from your company for good. You can do this by offering surveys with every transaction and enabling those channels we mentioned in the first tip.
4. Increase Account Creations
Increasing customer accounts will definitely improve your ability to engage said customers. The problem is that most people would rather make purchases without opening accounts. So while they give you profits, they don’t help you improve your customer engagement on your ecommerce platform. The key here is not to look for that account creation right away. Wait until they make that initial purchase and then offer them the opportunity to start that account. At that point, you’ve earned a bit of trust, and they’ve proven they like what you have to offer.
5. Keep Track of Significant Days
As we mentioned before, people like to be treated as individuals. You can offer your customers this personal attention by reaching out to them on their birthday, anniversaries, and other special days. This kind of ecommerce personalization is fantastic for engagement because it’s obvious that the customer is being treated as an individual. It is their special day, after all. At the same time, they may not have otherwise purchased from you on that specific day had it not been for your outreach. You can offer them a special deal, a certain percent off their purchase, or just about any other promotion you can come up with.
6. Make Better Use of Social Media
Obviously, you want your company to be there, too. That said, having a social media presence is not the same as using these platforms for customer engagement in ecommerce. For one thing, you should commit to posting at least once or twice a day. Over time, you’ll know which amount is right for your company by monitoring the engagement you receive for each post.
However, you should also set Google alerts to monitor what is being said about your company on social media. This is something you should already be doing so if your business is mentioned in the news or on a blog, you can react accordingly.
