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Now that global consumers are able to purchase nearly anything they wish on whatever device they want, the eCommerce experience has dramatically changed. Hence, providing an excellent eCommerce customer engagement is not only helpful for business, it’s a necessity for customer retention. As consumers increasingly rely on online shopping, their expectations for better CX also continue to rise, which is why eCommerce customer engagement is absolutely critical today.
73% of all people point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions.
Living in a world of abundance-choice situations, the benchmark of quality should be judged in terms of customer satisfaction. However, customer satisfaction is often the result of customer engagement.
Whether you have just set up an eCommerce business or have been running one for years, you might need to take a closer look at the quality of your customer engagement practices and eCommerce enhancement.
Ecommerce customer engagement is defined as the emotional connection between a customer and a brand. Highly engaged customers buy, promote, and show more loyalty. Providing outstanding experience is an important component of your eCommerce consumer engagement strategy.
A fully-engaged customer contributes more revenue than average. If you don’t have a solid customer engagement strategy for your eCommerce store, you could be missing opportunities to interact with customers and build strong relationships.
The key reasons why eCommerce customer engagement matters are as follows:
A solid e-commerce customer service experience can keep up to 84% of customers from leaving over something as simple as returning a product. Also by connecting emotionally with clients impacts the customer lifetime value that is four times greater than without that personal touch.
When customers feel closely engaged with your brand, they tend to share their positive experiences across social media channels and also recommend you to their friends and family.
Engaging customers in emotional relationships, which go above and beyond mere transactional purchases, helps forge stronger ties between them and your company. That’s why engaged customers are 5X more likely to stick to the same brand in the future.
Customer engagement includes providing information proactively and helping your potential customers determine if your products or services are the right fit for them more quickly.
Building your online store on the best eCommerce platform or following the modern payment methods is not just enough. There are always some ways to make the best of it.
Here is a list of useful tips to increase customer engagement in eCommerce.
Let us comprehensively discuss the different strategies to increase customer engagement in your online store.
Offering a top-quality shopping eCommerce experience to your shoppers should be an integral part of your customer engagement strategy. Implementing digital eCommerce tools helps to engage customers in real-time and deliver higher satisfaction.
Here are the popular customer engagement tools that impact the growth of your online store.
79% of consumers prefer live chat because it provides them with immediate support at the time they need it. Live chat is the best tool that delivers exceptional value in terms of engaging visitors in real-time and increasing customer satisfaction. With eCommerce live chat, you can also reduce additional support expenses and gain a competitive advantage.
Brands like Intuit and Sam’s furniture incorporated live chat and had a significant increase in sales conversions.
Key ways how live chat helps to boost your eCommerce engagement.
Data says retailers that use live chat experience an order size increase between 100% and 300% when customers chat with a representative before making a purchase.
Visual engagement has the ability to assist your customers in real-time. And faster engagement means more realistic chances of successfully converting a user into a potential buyer. Tools like co-browsing and video chat help eCommerce companies achieve new milestones as far as customer service is taken into consideration.
Cadillac Canada launched Cadillac Live, a “digital showroom” that enables patrons to video chat with an agent in real-time. The service lets shoppers ask questions live and view Cadillac models based on their needs — all from the comfort of their own home or office. Their dedicated site Cadillac Live, empowers customers to schedule a call, preview a session, and get a 360–degree virtual tour of the showroom.
Key ways, visual engagement tools help to improve eCommerce customer engagement.
Visual tools help to understand what the customer prefers and provide customized service, which boosts sales conversion. Co-browsing when combined with video chat and live chat lets the agent provide a human touch to the entire transaction. The customers can instantly contact the agent and get their queries resolved within no time. This leads to customer satisfaction and trust-building which in turn leads to greater goodwill.
Messaging channels such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc have gained popularity amongst today’s digital customers. 67% of consumers prefer using messaging apps when interacting with a business.
Chatbots perfectly fit into the eCommerce space. Bots can be deployed on online platforms, enabling you to assist your customers wherever they are, with ease.
Argomall is an eCommerce store based in the Philippines selling consumer goods. Their bot enables customers to find out key information about Argomall (including delivery details) as well as ask questions and talk to an Argomall support agent.
The bot was created with two key goals in mind i.e. to help streamline the sales process and to improve live chat and support experience, enabling customers to chat with an agency at any stage of the sales process.
How bots can fit best for customer engagement of your eCommerce site.
Omnichannel e-commerce is a unified e-commerce experience for your customers no matter which digital device or platform they are using. It is essential because research shows that 73% of online shoppers use multiple channels while purchasing online.
Having a well-defined omnichannel e-commerce strategy foresees that customers may start searching on one channel and move to another as a progression of their online purchasing journey. For nailing omnichannel customer experience, the need is to scale the customer support across all channels available.
Oasis is a U.K. fashion retailer that’s fusing its eCommerce site, mobile app, and brick-and-mortar stores into a simple shopping experience.
Key benefits of omnichannel eCommerce that impact customer engagement.
How often do you get customers close to buying, then lose the sale?
The checkout process encompasses the specific steps a consumer must take when completing an eCommerce purchase. The checkout process is the grand finale for an eCommerce website. It is where the prospect finalizes choices about the product, selects any add-ons, confirms shipping options, then provides payment.
Shopping cart and checkout abandonment account for up to a 70% loss in sales on average.
The below image shows the major reasons for abandonment at checkout.
The visitor’s journey from awareness to interest consists of a series of decisions visitors make. But failure during the checkout process is like losing being close to the goal line.
Customer reviews are essential in creating social proof. They are great ways to inform potential customers what items sell best and are of good performance and quality. Customer reviews and eCommerce website profits go hand in hand.
Users spend five times as long on sites when interacting with negative reviews, with an 85% increase in conversion rate.
Potential customers read reviews a lot and it can assist the buying process making it easier and more convenient to decide. Good reviews are a sign of customer loyalty, and businesses that have a lot of positive reviews tend to grow their revenues twice as fast as their competitors.
By understanding exactly how your business will benefit from customer reviews, you can work on a strategy that will help you to get more of them.
Key benefits of customer reviews to boost consumer engagement in your eCommerce store.
Engaging with your existing and potential customers should never be undervalued. It should be taken as a priority to your customer retention strategy.
Experiencing a ‘wow moment’ can undoubtedly change the perception of the customers and elevate the customer delight experience. It can also help to build long-term loyalty and trust in your brand.
Delighting customers is not just meeting their needs at the moment but is about establishing an emotional bond between brand and buyer. Furthermore, it acts as an investment in your business by increasing customer lifetime value (CLTV).
The key is to make sure that what you have on offer will entice the type of customers that you want.
Here are some giveaway strategies to improve eCommerce consumer engagement.
Including social media in your digital marketing strategy can boost business profits. It is one of the best ways to use social proof if you run an eCommerce website or any business online.
Online stores with a social media presence have an average of 32% more sales than those that don’t.
A strong social presence enables you to slice and dice the content you create and reach out to your audience through it. People share stuff online that matters to them, hence when you create content that matters to your audience and provides them in a format that is easy for them to digest, they share it.
Branded communities are 13% more likely to have an impact on customer experience.
Customers feel happier being a part of a community of their favorite brand. Building communities can benefit consumers to develop a positive feeling and improve your brand credibility.
Communities can be used as a resource for sharing useful information about your eCommerce brand. A place where customers can interact with one another and your business add extra value to the customer experience both before and after the purchase.
Usually, customers trust other customers, when they intend to purchase. Thus, the sponsored community forum can be used to help to guide their buying decisions.
Southwest Airlines invested in an online community as a place for customers to share stories, exchange knowledge, and find inspiration from other members.
Ecommerce loyalty programs are also known as rewards programs have a great impact on retention, purchase frequency, lifetime customer value, and referrals. Create a loyalty program that offers customers an incentive to buy more often or spend more on their purchases.
The best part, loyalty program ideas can take any number of forms, but generally feature a system whereby points are accumulated that build increased buying power. The best offer can be a combination of free gifts, exclusive discounts, early product releases, and points for product redemptions.
Amazon, the biggest e-commerce company in the world, launched Amazon Prime is a paid program.
The loyalty program gives its members access to benefits consisting of two-day delivery, free streaming of videos and music for a monthly ($12.99) or annual fee ($99/$49). It also gives users a chance to invite a friend for a reward of $5 Prime Referral Credit.
Key benefits of loyalty programs on eCommerce customer engagement.
Online feedback is a great way to collect deep and meaningful insights from your customers that enable you to keep your online channels up to par with their expectations.
Collecting feedback is a great way of reducing shopping cart abandonment, which is something that occurs in nearly 77.3% of online orders. Using exit feedback forms, you can collect insights into why your visitors are leaving the checkout process.
Having feedback at your fingertips is quite like having the right metrics for customer engagement. Both can enable you to quickly uncover valuable insight in real time and immediately implement measures to drive improvements for eCommerce website performance and customer experience.
There are three workflows that you can set up to collect feedback efficiently at different moments of the customer journey for your online store. They are as follows:
An engaged audience is more than some prospective customers. The key to creating engaging content lies in the balance of three factors – something that your audience likes, something that is related to your brand, it adds value to the readers.
ASDA creates content for their YouTube channel, Mum’s Eye View. They curated it keeping customers in the mind.
They have benefitted immensely from their video content marketing tactic and get new views and followers with every video they upload, without fail.
Tips to increase consumer engagement for your eCommerce store.
Ecommerce businesses that just focus on selling are going to lose a lot of customers. Today’s consumers expect personalized interactions and want to be treated as unique individuals. Moving ahead, customers will flock to the websites that have invested in eCommerce personalization. If your eCommerce business focuses on increasing customer engagement, you should be implementing personalization tactics that will have a significant impact on customers’ lifetime value(CLTV).
Using customer data rightly helps you to offer customized promotions, recognize returning customers, and anticipate their needs. Personalized customer service experience is able to deliver six times more transaction rates than generic communication, so it’s worth making the effort.
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