The e-commerce sector is increasing at a fast pace. It is growing 23% year-over-year. Unfortunately, most e-commerce owners are not experiencing growth. One way to grow your e-commerce store is to put strong customer engagement strategies in place.
Customer engagement strategies are tactics you can use to get your visitors or customers to engage with your website and make purchases. If there is ever a time to create effective customer engagement strategies, it is now.
Below are the reasons you need engagement strategies:
Why you need efficient engagement strategies
- US e-commerce sales rise 9.3% in Q2 2021.
- Retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 4.28 trillion USD in 2020 and e-retail revenues are predicted to increase by 5.4 trillion USD in 2022.
Sure, you are convinced now you need effective customer engagement strategies to partake in the boom of the ongoing e-commerce growth.
In this article, you will learn how to boost your e-commerce conversion with five (5) winning customer engagement strategies.
Let’s get started.
1. Improve user engagement
The first customer engagement strategy you can use to boost your e-commerce conversion is improving user engagement on your e-commerce store. A great user experience is more than the website design. It is about creating an e-commerce store that users will find easy to use. According to HubSpot, 76% of B2B buyers want an easy-to-navigate website.
So, how do you implement this customer engagement strategy?
It is simple: improve your site speed
Speed can increase your conversion rate or decrease it tremendously. People don’t have the patience to wait for a slow website to load. The truth is, an average internet user can only wait for 3 seconds for a web page to load.
Therefore, you need to increase your page speed. If your website gets heavy traffic, consider using a content delivery network. If you are having speed issues with your hosting provider, consider switching to a better one like Ultahost.
1-minute delay in page load can lead to a 7% loss in conversion.
- Let your customers know what you want them to do. Don’t keep your customers guessing. Your headline should be clear and specific telling them what to do.
- Make your website mobile friendly. Most online shoppers rely on their smartphones or tablet to make purchases online. A study carried out by ReadyCloud revealed that over 59% of smartphone users research products from their phones before making an online purchase.
- Use the short sign up forms. Make it easy for your visitors to sign up by using short forms. Most often than not, long forms are difficult to fill, especially when you are asking for information like house address, phone numbers, etc.
Improving your user experience is a great customer engagement strategy that will help to boost your conversion on your e-commerce store.
The next customer engagement strategy you can use to boost your e-commerce sales is “User-generated content”.
2. Create a strong content strategy
The second customer engagement strategy that can help to boost your e-commerce conversion is a strong content strategy. This includes product descriptions, blog, social media content, and product reviews.
A. Product descriptions: You need a keyword-optimized product description for your product/service. Make sure you include the benefits and features that could attract visitors. Below is an example of a product description page from Zappos.
B. Blog: Share informative and educative content on your blog. You can use it to educate your customers and tell them how your product can solve their problems. Blogging is an effective customer engagement strategy that most popular brands are using.
C. Social Media networks: Social media is a powerful customer engagement strategy you can use to engage and influence your visitors to buy. All you need is to create social media content that your audience can interact with and share. 60% of consumers research a product before making an online purchase and 25% of them use social media to complete the research cycle.
D. Product reviews: Product reviews are great for customer engagement. This is why 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. To get more product reviews, send emails to your past and present customers, asking them to give you a review of the product they purchased from you.
Below is an example of an e-commerce store (Deciem) that puts this engagement strategy to better use.
Thus, designing an all-round content strategy is a great customer engagement strategy you can implement on your e-commerce store to boost conversion.
The next customer engagement strategy is “Give customers financial incentives”
3. Give customers financial incentives
The third customer engagement strategy is to offer incentives to customers. It is an effective customer engagement strategy, and it works all the time. Examples include free giveaways, such as discounts, seasonal sales, coupons.
Most often than not, visitors land on the product page and leave buying nothing. This is known as product page abandonment. One reason a visitor will abandon a product page is when they are not sure whether you are offering the best deals. You can combat this issue by offering incentives to encourage them to buy.
This will make the product look like the best offer online. Here you can use free delivery, free returns, discount coupons, free sample, etc. You could do this in exchange for their email address so you can always market to them afterward.
Using this customer engagement strategy increases conversion, boosts average order value and helps you to gain an edge over your competition.
Below is an example from Miss Selfridge.
The store offers a discount on items.
The next customer engagement strategy is “Optimize your cart for conversion”
4. Optimize your cart for conversion
The fourth customer engagement strategy is to optimize your cart for conversion. Cart abandonment has been the major problem of most e-commerce stores. A cart is an important place a customer gets to make the actual purchase. There are many reasons a customer will abandon their cart.
The first thing is hidden fees and delivery charges. This is a major problem. PayScale study revealed that 42% of shoppers abandon an online purchase because of hidden transaction fees or delivery charges.
To solve this problem and boost your conversion, you can either offer free shipping on all products or choose the category of products eligible for free shipping. Research by ReadyCloud revealed that shoppers are ready to spend more when free shipping is included at checkout.
The second issue that can cause cart abandonment is when there are lots of steps in checking out. You can solve this problem by reducing the time to complete the checkout. here, you can use a short form or a long prefilled form. The faster and easier it is for them to check out, the better for your conversion.
Optimizing your shopping cart is a great customer engagement strategy you can easily implement on your website to boost conversion.
The next customer engagement strategy you can implement is ‘Provide post-purchase support’.
5. Provide post-purchase support
Last but not least customer engagement strategy is post-purchase support. The sales process is not complete after your customer makes a purchase. You should still continue to engage them afterward.
You can promote other products in your e-commerce store to them. Do you know it is 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one? This is the reason you need to use this customer engagement strategy to keep them happy with your brand.
You can implement this engagement strategy by sending an order confirmation email. Find out if the order they placed is correct. Next, send them a support manual or more videos that show them the makeup of the product and how to use it. Once, you send the orders, send them tracking information. After they receive their order, follow up to find out how they are doing with the product and ask for a product review.
Conclusion
Above are five winning customer engagement strategies you can use to boost your e-commerce store conversions. What engagement strategies are you using to increase conversion on your e-commerce store? Let us know in the comments!
