Your online store is capable of giving you more than you imagine. Even if it is built with one of the best eCommerce website platforms, follows modern e-commerce payment trends, and has robust shopping functionality, there are always more ways to make the best of it. See these 10 useful ways to increase eCommerce customer engagement.
Ways to Boost E-commerce Customer Engagement
It's never too late to implement these customer engagement tips that it’s never too late to implement on your online store. They may come as improvements, new features, or just techniques for you to apply.
1. Use cross-selling techniques
Among the ways to increase eCommerce customer engagement, the art of cross-selling is especially vital. This means offering your users more shopping options instead of simply letting them go. For example:
- related product recommendations
- your best-selling items
- the items that go with the item they viewed
- the “Other customers also bought” section
- the “Users who viewed this also viewed” section
and much more.
2. Apply e-commerce content personalization
E-commerce content personalization is great for the above-mentioned cross-selling and much more. It means showing individualized offers to customers — specific products, related products, promotions, preferred categories, personalized search results, and so on.
Personalization can be based on the user's previous behavior, like shopping history, visited products, clicking ads, opening email campaigns, as well as personal data like geographical location, etc.
3. Create sales promotions
Coupon and promotion codes, free shipping options, and gifts boost customer engagement and conversion rates on your e-commerce website. They also raise the clickability of ads and email newsletters.
The promise of a discount is also a great way to tempt a visitor into subscribing to your newsletter. You can add a time limit to your promotional event to add to the user's interest.
4. Use social media opportunities extensively
The global number of social network users is expected to reach 3.02 billion in 2021. These networks are the natural “habitat” of your potential customers, so customer engagement with your e-commerce store can start right from there.
In addition, before buying online, it’s nice to visit the store’s social media page and see how real users, maybe even friends, follow it or give positive reviews.
Ways to use the power of social media are numerous. Among them:
- regular and engaging social media posts with links to your eCommerce website
- paid ads on social media
- share icons next to products, promotions, or other content on your website
- icons on your website leading to your official social pages
- social media feeds on your website showing the latest activities
- social media statistics on your website showing the number of followers
- careful answers to all questions asked of your company on social media
and much more.
5. Let users generate their content
To increase eCommerce customer engagement, encourage them to have their say. User-generated content may include product reviews, comments, pictures of your product, blog posts, and so on.
This shows you are open to discussion and creates a feeling that your products are popular and trustworthy. Instead of thinking it’s not just you are singing the praises of your own goods, the user will see real people who are interested in them or have already used them.
6. Enhance your sales with your own content
While giving users a chance to create their content, you should never forget the most powerful engagement tool on the web — useful and unique content of your own!
High-quality blog posts, product reviews, and press releases help users make a decision about a product, assure them you are experts, boost your SEO rankings, and increase your chances to be shared to trustworthy websites across the web.
You could place links to the right on the product pages according to the best practices of content-driven commerce.
7. Add high-quality product images
Online shopping became available in 1991, yet the impossibility to evaluate the product from all angles is still stopping many customers. So reassure them!
Create high-quality images of your products, preferably with the help of a professional photographer. 3D images and videos will give them an extra “real-life” effect and boost customer engagement.
8. Use the abandoned cart emails technique
Statistics show that the overall cart abandonment rate is 69%. But the good news is that receiving abandoned cart emails makes 10% of people come back and complete their purchase. This is too good to let go of, but this engagement technique should be used sparingly to respect your customers’ privacy.
9. Offer a guest checkout option
Sometimes, customer engagement starts with simply not pushing them away. Make sure you don’t make your site visitors register in order to do the shopping. Give them a feeling they are always welcome and can shop in any way they like — with registration or with one-click guest checkout. Additionally, consider incorporating PayPal payment website integration to offer your customers more convenient and secure payment options.
10. Provide online customer support
Customers may want to ask a question about the product, shipping, or other details. In addition, of course, to listing as many details as possible on your pages, you will also need to provide online support.
The necessity of “Can we help you” popup is very debatable, because it may annoy visitors. But they should know they can reach support whenever they want.
Nice options for customer support include help desks, live chats, voice chats, video chats, chatbots, and more. To implement them, there are ready solutions that can be integrated into your e-commerce website.
Start engaging customers right now!
Are you ready to get more from your e-commerce website? Contact our website development agency to add the desired features and help you in every other way. Time to use the best ways to increase eCommerce customer engagement!
