Want to boost your customer engagement successfully?

With the whole world becoming one single marketplace, just having a simple online presence is not enough. Why will the global audience buy from you? What will make your online shop stand out? How will you ensure customer loyalty and conversions? These are vital questions that many eCommerce business owners, like you, keep asking themselves. But did you know, the answer to all your worries is very simple. You have to enhance your customer engagement.

Statistically, a recent survey showed that companies can multiply their eCommerce businesses by 1.5 times if they invest in customer engagement now. This means that if you are already earning $1 billion annually, you can expect an additional business of $700 million in the next 3 years, provided you apply the right customer engagement strategy now. Has this got your rapt attention?

Then continue to read below to know what you should include in your customer engagement strategy so it yields the best possible results.

1.  Live chat and chatbot: Powerful tools for customer engagement, provided you know how to use them. Enhance your live chat and chatbot to start engaging with customers the moment they land on your website. Collect data so you know their preferences and understand their needs. Lead your customers towards fulfillment by assisting them in all capacities. This will make their online shopping journey smooth and time effective. Create personalized pre-approved offers specially for them. Make them these offers, they make their selection and keep sending such offers through emails to keep inducing them to come back. You can enhance individual order size by about 100 to 300% by adopting this strategy. So, keep conversing to keep customers engaged.

Did you know integrating a Chatbot enhances your chances of serving a global audience? AI technology is improving by the minute, thereby improving Chatbot capabilities and making them almost human-like. Invest in a good Chatbot and offer 24×7 uninterrupted customer service. You will see your operational costs coming down, your cross promotion of products increasing and revenue from sales increasing exponentially.

2. Customer reviews: Leverage the value of user-generated content. Offer rewards in the form of discounts, coupons etc when they leave customer reviews or create some positive content for your website. Today, social media forms a very large part of all our lives. Any customer review or user-generated content that gives high ratings to your eCommerce website on a social media platform will help increase your web traffic and subsequently lead to enhanced conversions. Word of mouth or rather word of the social media is a powerful tool that can be used to create the correct allure for customers and you should include this in your customer engagement strategy.
3. Curate engaging content: Yes, even today content is the king. People read what they think is interesting on the internet. And the first few lines of your content play a crucial role in reducing bounce rate. So, curate content that interests the user. Make it more customer-centric. Take the time to conduct a survey and analyze the demographics of your target clients, their needs and pain-points, likes, dislikes etc. Seek to address them in your content to enhance its relatability. This will keep your customers hooked to your content.

Once you have managed to engage your customer, continue your engagement with them. Send them emails informing them about the items still lying in their carts. Make it attractive for them to buy it by including customer reviews, creating a good story etc.

• Interactive self-service: Many customers prefer self-service even today. You cannot let these customers go. So, you have to include the traditional FAQs section in your website product page but make it informative, crisp, precise and interesting. Create your product dashboard in a way that your customers can find all relevant information about the product in a single page. Doing this will ensure quick answers to customer queries and they will not have to wait for a response from a Live agent or a Chatbot. The idea is not to implement one strategy at the cost of another but to ensure the presence of all options so that individually they complement each other. This will create brand uniformity and mitigate the changes of cart abandonment.
• Social media: To build a sustainable and profitable eCommerce business, you have to enhance human engagement. Alternately, you improve your outreach by seeking out and actively engaging with your target audience. Social media with its 3.5 billion active user base is a gold mine of opportunities. Some ways by which you can enhance customer engagement through social media is by:

1. 1. 1. 1.   Increasing your market reach
         2.   Building brand awareness
         3.   Improving your credibility
         4.   Using social media as a source of curating customer-centric content
         5.   Giving all your user related conversations a human touch and showing them that you care
         6.   Researching trends to understand what your users want and need

• Loyalty programs: Be it a special price discount or a gift coupon etc., everyone likes to be appreciated and rewarded. Loyalty programs are the best catalyst to enhance customer retention. Every business owner would like to see their customers returning to their store. You would like it too. When you offer loyalty programs, you induce your customer to come back by making it attractive for them. By offering rewards for subsequent purchases, you can make your customers feel appreciated and valued. This will give them the impetus to keep coming back to your online store.

Statistics also show that when you offer loyalty programs, people generally buy more than they intend to. Thus, your order size will also increase, as will your total sales revenue generation.

Today, customers look for a smart buying experience. They seek a superlative online shopping experience coupled with personalized attention. This is easy for an offline store since there is physical interaction between the customer and the salesperson. But when you operate online, the website is your shop. You have to ensure a good user experience online by being constantly in touch with your customers. By leveraging the above options, you can achieve your desired results.

So, what are you waiting for? Get into action now!