3 tips to drive eCommerce customer engagement

In the hopes of adapting to the unprecedented digitalization era that’s impacted businesses worldwide, you’ve created your eCommerce site to continue selling to your ideal shopper. In an effort to overcome the pandemic’s aftermath, you stretch time and resources to help market your site and reach more customers. In doing so, you’re quite certain that you’ll make your money back in no time and quickly grow your business to beat pre-covid sales numbers.

You’re not alone; with over 24 million eCommerce sites worldwide as of 2021, competition is fierce, so making the right decisions and the right investments can give you the competitive edge you seek.  

A highly engaged shopper will help increase your customer base, translating to greater sales and revenue. This approach will enable you to work smarter, not harder, and reach your goals. To do this, you must remember that the art of providing top-notch eCommerce customer engagement needs to be nearly perfect to attract and retain customers, deeming your e-commerce site successful. 

Below are a few expert tips to help increase e-commerce customer engagement and reach new revenue levels. 

Segment Consumer Habits

The first step towards taking a customer-focused approach is to start segmenting your customers geographically and by demographics. These categories will allow a clear perspective of what might resonate with your customers so that you can easily apply content marketing strategies. Your strategies should then revolve around what actions your company can take to meet set customer expectations, what appeals to them, and how to leverage these advantages you might have over your competitors. 

By offering a tailored eCommerce experience for different customer habits, your customers are most likely to engage with your emails or any form of communication you offer, providing valuable and actionable insights. This understanding adds great value helps identify recurring customers willing to subscribe to your product or service on a regular basis, upselling them, and creating loyalty and promoters within your client base. 

The bottom line is to curate customer-focused content to build relationships through relatability and increased customer satisfaction. 

Minimize the Checkout Process

After analyzing consumer habits, you can extend your eCommerce personalization strategy to target the check-out process designed to cater to the needs of a specific customer group. For example, based on your customer’s behavior and geographic location, it can make sense to offer certain payment options to help minimize their checkout process, ensuring transparency and simplicity. For instance, if your target audience is millennials note that PayPal is a popular payment method, often used for quick online purchases in most countries

Get rid of any hidden fees, share current and relevant reviews in the checkout window, and offer payment methods that make the checkout process quick and painless to keep attracting more sales. 

Consider Cross-platforming 

Having just one site for purchases might not be enough to meet the expectations you've set with online sales in such a competitive market. Considering your industry, multiple platforms might be an effective way to reach a greater audience and, consequently, greater sales. 

For example, partnering with retail websites could be beneficial to help improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy and have your company rank higher in SERP (Search Engine Results Page), which in return can lead to increased brand awareness. Greater visibility in websites leads customers to keep your business on top of mind, which evidently is every company’s goal -- reach a certain level of ownership of a product or service. 

Taking it a step further, another way to increase customer engagement is through leveraging the power of social media. Many platforms, such as Instagram, allow users to purchase goods by clicking a link that takes them directly to your eCommerce site. Automatically, this created a chance to build a narrative and guide your target through your customer journey, ultimately leading them to pull the trigger and make a purchase. 

The beauty of e-commerce is that it allows for continuous improvement. Success is measured by sales and other metrics such as cart abandonment, which can easily be reduced through a proper e-commerce customer engagement strategy. All in all, the insights needed to make effective and optimal changes lies within the data collected through your customers. In such a competitive digitalization era, you simply cannot stay idle; gather and segment information, minimize processes, and leverage the different platforms out there. 

Photo Credit: Nonnakrit/Shutterstock

Murali Nethi is CEO & Founder at SnapBlooms.com, an e-commerce delivery platform for florists to send flowers.