Over the years, focus from product quality and price has steadily shifted over to customer engagement. Every customer has different wants, craves a different experience, and has different expectations when they are shopping at your online store. Meeting that many customers can be quite challenging but it is certainly not impossible.
Many large companies might have spent millions of dollars to increase their customer engagement online and if you are just starting out, spending that much money on just one aspect of your online store is impossible. But does that mean you have to give up on it? Not really.
Here are 5 steps to engage customers in an online store without hurting your pockets:
Step 1: Leverage AI for Value-Added Push Notifications – Regular push notifications are not just impersonal but also annoying. They add little to no value when it comes to customer engagement. Value-added push notifications, on the other hand, are notifications that are tailored to match the distinct preferences of each of your customers. Does that sound like a lot of hard work? Maybe, but it is not. There are apps like Enalito, which can help send out customized push notifications to each of your customers.
When businesses send out tailored notifications, customer engagement significantly increases, prompting purchases that otherwise would’ve never taken place.
Step 2: Set-up triggered marketing emails – A study has shown that triggered emails have a 70.5% higher opening rate compared to other types of mails. That’s a huge difference. This is because customers expect these emails. A few examples of triggered marketing emails are:-
(i) Sign up confirmation or a ‘Welcome’ email
(ii) Order confirmation email
(iii) Seasonal sales email
(iv) Festive seasons offer email
If your business doesn’t send out these emails yet, then it is high time to get starting with it. Sometimes, these marketing emails can even contain product recommendations customized for each of your customers based on their past purchases or searches. This may sound like too much hassle but it is quite simple. Enalito can help you with it too. All you have to do is set the triggers and conditions to send out the automated emails. Yes, it is that simple.
Step 3: Remove clutter from the website – One of the prime reasons for low customer engagement in online stores is a cluttered website. The saying ‘First impression is the last impression’ fits quite aptly in this context. If a browser comes across your online store looking for something but doesn’t end up finding it, then chances are that this person won’t come back.
Getting the landing page of your online store is very important. There should be a clear call-to-action, appropriate product recommendations from searches, and a marketing campaign with an unambiguous message. All these factors play a large role in determining a customer’s first experience of your online store.
If you are unclear on how to optimize or de-clutter your website for a better experience, then no worries because Enalito can help you with that too. You can control which products or widgets to show onsite with the help of intelligent automation.
Step 4: Work on Product Abandonment Page Issue – Most online retailers are too focused on checkout that they forget to look a little further up the funnel. When a visitor lands on your store’s website, it is the product page that will ultimately determine if the person will convert into a paying customer or not.
Showing customized product recommendations on your store’s website is one way to work on this issue. This is again something that Enalito can help you with. It can make product recommendations for customers even with New Arrivals based on their matching attributes with the already existing products in your store. This is something that many apps fail to do.
Step 5: Post-Purchase Services – Post-purchase services are very important to make your online store stand out from the rest in the industry. If you don’t send out order confirmation emails or track over emails to your customers already, then now is the time to start. The quality of your post-purchase services will determine if the customer is going to come back to your store or not. Include facilities like free shipping and no-cost return with 30 days of the purchase. Ask for a product and service review after your customer has received the product. This will help in making shopping at your online store more attractive.
Enalito helps online stores with order follow-up and offers post-sales assistance as well that builds your business’ goodwill.
So, here is my list of the top 5 steps that every business must follow in order to engage customers in their online store. However, the list is not limited to just these 5 steps. A business can do many other things like focusing on the cart abandonment issue, co-browsing, etc. to improve their customer engagement online. Keeping your online store’s experience simple, effective, and memorable is the key to overcome this massive challenge! So good luck!
