(Newswire.net — August 19, 2020) — If you want your ecommerce business to succeed, you can’t ignore customer engagement. After all, engaged customers can mean more brand awareness, sales, and revenue. It can go a long way toward boosting brand loyalty and getting repeat sales.
But engaging customers requires consistent effort.
You need a solid plan to ensure an increasing engagement rate. If you don’t have one already, it’s time to get started.
In this post, let’s look at some of the strategies that can help in boosting ecommerce customer engagement.
1. Run Contests or Giveaways
The best way to encourage audience engagement with your brand is to offer an incentive. Run a contest or a giveaway to get attention from your target audience and keep them engaged.
If a special occasion like Christmas or New Years’ Eve is around the corner, you should make the most of this time to promote contests.
Make sure you clearly define the contest rules. Keep participation criteria simple to get maximum engagement.
This promotional strategy can also do wonders for your ecommerce brand’s sales and revenue.
2. Make It Easy For Customers to Give Feedback
To boost engagement, it’s important for your customers to feel that they can voice their opinions freely. You should thus make it easy for them to give you feedback. Enable them to leave ratings, comments, and images for their purchases.
But giving them a platform to express themselves is only half the battle. To truly win over your customers, you need to demonstrate that you are listening and acknowledging their comments.
Make it a practice to reply to all comments. If you receive a negative response, show your willingness to help your customers fix their issues.
Not only will this strategy help you in boosting engagement, but it will also help you win their trust.
3. Run Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are a great way to recognize your customers’ efforts and nudge them to re-engage with you. For every purchase that a customer makes, you can offer loyalty points.
Similarly, you can offer reward points for feedback that they leave. This can be an indirect way of encouraging them to engage with you.
You can also offer special benefits like discounts, free shipping, early access to newly launched products, birthday gifts, invitations to events, and more.
Make sure you highlight all the benefits as well as the procedure for joining the loyalty program. State this clearly on your website. Follow the lead of The Body Shop. They have a separate web page outlining the details of their Love Your Body club.
Image via The Body Shop
4. Run UGC Campaigns on Social Media
One of the best ways to boost customer engagement is to encourage them to become brand ambassadors. For this, you can run a UGC campaign on your social media pages.
All you need to do is come up with a catchy branded hashtag and ask your customers to use it to showcase their purchases. To create social media buzz, you can share such posts on your brand’s social media pages and website.
This strategy doesn’t require you to invest a lot of time and effort. Plus, you can boost your brand awareness and get more visibility on social media.
5. Build a Community Online
Community building and engagement go hand in hand. When people find a community that shares their values, they are likely to engage.
To get more leads and increase engagement, build an online community where people can discuss topics related to your niche. The purpose should be to encourage discussion, not promote your products.
For example, Sephora’s Beauty Insider community is a platform where people can talk freely about beauty-related topics. They can exchange tips, give recommendations, and even discuss their problems.
Image via Sephora
6. Leverage Gamification
Adding a fun game to your website can help you attract attention. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Even a simple game that involves spinning a wheel or guessing a word can add excitement to the mix.
To get more participation, you can offer discounts, coupon codes, or other exciting rewards. This strategy can also help you get more conversions.
Keep in mind that you may have visitors of different ages and backgrounds. So it’s best to keep the game as easy as possible. That way, everyone can play.
7. Use Intelligent Chatbots
Chatbots can be excellent tools to promote customer engagement. Not only can they help in answering customer queries, but they can also provide personalized suggestions.
Intelligent chatbots are designed to help customers move to the next stage of the sales funnel. They do this by asking customers a series of questions to gauge preferences. Based on the answers, the chatbots can showcase relevant products.
The best part is that chatbots are available around the clock. Even if your team is not working, a chatbot can engage customers right away.
Conclusion
Keeping your customers engaged is necessary to grow your business. But getting engagement requires patience, dedication, and consistent hard work on your part.
Run contests, loyalty programs, and UGC campaigns to get more visibility on social media. It’s also a good idea to leverage chatbots and gamification to get the attention of your customers.
Use a mix of the strategies mentioned above to get the maximum engagement.