Ideas for Improving Online Customer Engagement

The success of any ecommerce business depends on effectively engaging customers for creating brand awareness and ultimately increasing sales. Customer engagement is all about building strong bonds with customers by providing personalized experiences. Recent trends in customer engagement include making recommendations based on customer profiling and creating value for customers. When engaging with customers, creating a continuous positive experience for them will garner brand loyalty for the business. Some of the ways through which companies can better engage online customers are as follows:

Create Interactive Digital Experience

It is essential to create a seamless online experience for your customers while engaging with them. Successful engagement requires businesses to listen and understand the needs of the customers and then deliver accordingly. This helps in building customer loyalty. E-commerce businesses should make their websites more interactive, giving visitors the opportunity to contribute and express their opinions on the pages. A comments and reviews section could be added to allow customers to provide feedback on various products and services. Moreover, some websites also have a separate forum that enables user based discussions about the company and its products. Videos could also be added about different products to catch the interest of the customer. Ask your customers to share their experiences not only in the form of messages and reviews but also make short videos about how they feel about your products and services and send them to you. These videos can then be shared on social media pages of your company.

Engage With Live Chat

Many ecommerce businesses are now using Live Chat, a feature that allows customers to chat with live operators on the website. The availability of proactive chat, enables the company to greet and proactively engage with customers. The Live Chat service lets visitors ask specific questions about the products and company services. Recommendations, problem solving, advice and general queries become a lot easier through real time chat conversations. The two way nature of the communication facilitates long term relationship building between the company and the customers. The customer service standards can also be significantly enhanced through live support which is available 24/7 on the website.

Active Social Media Presence

Businesses must build and maintain a healthy social media presence. As social media websites have gained popularity, it has become an important avenue for customer interaction and engagement. Answering customer queries on social media pages is an effective technique to build a better brand image. Social media websites can also be an effective tool for collecting feedback, which can be used to improve customer experience. Different polls and competitions can be run on social media to involve the customers and improve the level of engagement. Keep the conversations alive. It is of high importance to keep the company social media pages active and regularly updated with content.

For long term success, businesses should continue to look into unique ways to engage and improve communication with customers.