5 Great Ways to Maximize Customer Engagement for Your Ecommerce Store

As the global ecommerce sales growth is expected to surpass $5 trillion in the upcoming years, it truly seems like the ideal time to invest in your online store. But with the expansion of the market also comes new competition, with hundreds of ecommerce shops opening nearly every day. Only a few can succeed in this ambitious environment, and customer engagement is truly necessary for achieving that triumph.

If you want your your ecommerce store to thrive in the near future as well, here are some of the best, most efficient ways you can maximize customer engagement:

Try on-site messaging options

To improve your ecommerce marketing strategies and engage your audience, one of the best things you could do is tweak your website, and on-site messaging can be a great option. Similar to push notifications, these messages pop up when a customer is browsing your site, offering the option to take them straight from viewing to buying.

As they appear quite visibly on the page, sometimes even taking up the entire screen, on-site messages are great for capturing the visitor’s attention and interest. Whether you use it to advertise the most popular products, in an effort to improve sales of least-visited products, or even for social proofing, on-site messaging is a wonderful solution for engaging your ecommerce customers.

Invest in social media strategies

While ecommerce sites are important for all online businesses, you simply can’t overlook the huge role social media plays in the lives of customers. With billions of people around the world using social media platforms each day, it’s evident this is quite a powerful tool that could engage consumers and influence their purchasing choices.

To utilize these platforms to their full extent, optimize your posts for social media searches to increase your brand visibility and expand your reach. Instead of direct sales pitches, aim to post more informative and helpful content that’s more likely to be shared, possibly allowing you to reach an even wider audience. Don’t forget to interact with your followers as much as possible, to keep them interested and engaged.

Create a more diverse offering

Naturally, ecommerce is quite a broad industry with a number of areas and niches business can achieve success with. However, very specific, uniform offerings don’t seem to be as popular with audiences as they are with companies. Mostly driven by availability and convenience, consumers tend to prefer online stores that offer a wide variety of different products and categories.

A good example of this would be the increasingly popular Shoppster website that offers a wide array of brands and product niches, from electronics and home appliances to fashion and sporting equipment, among others. The prevalence of this and many other similar ecommerce stores only serves to prove that expanding your offerings and building a more diverse online marketplace is an effective way of attracting consumers and likely even beating the competition.

Provide feedback opportunities

Encouraging feedback from your consumers is undoubtedly one of the best ways to boost engagement, something that was proven time and time again by the largest marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay. Apart from boosting communication, feedback could also allow your consumers to share their thoughts and suggestions regarding your products, and even offer insightful reviews for other customers.

For that reason, it might be wise to make it possible for your audience to quickly and easily leave feedback on your ecommerce site. Whether that means using a ticketing system, adding comment sections, or even leaving a place for reviews, customer feedback is bound to boost engagement in any form.

Prioritize the checkout process

Cart abandonment is among the biggest issues regarding customer engagement. However, even the consumers who abandon their carts should be important and valuable to you, as they show a clear intention to buy the products in your store. To that end, eliminating some of the most common reasons behind cart abandonment might help to boost engagement.

As most customers value their time and prefer swift and simple payment processes, reducing transaction times and coming up with a one-click ordering solution could be quite beneficial. On the other hand, hidden fees can be a great deterrent as well, so aim to reduce your shipping costs or even offer free shipping if possible. Not only will this aid in customer retention, but it might also allow you to prepare your store for the holidays with an attractive offer.

Wrapping up

The success of every ecommerce business depends on how well it can attract and retain its consumers. Customer engagement is the key to this success, and the helpful advice mentioned above will hopefully allow you to achieve this important goal.

About the author:

Mike Johnston is an experienced blogger and editor with a background in digital media and web. He’s produced thousands of pages of original, engaging content for numerous online publications throughout his career. Mike’s core focus areas are business and technology, but he also often writes about careers, jobs, and work-life balance.