How to Boost E-Commerce Customer Engagement

The way customers shop online has dramatically shifted thanks to our shift from desktop to mobile and our obsession with social media. In the past, customers primarily browsed company sites on desktop for information and price comparison. Now over 50% of eCommerce traffic comes from mobile devices. It’s important to focus on eCommerce customer engagement. People are browsing social media, researching products on their phones, discovering products and then going straight to your site to explore and potentially make a purchase. Unfortunately, not many eCommerce sites are ready to engage and convert customers once they get there. The experience falls short of what customers expect. Thanks to social media, where 76% of customers say they discover products, customers expect shopping experiences that are personalized, visual, intuitive, and engaging.

How do you deliver that? Here are a few ways you can boost eCommerce customer engagement:

Create a personalized experience:

Customers expect personalization which they experience plenty of on social media and from other major retailers that ‘set the bar’ so to speak like Amazon. Algorithms are constantly presenting them with products, content, and brands they don’t even know they like yet. When they get to your site, they expect the same. You want to deliver dynamic content and personalized product suggestions as soon as they enter your site. There are a lot of tools to help you do this. Contently can help you change the headlines and content on your site to match data you have on specific users for a personalized experience. You can also use Optinmonster to present personalized popup offers and exit popup offers to better your chance of conversion now and later. An even easier and more engaging way is to suggest products and content through a personalized newsfeed with Beamer. You can easily add a Beamer feed that intuitively fits into your interface on both mobile and desktop where you can suggest new products and content segmented by users’ location, language, past behavior on your site, and demographics.  It’s an easy way to make your customer experience more interactive and personalized without a lot of work!

Add more visual elements:

Customers are much more used to hyper visual experiences thanks to social media feeds, where they discover many new brands and products. On social feeds like Instagram and Pinterest, there are plenty of high quality photos and design that customers are used to. Product pages and an eCommerce shopping experience needs to reflect this. Customers want to see higher quality product pictures, more views, and more “lifestyle” content and imagery around your products like influencer pictures and UGC (user generated content). It’s been found that imagery with people included gets higher engagement and is more actively shared. Take a look at these examples:

In an interesting and easy way to leverage social engagement, many eCommerce sites are now including photos and tags directly from influencers or other customers directly in product pages:

On Amazon, customers have become accustomed to being able to flip through customer-submitted photos before they purchase. 75% of customers rely on product photos for when making a purchasing decision - quality and quantity matter! Additionally, if you include a lot of images, your visual content is 40% more likely to be shared on social media. On your Beamer feed, you can include images and videos for a more visual experience on every page.

Include interactive and social elements:

We’re so used to everything being interconnected, even if we are not on social media but on your site. Including interactive and social elements can help keep customers on your site for longer and also boost the chances of them sharing your content or products. Always present the opportunity for customers to share your product as a whole or your images with a link to others. Here are a few examples:

Also allowing customers to interact with your team and other customers can help boost engagement, time spent on the site, and the chance that customers makes a purchase. Amazon has kind of set the bar here as well. Their comments and questions section below their products are a popular resource for customers looking to learn more and people often engage. Learn more about collecting and using feedback.

Reviews and feedback are also a social and engagement tool that helps engage users and speed up the buying process. Some eCommerce sites are doing a great job with using customer feedback and reviews in an engaging way as well by sharing reviews and organizing the data into simple, easy to read elements for customers as well as making it easy to share your own:

“When you say it, it’s marketing. When your customer says it, it’s social proof.”- Andy Crestodina, web strategist

Have an intuitive browsing and wishlist experience:

Many customers want their experience to be fun and no-pressure while online shopping. They want to be able to explore products, browse for hours, and still keep organized and keep track of what they liked while discovering more. Amazon did an excellent job at this with their wishlist functionality that lets customers know that they can always make their way back to products they’ve already liked without keeping a ton of tabs open. Wishlists and saved products also allow you to collect valuable data on customers and present suggested products and personalized deals more effectively throughout their browsing experience. With wishlists and saved products it’s also an opportunity for you to do two other important engagement-boosting things: collect customer information, target them better with special offers and products, and encourage sharing. You can intuitively ask customers to share their email to save their wish lists and products. That way, it’s giving their information is beneficial for them and not an annoying gimmick for “future deals”. You can also encourage customers to share their wish lists with others as a way to boost engagement off your site.

Continue engaging after they leave the site:

What happens after customers leave your site is still important - sometimes the most important. 68% of shopping carts are abandoned but that can be turned around with the amount of customer data eCommerce sites collect. Re-engaging customers and bringing them back to your site to continue their shopping experience is easier than ever. There are plenty of tools to help you do this via email, ads, social media, etc. You can use Adroll to retarget customers with personalized ads and offers off of your site and on other sites and social media feeds. You can also use Beamer to retarget customers with push notifications and emails when you post new updates that are relevant to them. You can set segmented push notifications live so that customers only get updates via push notifications and email that are relevant to them based on their demographics, location, language, and past behavior on your site. You can let Beamer do the work while you focus on sending out engaging updates! It’s an easy way to get customers back to your site in a more direct, engaging way. It can seem impossible to keep customers’ attention for very long as they are harder and harder to please thanks to super engaging social media platforms and other sites like Amazon that continue to raise the bar. By focusing on the key principles that are important to customers like personalization and visual experience, you can better engage your customers and boost conversion rates. Beamer makes it easy with a visually engaging and personalized way to present products and content on every page. Try Beamer on your site today.