3 Ways to Nail Customer Engagement for Your eCommerce Store

Given that eCommerce is growing 23 percent year-over-year, it does seem tempting to take the online plunge. However, do you have all it takes to survive?

Hundreds of eCommerce shops and stores come into business every other day. The reason — it is no longer time consuming and expensive to create an online eCommerce store. Only a few are able to thrive. Most probably, they did not take customer engagement seriously.

In 2017, it has become all the more important for businesses to win at customer engagement. With this in mind, we discuss the following three ways your eCommerce store can absolutely nail customer engagement.

Customer Engagement with Web Push Notifications

Most visitors browse on the move, on mobile and tablets. Most purchases are made from the good old laptop or desktop. No matter what device your visitors are using, web push notifications catches attention and keeps users engaged, even when they are not on the website.

According to DMN news, almost nine out of 10 (89%) millennials are likely to act on a notification received from their favorite brand.The best thing about push notifications — your message is read instantly. Any business is likely to benefit from a communication channel that enables sharing updates instantly, and acted upon in no time. Of course, only if they are able to get their opt-in strategy right.

Some of the top eCommerce brands improvement engagement and sales incredibly by using web push notifications. Though there are a number of customer engagement campaigns that can be talked about here, the following are our favorite three:

• Cart Recovery — Add to cart is the closest conversion goal to revenue and drop-offs at this stage are really disappointing for all eCommerce players. Web push notifications can help recover sales lost because of cart abandonment. Discounts, time-sensitive price alerts, out-of-stock notifications, and few other techniques can help improve click throughs on web push and re-engage users with their cart.

• Cross-sell — Increase average order value with cross-sell push notification campaigns. If a user has added a mobile phone to his cart, make him buy just a bit more by pushing notifications offering a 10% discount on headphones.
• Fresh Stock Updates — May be your users haven’t purchased from you for a while because you don’t have anything new in store. Get inactive users back to browsing and buying by informing them about fresh items in stock. Send out alerts personalized and based on their behavioral data. For example, if they last visited your ‘fashion jewelry category’, notify them about the fresh stock that you have added to that category.

Customer Engagement with On-site Messaging

On-site messaging or onsite push notifications are similar to web push notifications, with the former appearing only while a user is browsing the website. Showing your users personalized onsite notifications while they are browsing your website can get them from browsing to actually buying.

If you shop online frequently, you must have seen such notifications popping up every now and then while you are checking out products or adding a few items to your cart. To your surprise, these seem to often catch your interest. This is because, they gauge user behavior and are triggered on specific user actions.

The one best reason why marketers must add on-site notifications to their toolkit is that for these notifications to display, the user doesn’t need to opt-in. If you are seriously considering this channel of engagement and sales, here are two use cases that might just give you a bit more positive push.

• Advertise Most-viewed Products — Have a visitor on your website browsing through the a certain cosmetic brand? Notify that user about the most-viewed or most-purchased items from that brand. Run URL based targeting for this campaign and set it for all visitors who visit this URL.
• Social Proofing — Booking.com is the perfect example of how on-site notifications can be used to win the trust of visitors. While this is an example from the travel industry, eCommerce businesses too can use onsite notifications to create a sense of trust in their products and nudge users to buy!

Customer Engagement with Exit Intent

One of our client’s case study is the best example of using exit intent to improve customer engagement. Ethos watch boutique used Wigzo’s exit intent technology to gain back the lost attention of their visitors. Wigzo predicted the visitors’ on-site movements and intent to exit, right from the time of the visit. The exit intent campaign largely worked because Wigzo uses a runs 1:1 personalized campaigns powered by machine learning. You can check out the entire case study here.

For your exit intent campaign to work just like it did for Ethos, you need to design it right. Your messaging should be strong and relevant. Phrases like “Just before you leave”, “Don’t leave without checking this out”, should be followed with an offer that the potential customer is interested in.

Segmentation can further help you fine-tune your exit intent campaign based on target audience group/groups. Create unique user segments and build campaigns that cater to their interests or likes of these groups. For example, you could segment users who have added products to their wishlist as a user set and run an exit intent campaign offering a 15% discount on their wishlist.

URL targeting is another technique to strengthen your exit intent. It is a much refined way of running exit intent campaigns than designing a generic campaign for the entire website. Identify key pages on your website and build your campaign for visitors browsing those pages. For example, for a visitor who is reading your blog and just about to leave, offer or invite to subscribe. Similarly, for someone who is checking out ‘watches’ on your website, customize the exit intent to say ‘ Before you leave, check out this awesome discount on branded watched’.

To Wrap Up

Email marketing and social commerce are something that everyone is doing to build brand awareness and recall. However, to gain that upper edge over customer engagement your business needs something that has the power to catch users in the moment. Web push notifications, onsite messages, and exit intent technology are three such techniques that can help you engage with your users more meaningfully, and at the right time.

This post was originally published on Wigzo’s blog.