How to Increase User Engagement for an E-Commerce Site

HOW TO INCREASE USER ENGAGEMENT FOR AN ECOMMERCE SITE No matter how wide your product range is, Customer Experience (CX) is the ultimate decider to make or break your e-commerce website. In fact, a striking survey by Super Office reveals 86% of customers are prone to spend more if they get a superior customer experience.

CX can also influence on-spot purchasing. For example, around 49% of buyers seem to make impulse purchases on receiving a personalized experience (source: Super Office). Leveraging such an audience can be beneficial to boost your business. So, starting today, focus on improving the audience engagement for your e-commerce site.

We admit it’s easier said than done. An alarming survey by Lilo exposes that 69% of the online shopping carts are left abandoned due to a complicated checkout process, unexpected costs, online errors, and various other factors. (Fun fact: do you know Flipkart has around 56.57% of bounce rate? Did we say fun? We meant disturbing,

really! If you don’t want to make the same mistake, check out our post and learn how to reduce the bounce rate of your e-commerce site.)

To address such challenges you need to adopt the right strategy to increase user engagement and build brand reliability. If you are looking for such strategies, you are in the right place. In this blog, we will offer a few handpicked strategies recommended (and followed) by the experts of e-commerce website design companies.

So, let’s begin.

1. Optimize the Site Speed and Responsiveness Nothing irritates the customers more than a slow website that takes a long time to load. This can lead your potential customers to leave your site and go elsewhere thus increasing the site’s bounce rate. Also, site speed is a crucial Google ranking factor when it comes to generating organic traffic to the site.

Make sure the site loads faster on device platforms like desktops and mobiles. Yes, optimizing the site for mobile devices is important because 53% of mobile sites are abandoned by the customers due to their slow loading time (source: CoreDNA). You may set up e-commerce analytics tracking in order to generate the site speed metrics.

As a thumb rule, your site should load in about 3 seconds or less, but the faster is always the better.

2. Content Upgrade Is a Must As the market gets over-populated with numerous shopping sites, the competition to survive in the market increases evermore. In such a scenario, content upgrade can be a rescuer to drive more attention. Even if your potential customers don’t buy anything at that instant, you can obtain their email addresses and market your products or services to them until they come back to purchase. And a returning customer can speak volumes of your brand reliability.

While discounts are popular and the most conventional way to allure people, there’s more and relatively innovative ideas that you may explore for content upgrade. For instance, you may provide an informative downloadable ebook, free buyers’ guide to the latest products, industry experts’ interviews, and several quizzes or fun games related to your site. To cite another instance, if your site deals with cosmetic products, you can customize a mail with a wheel game. The wheel will be segmented into multiple parts - each part offering a particular service. One may mention free shipping above a certain amount, another may indicate one lipstick free on buying a moisturizer from the same brand and so on. The receiver of the mail is supposed to turn the wheel and avail the offer within a fixed time period. Such games can enhance user engagement and allure them to purchase a product to get the offer.

These are a few cool ideas to grab the attention of your target customers. Brainstorm and find out more creative stuff.

3. Make It Personal As we mentioned earlier, personalized treatment is sure to make the users feel special and draw them to your site. Giving discount offers to your previous customers on their birthdays or anniversaries can be a cool way to reach out to them without putting much effort. You can simply add these two options in the registration form and keep a track of them.

Additionally, you can also seek to make your customers feel valued and launch a loyalty program to reward them. Generally, it features a system where certain points are collected on each purchase, which can then go into reducing a few bucks on the next purchase. You can also create loyalty programs to reward buyers for sharing your page and posts, writing reviews, and submitting pictures.

4. Promote

Your Content and Generate Activity

Diverse types of content including videos, infographics, charts, and GIFs are amazing means to enhance audience engagement.

Make it a practice to use a single content on multiple forums. For example, you may post a review video of a product on your site, share it across social media, and publish it on YouTube. This gives you an opportunity to drive organic traffic, social media traffic, and YouTube traffic with a single piece of content. This will help to create brand awareness.

Further, regularly promoting your blog will enhance visibility and encourage user participation. You can also generate activities in the form of surveys and contests.

5. User-centric CTA The CTA buttons should reflect what you intend your customers to do. For example, instead of using “Buy Now” time and again, you may bring versatility with phrases like “Check Reviews”, “Know More”, “Add to Cart”, or “Add to Wishlist”.

However, make sure not to confuse your users with unnecessary procedures. If the checkout process is much convoluted leading to delays, they may drop off midway and leave.

6. Develop a Community Unless you are a big brand like Apple or Microsoft, chances are that people shall rarely talk about your next product. This is where you need to be strategic and develop a community that revolves around the products or services that you sell.

Let’s elaborate the idea with an example.

If you sell exercise equipment, you may create a blog section that deals with the benefits one may derive from using such equipment - increased stamina, good health,

appealing physique, etc. You may even upload pictures of some celebrities using such equipment. Thus, you can avoid promoting your products all the time through your site or social networking platforms. This will further give rise to an online community that interacts with your business through blog comments and the sharing of content. This again can help to increase brand awareness for your products or services.

Some prominent websites that adopted this strategy and became highly successful include moz.com, naturescapes.net, and tor.com. Instead of pushing their products, they have built an online community that revolves around topics related to their products. Similarly, your e-commerce site, too, can focus on being user-centric rather than product-centric.

7. Gear Up the Search Function Despite offering easy navigation across the pages of your site, the users may face difficulty in finding a specific product. So, as the owner, you need to nudge them to buy a product, but of course, in a subtle way.

That’s why it’s better to design your site’s search function with user-friendly features like autocomplete and faceted search. These features help the users to find out an item without having to spend much time and also offer product suggestions. For instance, autocomplete helps the users to find products when they don’t know the exact name. Faceted search refines the options and makes them more specific so that the users don’t have to scroll through pages.

Conclusion Enhancing the user experience and not simply selling a product should be the motto if you seek to reduce customer churn, drive more leads and boost your business. The key to creating a robust e-commerce website is to put yourself in the customers’ shoes. Check out your site from the perspective of the potential buyer. Is it visually appealing? Does it provide adequate information? Are all the web pages navigable?

Is the payment secured? Inspect every point minutely.

Initially, it may sound overwhelming to keep a track of all the mentioned points and design a dynamic website, but with time, your investments will pay off as the company starts to achieve a reputation for outstanding customer engagement. This is where a reputed e-commerce website design company can play a substantial role.

With their long experience and expertise, they can help you develop dynamic, responsive, feature-rich, and secure websites and web applications at cost-effective rates.

Source: https://boardspace.org/increase-user-engagement-ecommerce/

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