The way people connected with each other before the pandemic has changed and for a while, the new norm was fine to employers and employees. However, as we continue to struggle with the pandemic, there is now some fatigue among professionals with virtual communication and connection. This fatigue can make it hard for organizations to keep their employees engaged.
A year of being online has caused burnout for many, so it is important to learn a few ways to keep your members engaged with your online platform. Here are a few tips that will lessen member attrition, keep your members engaged, and even recruit new members.
What is Virtual Customer Engagement?
A metric that is designed to determine how involved and interested a customer is in a company is called virtual engagement. Marketers spend a lot of time engaging prospective customers, attempting to engage them as a customer and eventually as an advocate of your brand.
Online platforms play a huge role in the lifecycle of a customer and often include virtual events and other customer activities that happen in controlled environments. This allows marketers to obtain detailed feedback on the customer’s engagement level, which they can use to measure how successful their marketing efforts, as well as the company, are to the community.
Community engagement was established by industry analysts, which allows companies to focus on a lower level of behaviour from customers and the strength of their connection.
1. Employ Digital Tools To Engage Customers in Real-time
There are several ways to employ digital tools to keep customers engaged. Not only do these tools help you deliver a higher rate of satisfaction, but they also allow you to engage with your customers in real-time. These tools can include:
Live Chat – There are many high-quality eCommerce sites that use a Live Chat feature to allow customers to ask questions and provide a more satisfactory shopping experience. It also helps businesses reduce the expanse of added support and provide it with a competitive advantage over their competitors.Live chats are a great way to proactively engage with your customers providing them with shopping help. These chats are also helpful in increasing a site’s chances of converting a visitor into a buyer.
Visual Engagement – A digital showroom will also allow you to engage with visitors in real-time which is an invaluable sales tool. When a customer has faster engagement, your success in converting that visitor into a buyer increases.
The ability to browse products along with the help of video chat provides the customer with the ability to see products in real-time and ask questions, which has been a huge benefit to the car sales industry.
2.Enhance Conversational Commerce With Bots
Chatbots also fit well into an eCommerce site. They offer the benefit of recommending products to visitors and offer a more personalized experience, which helps to convert a visitor into a customer.
Many AI-powered chatbots are able to detect the shopper’s intent and provide relevant suggestions to engage a customer, plus they can do all of the around-the-clock reducing the number of queries and support tickets a website receives.
3.Deliver Omnichannel Customer Experience
A unified eCommerce experience, omnichannel e-commerce provides a consistent shipping experience no matter which platform a customer is using. Research shows that shoppers use several channels when they make purchases online, so it is important to integrate your mobile app, eCommerce site, and physical store location in a simple and easy shopping experience.
Many omnichannel e-commerce strategies see a customer begin their search on one channel before moving to another channel progressing their online purchase. Because of this, it’s important to have consistent brand messaging and proactive customer support, which ensures that there is active customer support and minimizes the loss of customers.
4. Minimize Hassle Check Out Process
It’s not uncommon to lose a customer during check out. Customers want a process that is simple and straightforward, the more difficulty a customer encounters during check out, the higher the chances that they will bail on the purchase.
Make the purchase as simple as possible by using fewer pages and requiring a minimum of steps during the process.
5. Include Customer Reviews
An essential part of any online sales process, customer reviews give you credible social proof of what a customer is buying. It helps to reinforce the quality and performance of the items you want to sell. Online customers spend a lot of time reading reviews, which can help assist them in their decision-making process.
A good review is a sign of the customer loyalty a business enjoys, and if you have many positive reviews on your site, it will help to grow your revenue twice as fast as your competitor will.
6. Engage Users Across Social Media Channels
It is important to follow best practices when using social media to engage your users. Make sure to post regularly to stay at the top of everyone’s news feeds. Use entertaining and engaging content, and don’t forget to use images since they will increase your interactions with users greatly.
Also, listen to what your users are trying to tell you about your brand and make sure you respond to any criticism you encounter positively and constructively. You can also use tools to monitor your site’s social media that will keep track of likes, shares, and retweets allowing you to see who is engaging with your posts and how they are responding.
7. Authorize Your Customers With Communities
A branded community will have a higher impact on a customer’s experience since it gives them a feeling of happiness to belong to a branded community. Not only will it create positive feelings, but it will also help to improve a brand’s credibility.
You can use a community as a resource for passing on useful information about an eCommerce brand and also allow your customers to interact with one another. In this way, the customer receives added value to their experience before and after they make their purchase.
Since people tend to trust other customers when making a purchase decision, a branded community forum is a great way to help guide buying decisions. It can also offer a discussion forum where customers can find answers to common support questions alleviating the need to contact the company directly.
8. Offer a Customer Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs are often referred to as “rewards programs.” They offer a great way to retain customers, increase the frequency of purchases, offer referrals, and provide a lifetime of customer value. Creating a loyalty program will offer a customer an incentive to spend more on purchases as well as retain customers who might venture to other eCommerce sites for a better deal.
Existing in several different forms, loyalty programs offer a system where points can be accumulated to increase a customer’s buying power. It can offer a mix of early product releases, exclusive discounts, free gifts, and redeemable points.
9. Acquire Customer Feedback and Implement It
Customer feedback is a meaningful way to get meaningful insight into your customer’s experience that allows you to keep their experience equal to their expectations. When you collect feedback, you can lessen abandoned shopping carts, which happens in almost 80% of online orders. Feedback allows you to find out why they left your checkout process and allows you to implement measures to improve your eCommerce site’s performance and experience.
10. Create Engaging Content for Your Audience
It’s important to create awesome content that adds value to your readers, particularly something related to your eCommerce brand, and something that your customers like. You want to create content that is customer-centric, so you should target content for your customers by developing something that they will want to see and enjoy.
You also want to understand your customer’s needs, so that they stay engaged and feel a sense of relatability to your brand. It’s also important to segment your audience by using real-time customer reviews in your emails and following up with shoppers that have left carts filled with products.
Why Customer Engagement Is Important?
Customer engagement is important since it benefits both suppliers and buyers by increasing closing rates while also meeting customer expectations. When you keep customers engaged through their purchase, you can develop loyalty from your customers as well as collect some very valuable information on them.
The more interactions you have with your customers, the more valuable your brand will become. Through customer engagement, you will have a better understanding of your customer’s pain points and feedback, which can help you make better marketing decisions for content development and retargeting. Plus, these interactions can also help with the sales process including outreach and messaging methods.
To Summarize
The current pandemic has changed the way we work, live, and shop. We have relearned how to stay connected, and it’s important that your business and its members remain connected as well. Using intuitive tools and marketing techniques like the ones mentioned above will allow you to remain relevant in today’s digital landscape and allow you to engage members in refreshing and unique ways.
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