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Six Strategies for Increasing Customer

Engagement on Your eCommerce Site
With thousands of sites vying for your customer’s attention, how are you going to win?
If your site is built with the singular goal of driving customers to a quick conversion, you’re likely
missing the boat. A laser-focus on conversion as the only measure of success is quickly becoming
a thing of the past.

With digital “noise” all around, keen

marketers and eCommerce professionals
are realizing the importance of capturing
not only wallet share, but mind share,
as well. This mind share is measured
by engagement. How much time are
customers spending on your site and
how often are they coming back? These
measurements are increasingly being given
more attention as the connection between
engagement and eventual conversion
becomes clear. A more engaged customer
is more invested in your brand, more loyal
and more likely to buy.

But the traditional site built for “search, click, convert” shopping is not going to move the needle in increasing these valuable metrics.

Here are six strategies for increasing customer engagement (and revenues)
Create an Experience – Interaction breeds long-term whether it’s information, expert advice or a more fun way to
engagement. Change your perspective from “how quickly shop. Create tools on your site that deliver this value. Make the
can we get customers to make a purchase” to “how much experience visual and intuitive to decrease drop-offs. Focus
time can we get them to spend interacting with our site or on creating the experience from the customer’s point of view.
brand?” Consider what value you can bring to the customer, What would you customer like to do, see and learn?
Create a Relationship – Demonstrating value to the
customer kicks off a positive relationship. Personalizing the
experience makes the relationship last. Support the front-end
design with back-end technology that allows you to store the
customer’s answers or preferences, then tailor the experience
the next time your site is visited. Show that you’re “listening”
to the input a customer has provided by also targeting
outbound communication and promotions to the individual.
Give customers and opportunities and motivation to continue
interacting with you.
Be Where Your Customers Are – Customers not
only have far greater choices of who to buy from, but mobile
technology is giving them the ultimate choice of how and when
to buy. Mobile and tablet shopping more than double during
the holiday season of 2011 (over that of 2010). An interactive
experience that can seamlessly transfer from online to mobile
to tablet is going to be integral in increasing the amount of
time customers spend with your brand. The importance of this
“customer experience” has long been recognized in-stores.
The more you can engage people in store and the more helpful
you can be in their buying experience, the more successful
you will be. It’s time to transfer this thinking to all potential
channels a customer can use to reach you.
Make the Experience Easy to Find – You’ve no
doubt spent money on PPC or other kinds of advertising to
get users to your main site. Adding an interactive experience
doesn’t have to replace your traditional site. However, to
get the most from the development of the game or tool,
you must give it some “love” directly from your homepage
or optimized landing pages. One major retailer uses a TV
Finder to interactively walk customers through the process
of selecting the right television. By creating a banner graphic
that publicized the tool and placing that banner on the TV and
Video landing page, the retailer increased traffic to the tool by
more than 200% and increased the total conversion value of
purchases from the tool by more than 500% in one week! This
“case study” leads to the next two strategies…
Promote the Experience – The TV finder example
showcases the benefit of promoting the experience through
an aesthetically pleasing graphical banner. While it is intuitive
to put an internal advertisement like this on the homepage or
product category page, also determine other places within
the site (complimentary product pages, for example) where
taking part in the “experience” could be a next logical step.
If your company has the budget for external advertising,
promoting the experience can increase traffic and resulting
conversions. A global health and beauty brand created an
interactive consultation tool to help customers decipher the
best skin care routine for their personal skin needs and goals.
By executing an advertising campaign around the availability
of the tool, traffic increased by 1,000 percent.
Expertly place the monetization of the
experience – Bottom-line revenues are still going to be
driven by conversions. Spending the dollars to build a user
experience on your site and having no way to measure
its contribution to the bottom line will not sit with a CEO or
CMO anywhere. But, be smart about where you place the
conversion opportunity within the experience. Let the content
drive the conversion and not vice versa. If your tool is delivering
information, don’t cloud a resource article with blatant product
pushes disguised as “useful information.” Instead, deliver
content with a non-intrusive side bar that includes links
to related products. If you’re giving users advice, ask them
about their wants, need and goals, then deliver recommended
products that synch directly to the answers. It’s important to
note here that brands can deliver these kinds of experiences
to their customers (and monetize the value of the tools) even
if they don’t offer commerce functionality on their sites. By
integrating “where to buy” functionality into the conversion
aspect of the experience, the brand can offer value to both
their customers and distribution channels.