Many companies have jumped onto the e-commerce bandwagon during this period. However, online commerce is not just about implementing a shopping cart into your website, and hope that your visitors will buy from you. Consumer expectations have changed. If they can’t find what they’re looking for on your website, they’ll go somewhere else.
Visitors can become disengaged at different points in their journey. We often hear people talk about their customers disengage as cart abandonment stage, but the real challenge is that visitors can disengage with you at different stages of their journey. Thus, visitors engagement at every stage of their buying journey is hugely important to the success of your e-commerce store. To understand how to engage with them, let’s break it down into 4 stages:
First visit on your e-commerce website
Convert from “Browsing”, to “Add in Cart”
Checking Out Shopping Cart
Post Purchase
First Visit to Your E-commerce Website
Huge amount of marketing budget is spent on driving visitors to websites, but the fact is if your website is not properly setup, you will be losing these visitors in their first visit. Some of these can be the layout, contents of your website, slow loading time, or maybe missing Call to Action on the home page.
The likelihood of conversion increases when the duration on site visit increases. The first touch on your website is the first point they can disengage with you. So after spending so much effort and resources to get the visitors onto your website, how do you keep your visitors engage? You can start by doing some analytics on your website, understanding some statistics behind such as bounce rate, at which page was bounced etc.
Getting your landing page right is really important, having a clear call-to-action, and matching the campaign that the visitor came from. Going back to that statistic about mobile, making sure that it’s optimized for that channel. Marketing automation solutions such as ActiveCampaign, allow you to spin up beautiful, on-brand landing pages for products or promotions easily.
Convert from “Browsing”, to “Add in Cart”
The next step in the customer journey is the product page. You you’re your marketing spend you put into generating traffic to your website, but it’s your product page that will ultimately create the sales. This is especially when a visitor come into your website with the intention to look for a specific product.
Don’t just focus on cart abandonment. Do also take a look at product page abandonment. It could be that he is trying to get the best deal. It is critical to understand why they might be leaving, and re-engage them There are a couple of ways to bring them back onto the buying journey such as offering free delivery or extended warranties. Or if they are not fully convinced, you can offer some incentives such as discount in exchange for their contact information like email addresses, so that you can continue to engage them after they leave your website.
Shopping Cart Checkout
As mentioned earlier, the most commonly discussed on customer disengagement, is cart abandonment. According to Stastica research, in March 2020, 88.05% of online shopping carts were abandoned. Paysafe Survey shows more than 40% of abandoned cart, was due to hidden charges and delivery fees.
Or it may also be due to reasons where customers need to have some questions answered during the buying / checkout, and if your website doesn’t have the answers, you need to provide channels to offer help to your visitors. So if a customer sends you a message via email or live chat, you need to respond immediately, or within a certain amount of time, otherwise that sale is likely lost.
ActiveCampaign Conversations is a feature which allow you engage with your customers real time, and also chatbot automation which customise each chat experience of your customers, even when your reps are offline.
Understanding the reasons can help implement measures to minimise cart abandonment rates, but for whatever the reason for cart abandonment, the main job for the business is bring these shoppers back to complete their transaction.
Similar to Product Page Abandonment, you can leverage on marketing automation tools to engage the visitors. Tools like ActiveCampaign allows you to collect your customer profile and shopping behaviour on your website. Armed with this information, you can now send out personalised email contents to these visitors to increase their possibility of email clicks to reengage with you.
Post Purchase:
Depending on industries, statistics show the cost of customer acquisition is almost 5-25 times more than retaining a customer. Therefore, continuing engagement with customers to keep them happy, can help ensure re-purchases, cross sell, or upsells from your existing customers.
Engagement at this stage can mean updating your customers throughout the whole process of delivery; from order confirmation, order delivery date, order tracking, order arrival and follow ups after order is delivered. Allow customers to a feedback channel where they can leave a testimonial, or resolving their issues before leaving you with a bad review.
Personalisation strategy is also crucial here because people like to be treated as individual, rather than the mass. Personalised tactics such as providing contents relevant to their purchase, customised promotions, or anything that your customer would be interested to receive based on their profiles or interests.
Leverage on Technology:
While it may seem challenging to personalise the engagement of your customers when the business grows, it is very much possible through the use of technology. As a digital agency, one of the Customer Engagement Automation platforms we always suggest to our customers is ActiveCampaign, which many companies have used, and has achieved ROI on their investment.
ActiveCampaign has also expanded their functionality with e-commerce in mind - allowing sellers to differentiate themselves by the unique experiences they can create throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Some of the key highlights include:
ActiveCampaign doubled its e-commerce automation recipes to 80, making it easier than ever for businesses to sell online. With these recipes, anyone, even those without technical expertise, can automate engaging campaigns that expand the entire customer experience; popular recipes include abandoned cart reminders, upsell recommendations, and requests for review.
New Pages enable e-commerce companies to spin up beautiful, on-brand landing pages for products or promotions, such as a Black Friday or Small Business Saturday campaign. This functionality also enables organizations to automatically create and tag new contacts in ActiveCampaign when users submit a form on those landing pages, and trigger automations based on visits to the page.
New Web Personalization enables companies to leverage the unique attributes of each customer to create a hyper-relevant website experience, increasing online purchase frequency and volume.
New Conversations integration with Facebook Messenger brings all Facebook Messenger messages to one unified inbox along with messages coming in across channels like email and SMS. With one inbox to manage, strapped teams can more easily respond to customer queries in an efficient and impactful manner.
Now the number one marketing automation integration in the Shopify app store based on customer reviews, ActiveCampaign boasts a 4.7 out of five-star rating, which points to the expertise small businesses receive when working with ActiveCampaign and Shopify together.