COLUMBUSCAST: Improving customer engagement in the commerce space

In this episode of ColumbusCast, our Customer Experience Specialist Steve Lyon joins Anders Östlund, Growth Lead in the Digital Commerce team, and Fredrik Andersson, Head of User Experience. They discuss how businesses interact with customers through digital channels, and how you can improve your customer engagement within the commerce space.

What is customer engagement, and why is it important?

Customer engagement involves influencing your customers to get their attention, retain their attention, and participate with your brand to become an advocate. If you’re successful at engaging your customers, this’ll lead to several benefits such as:

• Increased loyalty – customers who receive great experiences are more likely to return to your brand
• The potential to attract new customers – keeping customers engaged leads to positive word of mouth, which’ll not only increase retention but draw new customers towards your brand
• Better conversion rates – Anders mentions that repeat customers are nine times more likely to convert towards additional offers than the first-time shopper, increasing the amount of repeat purchases

How can you improve your customer engagement?

• Develop a partnership with another business - this provides new opportunities to enhance your customer journey and can offer your business a better understanding of the areas where you need to boost engagement
• Live chats on your website –  41% of consumers say they are more likely to trust a brand if live chat is available on their site. Connecting with your customers with human interactions rather than robotic ones helps build confidence in your brand, increasing the chances of them revealing information about themselves. This data can then be used to offer personalised recommendations

• Live streaming – by engaging with your audience via streaming sites such as YouTube, you can develop your brand personality. For example, you could host a live Q&A where customers can respond in real-time about your upcoming events or launches

How can collecting data help you improve your customer journey?

In the commerce space, Steve mentions although there’re so many areas where you can improve your customer engagement, the data you collect can be just as important. For example, as you’ll retrieve large amounts of qualitative and quantitative data from tactics such as live chats, this can help you pinpoint issues with your customer engagement strategy so you can make better informed decisions from this.

Additionally, collecting data allows you to see where your customers are throughout specific parts of the journey. With this, you can create alignment with your content and their buying stage, meaning you can send targeted information at the right place, at the right time.

What are the main challenges with customer journey mapping?

• Customer journeys are forever changing -with the pandemic, for example, your customer journey is likely to have changed due to the evolvement of commerce platforms. Therefore, to keep engagement high, you must update your mapping process regularly so you can keep on top of changes in the market

• It’s easy for customers to switch to competitors – due to the amount of noise from all industries across digital platforms, it’s become much harder to retain customers. To prevent this, Anders mentions the importance of having always-on campaigns and how you should be present for your customers at all times, allowing you to captivate your audience for longer periods of time
• There’re always new channels released to engage with your customers – it’s not enough to be present on just one platform such as email or social media. Instead, focus on being active through multiple channels so you can maintain engagement towards your brand on a broader scale

How can you measure the success of your customer journey?

For every business, different metrics and KPIs will be more relevant than others depending on the customer journey. For example, when you’re setting goals about driving traffic to your site, relevant metrics could be bounce rates and the number of page views, indicating how effective your website or product is at gaining attention. However, the metrics change when you’re looking to re-engage customers.

What can you do to re-engage your customers?

One way to re-engage your customer base is through win-back campaigns. When a customer hasn’t logged into their account for some time, you could send out push notifications as a reminder or set up an email campaign with exclusive offers and news.

Personalisation shouldn’t just be for win-back campaigns when looking to re-engage your customers. Other examples include:

• Loyalty schemes to encourage repeat purchasing
• Segmenting product recommendations based on similar customer data
• Using their name when sending out marketing material

You can find out more about the power of personalisation here.

Learn more about how you can improve customer engagement strategies in commerce

Tune in to our podcast by scrolling to the top or by searching ‘ColumbusCast’ in your podcast app so you can find out:

• The distinction between customer engagement and customer experience
• More ways to improve your customer journey mapping
• How Columbus has helped customers introduce personalisation with their engagement strategies

Finished the episode? Find out how Columbus can assist in mapping out your customer journey in our infographic and learn about our Catalyst Workshop, helping you to:

• Define your pain points
• Explore your current opportunities
• Create a blueprint for success based on your desired outcomes

Get your copy below.