Customer Engagement Is the Key to Online Store Success
Is your online store losing customers to competitors? The solution may be in your customer engagement strategy. Online customer engagement is all about omni-channel access and dynamic adaptation to changing trends.
What this means is that your company needs to engage customers across all platforms where they gather, including social media, mobile devices and blogs, not just through your e-commerce website. It’s all about visibility, because when your brand is always visible, potential customers will have the opportunity to interact with your store.
An effective online customer engagement strategy should be flexible to adapt to new technologies and trends. This will help prevent customer erosion when new software or devices enter the market. In short, customer engagement is all about making sure that your customers never lose sight of your brand online, and that regardless of how the market changes, that it will deliver the brand promise across any platform.
Consider this simple example. Let’s say that your company has invested a substantial amount of time and resources on a well developed e-commerce website. For the past few years, the site has worked well, and generated plenty of sales. However, all this changed a couple of months ago when the site began to lose a substantial amount of traffic. You later discover that the reason this happened was because of a new mobile device that became popular with many of your customers, and only those companies which actively engaged their customers on that new device were able to maintain a substantial proportion of their online sales.
Now, in a scenario like this, the problem is quite obvious. Because our hypothetical company’s online customer engagement model was unable to adapt to new factors (in this case, a new mobile device), it lost some of its paying customers. Therefore, in order to keep engaging an online audience, your company must not rely on any single device or site to engage its clients. Relying on one single platform causes inflexibility creating vulnerabilities to unpredictable market changes.
Furthermore, your customer engagement strategy must also continuously expand to incorporate multiple platforms in order to adapt to a rapidly changing market, so that when something new comes along, it will be able to retain most of its customers.
What you have to know about online customer engagement is that it’s a constantly evolving process that involves multiple platforms and mediums. There’s no such thing as a fixed system for engaging customers online, and this is because the internet, as well as most electronic and mobile devices, are constantly changing. Sites, apps, software and devices which are widely used today may be obsolete tomorrow, which means your company’s customer engagement model must always be prepared to adapt whenever such changes occur. So, if your company is keen on keeping or expanding its market share then it will need to maintain a responsive e-commerce website with a flexible and future-oriented customer engagement strategy.
