How to Increase Engagement at your Online E-commerce Store
Are you getting visitors to your e-commerce store? You don’t just want visitors though; you want to convert them into customers. There are a few solid ways to keep visitors interested and engaged in your shop.
Avoid Static Content
Take advantage of current technology and keep your store fresh with a variable mix of formats that go beyond pages of still photos.
One simple way is to use flippable animated pages, to produce the effect that your readers are literally browsing through a catalog page-by-page. You can find out more on how to make page-turning documents at The Flipbook Hub.
Video is another way to keep readers interested and engaged. Most shop platforms will allow you to embed video along with still photos for your products, and it’s a feature you should take advantage of. Seeing a person using the product or being able to see it at work can be a huge influence on a potential buyer.
Include Reviews
Being able to read what other customers have said about your products is a sure-fire way to encourage someone to buy. Adding customer reviews also increases the copy on any given page, usually making your product pages more SEO favorable as new reviews also keep your content changing and updated.
Bad reviews? Obviously you don’t too many of those but you can even turn a few to your advantage by showing off how politely and quickly you worked to resolve the problem.
While not strictly reviews, you can also use this idea by allowing comments on your product pages. You’ll have to moderate a little but it’s a great way to allow user input and to show your customer service skills.
Detailed Search Options
Don’t lose customers by having weak searching services. Even a perfectly designed site with clear categories and grouped pages can lose people who simply want to go directly to what they want in one step. They don’t bother navigating; they just want to go straight there.
While a standard search box is fine, you can also broaden the feature to allow for meaningful autocorrect options to display as they type. You’ll have to check with the shop platform you are using to see how to activate or develop this. It’s worth looking into though. If you simply take their search terms as-is, they may not get the best results. Show them options as they type, and they can see that perhaps they are not looking in quite the right direction and can adjust their terms.
Your results should be filterable as well. Sorting by price or popularity can help your customers find exactly what they want quickly. That keeps them browsing and hopefully making purchases.
Use Social Media
Using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are great ways to let people know about your store and your products, but these can also help people stay interested and connected once they are there.
Buttons to like, share or post your pages are great to build added exposure while your visitors enjoy being able to show interesting things to their friends. Keep people connected by letting them follow you through various sites so they don’t forget about your store later.
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