It’s never been more important to know your online customers better. It’s the age of personalization. Consumers expect brands to know exactly what they want and offer an experience relevant to them.
For eCommerce brands, despite having so many channels to connect with customers, getting to know them is getting tougher.
Moreover, as the number of online brands increase, so do the number of sites customers shop from. And with that, customers are getting more and more skeptical about sharing information with brands.
So, how do you understand customers in this tough environment? We tell you how, in this blog.
How to get to know your customers better
Encourage customers to sign up for a customer account
This is perhaps the best way to get to know your customers. The customer account page is where your customers’ personal details are stored – name, address, birthdate, etc.
This is also the page which gives you an overview of the customers’ buying patterns – what they bought when, how much they spent, items they are interested in, items in their wishlist, etc.
The customer account is also customers’ go-to place when they have a complaint or in case of returns and exchanges. No matter where they are in the eCommerce customer journey on your site, encourage them to sign up for a customer account.
Here are some more benefits of getting customers to sign up:
- It gives you an opportunity to collect customer data
- Enables high personalization, which helps your customers to find products they like faster (91% of customers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant recommendations – Accenture study)
- It makes your Shopify store more accessible to your customers
Now, let’s look at some examples of how you can use information from the customer account to send targeted marketing messages.
An example of a push notification:
An email example:
Request customer feedback
Are you a brand that just speaks to customers? Or are you a brand that gives voice to your customers? We’re talking about customer feedback here.
It is impossible to grow an eCommerce business without customer feedback. Brick-and-mortar stores can easily gather customer feedback face-to-face. But what about eCommerce stores? The only way you can know what your customers feel about your store is if you request them for feedback.
Collecting customer feedback helps:
- Measure customer satisfaction
- Improve products and services
- Create relevant and targeted content
Here’s what you can easily do to request customers for feedback:
- Reach out to customers at every touchpoint in their eCommerce customer journey
- Ask them about their experience, whether it was a purchase, customer service, or an issue resolution
- Ask them how you can make their experience better the next time
- Make them feel like they have a say and are a part of your brand
- Let them know that you will address their feedback (70% of consumers have changed their perception of a brand based on how the brand responded to their online reviews – Bazaarvoice report)
Some examples of how you can request for feedback:
Send an SMS after their purchase:
Send an email:
Double down on your customer support
Companies in the US lost, on average, $62 million because of bad customer service. On the contrary, an increase in customer service helped them earn $823 million in revenue over three years.
Today’s customers don’t care about discounts and low prices as much as they care about buying a product from a company that offers good customer service.
People don’t buy products. They buy the experience of buying a product. They buy a product from you because of the way you make them feel. And that brings us to the need for providing good customer support.
Here’s how customer support can make a difference to your Shopify store:
- Customer service impacts purchase decisions (84% of customers say customer service helps them decide whether or not to buy a product – Zendesk)
- Customer support is important to enhance brand loyalty
- 75% of customers prefer a human experience (PWC)
- You get to understand your customers better
For example, a customer is browsing products on your site. But seems to be lost or confused and unable to make up their mind. In this situation, if you just let them be on their own, they might soon leave your site. But, what if you engaged them over a chat? What if you offered to help them find what they’d like?
And how do you engage a customer on your online store? Through live chat.
When you engage a customer in a conversation, there are many things you can do to nudge them to buy a product. For example,
- Recommend products to them
- Ask them a few questions about what they’re looking for
- Explain to them the product features
- Entice them to buy a product by offering a discount
- Tell them how the product can make their life better
- Get to know more about their likes and dislikes
By doing the above, you will get to know more about your customers. Once you build a rapport and grow their trust in your brand, you will be able to nurture a long term relationship.
And when you increase your customer retention rate by just 5%, you can increase your profits by between 25% to 95%!
Here’s an example of live chat:
Here’s how Sephora offers live chat across channels:
Dig deep into customer analytics
Everything that happens on your website and all your marketing efforts have some sort of customer analytics potential. The question is, are you collecting that data?
- What are customers doing on your site?
- Which products are they exploring?
- How much time are they spending on what?
- Are they adding items to their cart and abandoning it?
- Why are they not buying it?
- What are they buying?
- Their past orders
- The discounts they availed
- The months or time period in which they tend to buy more
These are just the basic metrics that can help you understand your customer better. The only way to understand your customers better is to dig deeper.
Once you collect data and analyze it, you can start making informed decisions – what’s working on your site and what isn’t? How can you personalize your customers’ experience based on the data?
Customers’ preferences keep changing. And so, you have to keep collecting data and apply analytics through their eCommerce customer journey.
The key question – as a Shopify store and a marketer, are you curious enough to know your customers?
Start conversations, keep communication consistent
Your potential customers won’t just land on your site. You’ll have to meet them where they are and draw them in through customer engagement strategies.
Social listening, paid ads, customer reviews, sharing user-generated content, asking questions and responding on social forums – these are all ways in which you can spark a dialogue with your potential customers.
By learning where your customers are most active, you will be able to create an opportunity of creating a dialogue with them. You will also gain an understanding of how they connect with other brands and products.
All these will help you provide an authentic and relevant experience to your customers. And 90% of customers prefer brands that are authentic.
So, instead of being salesy all the time, make sure you engage with your potential customers beyond commerce.
- Ask the right questions
- Listen to them
- Respond to their queries
- Address their problems
Create a plan for customer engagement
Okay, so you want to enhance customer engagement on your Shopify store. Good decision! But have you planned how you’re going to do it? Unless you plan, you won’t know what exactly you want to do.
Here are some cues for planning customer engagement strategies:
- Get your Shopify customer account page in place. Motivate shoppers to register no matter at what point they are in their eCommerce customer journey
- Create a comprehensive customer account page. Features such as wishlist, recently viewed products, history, loyalty program can help you gain more insights on your customers
- Create engagement strategies for all the features present in your customer account
- Look at market trends and see what other brands in your sector are doing and what you can learn from them
- Plan engagement at every touchpoint, across channels, and throughout the customer journey
- Get analytics across touchpoints and channels
Over to you
All eCommerce marketers know this – the one who personalizes is the one who wins! But most eCommerce stores find it hard to know how to understand customers.
You can take the first step towards understanding your customers better with the help of Flits. The Shopify app is designed to provide the best customer account page experience with multiple add-on features, all of which, when used intelligently, can offer invaluable customer insights.