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Got a sharply designed eCommerce store? Awesome. However, your work isn’t finished yet.

Why?

It doesn’t matter how pretty your website is if you aren’t holding onto customers.

Brands with the greatest customer engagement grab consumers attention so that they keep on coming back to purchase more products. Using the correct customer engagement strategies improves loyalty and helps retain customers.

In this article, we take a look at 4 strategies to create loyal eCommerce customers.

Maintain Excellent Customer Service

In 2018, there are certain features that your customers expect from you – and excellent customer service is one of these.

Put yourself in a customer’s shoes: If a store treats you brilliantly, answers your questions quickly, solves your problems and gives you what you want, you’re going to feel pretty darn positive about that store.

So positive, in fact, that you’ll probably want to shop there again, and even perhaps recommend it to a friend.

One of the best ways to improve your customer service is to install a live chat feature in the form of a chatbot. Chatbots can do many things you can’t always do. They can:

• Respond fast to your customers
• Personalize the customer’s shopping experience and make accurate recommendations (a chatbot uses AI to know more about a customer based on their past purchases and browsing history)
• Provide satisfactory and detailed answers

Because chatbots are available around the clock, your store becomes more accessible to customers around the clock. This is important when you consider that customers expect you to have answered their query within an hour.

As well as implementing chatbots, be more active on social media. If someone is asking questions or raising concerns, meet them where they are; interact with them and show them that you care.

Focus Energy on your Brand

If we can identify with a brand, and if we can see our own values represented in a brand’s values, it’s very unlikely that we’ll even glance at the competition, let alone try it.

Brand identification is key to retaining customers, with a study last year showing how important it is that a brand shares the same beliefs and values as their customers.

Moreover, according to another study, stores who put a lot of time into building a meaningful connection with their customers perform better than those who don’t.

According to the same study, 74% of people wouldn’t miss you if you disappeared. Why? Well, you hadn’t worked on crafting a memorable brand that people relate to and identify with.

Here are some tips to help you with your branding:

• Create a logo – It all starts with a logo, which is your brand’s visual identity. A logo must represent who you are, and you need to plaster it everywhere, from your website to your social media profiles to your emails
• Identify your purpose – What are you here for? What promises are you making to people? Once you know your purpose, it will then inform the way you brand your store
• Be consistent – Colours, fonts, images, and content need to be consistent so that people begin to familiarise themselves with you and so that they get a feel for who you are
• Create a narrative – All good companies have a story that they tell so as to earn the trust and loyalty of their customers through empathy. What will yours be?

If you find these tips overwhelming and don’t know where to get started – don’t shy away from outsourcing the work to experts who can really help excel in the growth of your brand.

Make the Buying Process as Quick and Simple as Possible

Shoppers are busy people, and they’ve grown accustomed to a super simple, hassle-free buying process.

Amazon holds a lot of responsibility for this. They realized that a great way to improve conversions was to add a one-click buying process. It makes the buyer’s journey simple.

Simplicity isn’t just key to instant conversions – it’s also key to long-term loyalty. If you can make this really easy for your customers, they will want to return again and again.

To this end, it’s a really good idea to add a Point of Sales card reader to your store. This allows you to sell anywhere, and it also allows the customer to buy anywhere and at any time – be it offline or online. Customers want these options. They want to be able to browse and shop anywhere at any time, and they want their data to be the same on all devices.

The POS card reader also protects your customers, which is awesome for building trust and more loyalty.

Not just this, but the card reader also stores your customers’ data so that it can personalize their future shopping experience, allowing you to recommend them more of what they want and less of what they don’t want. Again, this is perfect for building customer loyalty.

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