A hyper-competitive market with mounting customer expectations makes it increasingly challenging for your ecommerce business to stand out. In 2022, ecommerce is expected to generate $5.42 trillion in sales. While ecommerce businesses may be on the rise, surprisingly only 2.86% of ecommerce website visits convert into a purchase. This is because of a surplus of choices in the online retail space and an ever-increasing attention recession amongst shoppers.
As the world shifts in favor of ecommerce businesses, brands must constantly innovate to keep up with their customers’ changing online preferences. To win and retain customers, your brand needs a stellar Customer Engagement strategy that focuses on reaching your customers at relevant touchpoints with communication that matters. To compete with the influx of brands in the market, it is critical for your business to create meaningful connections with customers. This can be achieved by offering personalized omnichannel engagement, which is possible only by deploying a dynamic CEE platform.
- Rapid digital adoption has made shopping behaviors volatile. With a myriad of brands and ecommerce platforms to choose from, a McKinsey report showed that 76% of shoppers defect to brands that offer relevant and personalized interactions.
- The ecommerce industry experienced unprecedented digital transformation in the last 2 years due to the COVID 19 pandemic. So technologies like AI-powered personalization, product recommendations and actionable analytics have now become key to creating customer experiences that drive brand loyalty.
Now, more than ever, it makes sense for ecommerce brands to automate their Customer Engagement and Experience.
In a bid to increase customer retention, online retailers and ecommerce brands are turning to data-driven and ROI-focused Digital Experience solutions to provide personalized digital experiences at scale.
Given the changing ecommerce landscape, a digital experience platform can help boost your CLV and drive conversions for your business. But before you adopt a platform, we bring you some common challenges you need to look out for when selecting a CEE solution.
Make an informed decision while evaluating a digital experience platform
Since we have identified that customer engagement is imperative for boosting sales and the CLV for your ecommerce brand, the next logical step is to assess your engagement strategy and evaluate a digital experience platform that would help you achieve your goals.
Though a simple proposition, finding a digital experience platform suited for your business requires a critical evaluation of different solutions. The most popular customer engagement platform providers can seem attractive due to their extensive features, but in practice, they can often be restrictive to your strategy implementation.
The questions you need to ask when navigating a customer engagement platform are:
- Does the solution have AI?
- Is the platform intuitive?
- Can it provide experiences at scale?
You can only reap the benefits of a Customer Engagement solution with an outstanding customer engagement campaign strategy. So, how do you go about setting the campaigns? You can follow this 3-step process before setting up a campaign.
Identify the right customers to target
To scale your sales and revenue you need to reach your customers at a time that counts and at places they seek. Running targeted campaigns should be at the foreground of your Customer Engagement strategy.
The ideal customer experience solution should facilitate exactly that. Identifying and subsequently creating segments should be simplified by your customer engagement platform.
But that is often not the case. Creating segments manually can be time-consuming. Besides, how do you ascertain that the segments created are ROI-optimized?
To overcome this, you need to be able to create no-code segments instantly and accurately.
That’s where Predictive Segmentation can help you.
Predictive Segmentation can build unlimited segments based on user events or historical or real-time user data.
With this feature you can identify customer segments that are likely to:
- engage with your campaign
- purchase in the next 7 days
- convert through cross-selling campaigns
- go dormant on your mobile app and/or website
- uninstall your app
With the AI-powered smart segments, all you need to do now is choose the customer segment and send targeted personalized marketing campaigns across the right channels or through customized user journeys based on your customers’ behavior.
With accurate insights on the potential actions of your customer base, the probability of you engaging with the most relevant customers increases manifold – thus, ensuring guaranteed conversions.
Once you know who to target, your focus will shift to making your strategy more ROI-focused. Which raises the question: What’s the most efficient way of ensuring this?
That brings us to our second step:
Select the right channel to engage with these customer segments
Campaign optimization is the next step to drive impactful engagement and conversions with your targeted customers.
Once you have unlocked Smart Customer Segmentation, you need to identify the best channels to engage with these customer segments. To maximize ROI, an omnichannel-focused engagement strategy is essential.
An efficient customer engagement platform would empower you to leverage a host of channels such as email, WhatsApp notifications, app push notifications, web push notifications, AMP for email, etc. While many platforms do claim to provide the option to create an omnichannel marketing journey for your customers, deliverability comes in the way of campaign performance.
Additionally, with increasing demand for personalization, missing out on the nano-segments within each segment can mean the difference between winning a customer for life or a casual viewer. 72% of consumers have reported only responding to personalized messaging, So picking up on nuanced behaviors that your customers display in terms of their interaction, is important.
It simply isn’t enough to communicate a sale via email. You must ensure you reach your customer during their coffee break with a notification on a price drop on a wishlisted item they can’t help clicking on.
Send Time Optimization and Preferred Channel feature can help you achieve this.
Take a peek into how Raman’s Send Time Optimization works:
A perfectly timed check-in is a solid start, but to capture your customer’s attention it’s fundamental that your messaging is flawless.
For your communication to land and stay with your customer, messaging aside, tone and language insights can help add value to the customer’s experience. Reaching customers with relevant and appropriate web messages or in-app messages, delivered and altered to their behaviors and preferences will achieve the dual goal of driving sales and boosting CLV.
Whether it be an e-mail or a push notification, a relevant title plays a huge role in your campaign’s success. But doing this manually, for several segments can be an arduous task. So, to take out the grunt work, Subject Line Optimization is the perfect solution.
Subject Line Optimization generates the following insights:
- Title score
- Predictions on the probability of customers clicking
- Suggestions on high-conversion keywords and titles
Try it for yourself and witness Raman’s campaign title optimization in real-time.
With these two features, you can create impactful marketing campaigns while uplifting your marketing ROI. While these are the essentials to planning high-impact campaigns, we come to the final point.
Track the performance of your campaign
As a smart marketer, you understand the importance of campaign performance data. In delivering a thorough and personalized engagement to your customers, it is crucial to draw actionable insights based on your customers’ interactions. To do this, you need a 360-degree view of your customers, containing all the relevant, rich, and real-time data on individual customer profiles. To streamline this process there are 3-simple questions that must be answered:
- What happened with my campaign?
- Why is it happening?
- What can I do next?
A state-of-the-art customer engagement platform comes equipped with a campaign performance tracker that:
- Keeps a close watch on your data 24*7 and observes patterns, trends, and abnormalities.
- Raises contextual alerts when an abnormality – good or bad – is detected
A continuous watch on your campaign performance data equips you with the most current insights every day. You can then zero in on the insight you want to act on to optimize your campaigns further.
As a marketer, your time is precious and most definitely shouldn’t be spent grappling with data. Your focus should be on the greater things at hand. So for you to create more bandwidth to craft, strategize, and execute powerful omnichannel marketing campaigns, you need a customer experience platform that works as hard as you. You need a personalization platform that can deliver personalized customer experiences at scale– consistently and at an optimum cost.
The right digital experience platform can make analyzing your campaigns to identify what went wrong or right and why less time-consuming. And to make the evaluation easy, read our E-book ‘7 Half-truths your Digital Experience Platform Provider told you’ to find out what makes a Digital Experience Platform exceptional and the common blindspots you need to avoid when choosing one.
Working with Netcore Cloud, repeat sales, increased AOV, improved CLTV, increased ROI, effective customer engagement, and sky-rocketing customer retention would be a daily reality for your business. Sign up for a customer engagement demo today.
