The 3 Points of Customer Engagement That Yield the Most Conversions

An online business is made up of many moving pieces. Owners will have to juggle stock management, marketing, traffic acquisition, site design, shipping solutions and much more. All of these elements come together and keep an ecommerce business running, but it is the conversion process that delivers the fuel to the engine, and more specifically, it is the final step of this process that carries the most weight.

Cart abandonment is the leading cause of low conversion rates, and as such, it warrants much attention. In fact, each year, as the volume of online sales grows, so does the volume of cart abandonments. This is why it’s important to target this specific area of the conversion process. Here are 3 crucial points of customer engagement that will encourage lower cart abandonment rates.

1. On-site engagement

If a customer visits your site, browses your catalog, and adds items to your cart, he is clearly interested in shopping. Each one of these points are ripe for engagement. What’s the best method for on-site engagement? Popups. By using popups, you can target bottlenecks in your conversion process and help customers along their path to a purchase. The key balancing act here is to provide popups that act as a service courtesy and not as a nuisance.

2. Cross-device engagement

This is an often overlooked aspect of customer activity: some customers might want to add items to their shopping cart on their laptop and approve the shopping cart on their smartphone, or vice versa. To address this need, it’s good to add the option of emailing a shopping cart, and provide a persistent cart link. This feature is particularly important for businesses that have a longer sales cycle. In fact, it might be essential for a customer to be able to save his purchasing preferences. In both cases, the ability to save a shopping cart, and share it across devices, can improve your conversion rate.

3. Off-site engagement

Retargeting efforts using emails have been shown to deliver results over and over again. With the adequate metrics, you can gather enough data to know where a majority of customers abandon the purchase, and analyze it in order to tailor a marketing message that will reengage them. Email can also be used to upsell, cross-sell and encourage more purchases in general. Once you have a customer’s item browsing and purchasing history, you can send him special offers based on the category of products that he prefers.

Addressing these three engagement points, and implementing strategies to engage the customer along the way, has been shown to increase daily sales by 25% or more. The important thing to keep in mind is that you must gather data, analyze it, implement solutions, and review the results.

For more information on how to best take advantage of crucial engagement points for an effective sales conversion strategy, or to sign up for a merchant account, please call (888) 924-2743 or go to Charge.com.