How many times have you added an item to your shopping cart only to slam your computer shut in disgust at the sight of the shipping charge at the checkout? Okay, maybe it wasn’t even that high. Maybe it was just your standard $3.99 shipping and handling fee. Even then!
Living in the age of Amazon Prime and two-day shipping has set the bar impossibly high for all online retailers. While giants like Walmart can adapt their own business models to get a leg up on Amazon, most smaller to mid-sized businesses simply can’t compete in the same way. Fear not, there are other ways to build out your consumer engagement strategy that don’t involve two-day, free shipping!
Personalized Touchpoints
80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand if they provide a personalized experience. Online customers willingly offer up kernels of personal data at every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey. In exchange for that information, they expect a customized user experience that is aligned with their interests and behaviors. Personalized messaging, product recommendations, and onsite engagement tools make this a simple and cost effective way for retailers to stay on the consumer’s good side. Even if a consumer leaves your site, you have an opportunity to re-engage them with retargeting ads personalized to the products they last viewed.
Consistent Brand Experience
There’s no quicker way to destroy the foundations of customer loyalty than to provide an inconsistent customer experience across channels. When customers interact with companies –whether in person, online, or on the phone – they want an effortless experience. They expect an easy way to voice their concerns, full cooperation and empathy from company representatives, and transparency about the next steps the company will take to rectify the problem.
While a good customer experience doesn’t automatically motivate a consumer to evangelize a company, a bad customer experience can be devastating. An average of 86% of unhappy customers will stop supporting a business and will share their bad experience with an average of 15 people. Monitoring the user experience at all touchpoints can prevent the spread of negative reviews. It also provides the insights necessary to prevent the issues that lead to the bad customer experience from occurring in the future.
Customer Loyalty Incentives
Above all, your customers want value. While you can’t offer that free 2-day shipping, you can make your customers feel like VIPs in other ways. Cybba’s email remarketing solution helps capture and convert customers who express interest in your products by emailing promotions on previously viewed items. Consumers who abandon their shopping cart are 30% more likely to complete their purchase when served a personalized and branded email with a discount.
Another highly effective consumer engagement tactic is to include free samples with a purchase. The addition of a free sample makes the customer feel important and promotes new products at a relatively low cost to the business. There is an additional opportunity to delight customers when insights about consumer preferences are used to determine which samples are distributed. By gifting a product that you know your customer will enjoy, you bring your personalization strategy to the next level and inch closer to achieving brand loyalty.
Cybba helps companies increase revenue and lower the cost of acquisition, all while optimizing every stage of the customer journey to create a personalized and seamless online shopping experience. To learn more about developing a cost-effective consumer engagement strategy, contact info@cybba.com.
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