Businesses rise and fall through the support of their customer base. Consequently, it is absolutely essential that you develop effective eCommerce customer relations. Whichever field your business operates in, focusing on your customer is something that never gets enough.
After spending a lot of time and money on promotion & advertising to acquire new customers, you wouldn’t want them to purchase just 1 order without coming back. Store owners often encourage customers to buy more with up-sales & cross-sale campaigns. You also want to get the words out & acquire “$0 lead” via referral programs. Therefore, customer relation is a MUST-HAVE for any business to scale up.
Now, how to make your customer remember your name? Let’s look at it from another perspective: What does a customer appreciate most from you?
Personalized experience
Having customized conversations with customers can get you places. This requires making a great first impression on new customers, maintaining a strong connection with existing ones, and excellent customer service. It’s not a surprise to find out that achieving high visibility with your customers might be a rough road to navigate. As tricky as it might be, the customized and personalized experience will be an integral part to build trust.
Most eCommerce businesses rely heavily on their human resource department to engage with customers individually., But this can be an extremely costly and time-consuming option.
Automation, however, can be a great replacement for human effort. Here are some areas that your eCommerce business can implement personalized touches:
- Customer segmentation to segment customer based on specific behaviors or purchases
- Automated email sequences to engage with customers on a pre-set flow
Timely response
Your eCommerce business will see a huge improvement in customer satisfaction if you ensure timely responses to customers. Chatbots can be a great fit because they can act as a placeholder until a representative is available. They can also be customised to display frequently asked questions after their initial welcome message.
“Engaging’ is the keyword here.
If you want customers to feel the same interacting with a chatbot as they would with an actual customer service rep, then the interactions need to be seamless and helpful. Chatbots are great in theory, but they can be too robotic if they are not personalized to your eCommerce business.
Aside from chatbots, automated emails are another solution for speedy and timely responses. You can follow up with customers with personalized content, thanks to the data collected from their site activities. For example, auto-send a “thank-you” email once a customer completes an order or a “welcome” email whenever a new customer account is created, etc.
Loyalty programs, rewards & incentives
If customer satisfaction is the silver medal then customer retention is the gold to eCommerce customer relations! It’s important to make customers happy, but what really elevates the sustainability of your business is making your customers loyal.
One of the most popular & effective ways to create a loyalty program is based on customer total lifetime spending. Below is an example of how Atom8 helps BigCommerce merchants categorise & engage with specific groups of customers based on their total lifetime spending.
Key Takeaways
The tricks to build strong eCommerce customer relations are consistency and authenticity. It takes time and effort to create a customer base that is both consistent and authentic. The work that you put in now will pay off. Ensure that your customers are receiving the most personalized communication. Customize messages to be less robotic and impersonal by prompting questions that are realistic to an actual conversation. Show up for your customers by showing them that you truly focus on bringing value to them and appreciate their support and purchases at your store.
