Dotdigital blog

5 effective strategies to increase customer engagement for online retailers

Deliver an engaging customer experience by focusing your optimization efforts

The retail landscape has evolved massively: only a few years ago, retailers were producing a standardized product set for consumers who weren’t used to a large product range. But today’s retailer faces a consumer who is spoiled for choice, knows about the market’s transparency, and demands an excellent customer experience.

Power has shifted from the retailer to the consumer. Brands have to find ways to catch the attention of their target consumers, especially online, where competitors are only a click away. Engagement is key to transform them into loyal customers without loosing them on the way. Achieving this, though, is becoming more difficult in the ever-changing ecommerce landscape.

In this blog, we’re going to reveal five effective strategies to increase engagement and conversion. We’ll expand fully on one of them; if you’d like a breakdown of all five, download our partner ebook here.

1. Creating quality content at scale

Merge content and commerce to connect with your audience and boost sales. Contribution by Styla.

Promotions and discounting are an important part of the customer buying cycle, but most retailers agree that it’s becoming a race to the bottom. However, the alternative, creating high quality content at scale which engages and drives higher AOV and repeat purchases, can be a huge challenge. But it doesn’t have to be – here’s how to overcome the bottleneck of creating great content that converts.

With dwindling conversion rates, increased media spend, and new competition every day, the customer experience has become one of the most important features for brands and retailers. They key element of an extraordinary digital shopping experience is engaging content that creates brand recognition, brings value to the customer, and inspires them to buy.

Why?

Because your audience’s main exposure to your company is through the content you share. So, it’s no surprise that in 2018 more than half of B2C marketers have used content marketing successfully to create brand awareness, build credibility, educate audiences, foster loyalty with existing customers, and more (Content Marketing Institute, 2019).

So, why are some brands not building loads of engaging content? The answer is simple yet significant: because most brands do not have the right content production process in place.

Simplify the content production process

Historically, ecommerce platforms have had very limited content creation capabilities. Plus, all the pages across the website would usually need to be built by a developer, which would’ve been prohibitive if you had a small team or didn’t have a lot of resources to spend with your agency.

Even brands with larger development teams and big budgets struggle to build enough content to keep up with the appetite for today’s consumers.

A study by Accenture shows that two-thirds of content executives feel burdened by content production. Two-thirds of content executives feel burdened by content production and even less prepared to manage enormous amounts of content than in previous years (Accenture, 2017).

So, to create high-quality content at scale, the production process needs to be as short and simple as possible. This means reducing manual work across departments and utilizing technology at scale.

Don’t have your creative team spend days with the production of pixel-perfect layouts for all devices, or your IT team building them. Use automation technology to make these processes quicker and easier.

With a no-code content management solution in place, digital content experiences can be built with a few clicks and automatically optimized for all different devices. All without any IT effort. So, implementing the right technology simplifies the content creation process and makes it scalable.

How Holland & Barrett overcame the content creation bottleneck

Health and beauty brand Holland & Barrett has over 1,300 stores where all staff have gone on extensive product training to make sure they can help customers find the best products for their specific needs. Holland & Barrett understood that to create this superb in-store experience, they needed to provide rich content on their site that educates the consumer about their products in a fun way.

The challenge they faced was their content creation bottleneck; even though they have a large team of developers they could not produce enough content efficiently due to limitations in their tech ecosystems. While they wanted to be able to produce landing pages weekly, they were only able to create one landing page every six weeks.

By implementing Styla’s Content Experience Engine within 10 days, Holland & Barrett has now managed to increase content production by 90%, while decreasing production costs by 85%. The team can now easily create custom landing pages that inform customers and inspire them to buy with confidence.

Checklist for converting content

Keep the shopping cart close

When building rich, editorial pages for your shop, make sure the shopping cart is integrated into the assets, so customers can buy directly from the experience and not get redirected.

Variety is the spice of life

Create a range of different content types for different stages of the customer journey:

Personalized content on the homepage
Bespoke campaign pages
Enhanced category pages with content
Enriched product detail pages

Use data to inform content strategy

Look at Google Analytics to see what customers are searching for on your site. You can also use it to identify popular search terms or questions that could inform what type of content will have the biggest impact.

The welcome party

Use social and email marketing to engage an audience in a more personal way and get them to your site. Make sure to drive the traffic to custom campaign pages rather than the homepage or generic category pages to ensure more conversions.

Final thoughts

Creating meaningful content is not an option anymore but every brand’s responsibility. Consumers have an insatiable appetite for relevant content and this is an area where the most competitive brands are innovating to fulfill consumers’ demands. Keeping up with them is vital and manageable if you have an optimized content production process and the right tools in place.