5 Efficient Ways to Engage Your Website Visitors

There was a time when creating amazing products is everything for a business. Still part true today since good products always sell themselves. However, long gone are the simple days of throwing the bait and sitting aside to wait for the fish. In the modern ecommerce world, you have to be a lot more proactive to fight for a seat.

A ‘read-only’ website in today’s market puts you at risk of alienating people (i.e. potential customers) and losing their interests. In order to engage your site visitors, you need to provide a channel for people to connect with you first. Below are 5 most common while efficient ways you may take advantage of.

• Add a live chat box. The magic of live chat is no longer a secret. Researches from this year have shown that up to 20% online shoppers in the US and UK prefer using live chat to contact a retailer rather than any other communication channel. And according to our experience here in Comm100, an average increase of 15%~20% in sales can be made with a proper deployed live chat button. However, figures from EG’s 12th Annual Mystery Shopping Study has also pointed out that only 47% of online merchants are currently supporting live chat, which means it’s right the time to move off the needle and be one step ahead of your competitors.

• Be brave to send a chat invitation. Will a pop-up chat invitation window scare off your visitors? Not really if you follow the rules to play the trick. Probably to your surprise, we’re approaching an age in which over 75% of regular online shoppers have engaged in a live chat conversation before and found it satisfying. Live chat has indeed become as common as a sales person standing in a brick-and-mortar shop in most people’s eyes. So why be afraid of greeting your customers? Smile and say ‘hello’ with your best sales etiquette.

• Make regular contacts through email. On-site communication is important in engaging site visitors but obviously should not be the only way. Regular follow-ups after the visitors left your site are even more important when it comes to building up relationships. Studies have revealed that it takes 7 to 16 ‘touches’ to ensure a stable business relationship and more than 80% of online sales are actually made after 5 to 6 contacts. Email is a wise choice for making this kind of contact. It can help you build up long-term relationships with your target audiences and improve mutual trust between both parties. Manually composed emails are sweet signs to show your care for the receivers, while auto replies and email newsletters can be as effective with various business goals like sales promotion or customer education.

• Become a social media fan. It should be no surprise for me to include social media here. With the born of Facebook and Twitter, ‘social media’ has been the word that’s taking over people’s attention for quite a while. Average people now use these platforms as a window to see the part of world that they’re interested in, while businesses and marketers use them to keep track of sales and marketing opportunities. A Facebook account can probably be the first thing your customers think of when they’re trying to know more about you, which makes it a priority to work hard on your social media images.

• Learn to use site analytics tools. Running a business is more science than art these days, and this is particularly true with ecommerce. Like it or not, learning to handle with the site analytics tools and gaining access to all those figures & data has become a must. Google Analytics is a good choice to start with. Integrate it to find out which keywords are the most likely to develop engagement.

Guest post contributed by Kevin Gao who is the founder and CEO of Comm100 Live Chat (http://livechat.comm100.com/), a leading provider of live chat software for business. As a software developer as well as a small business expert, he’s always ambitious to revolutionize the way of online customer service and communication. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn to find out more about him.

Further Reading

• Top 3 Tips to Make Your Website Really Sell
• 4 Tech Tips for Small Business Owners
• Tips For Improving Your Website
• Using Social Media to Market your Business
• 5 Ways to Keep Your E-commerce Site Fresh and Fun
• Is it Becoming More Difficult for New Businesses to Succeed Online?
• Dos and Don’ts in e-Commerce Website Designing