Owners of Magento web stores seek virtual dialogue with customers to discover their pain points, assist them in making purchasing decisions, promote products and, consequently, provide a solid basis for their ongoing loyalty. So, efficient communication become one of the puzzle pieces in a complex picture of ecommerce success. An open-source nature of Magento allows for freedom in offering multiple communication channels. In this article, we aim to address two questions: what options to stay in touch with customers online merchants have and how to implement them in a Magento e-shop.
Live chat
Switching between web stores takes a few seconds, so the failure to solve customers’ issues promptly results in losing them. Live chat is an excellent opportunity for a support team to instantly see a customer’s request for help and give him or her a hand. Offering this option, merchants win as the overwhelming majority of online shoppers (92%) prefer it to other ecommerce communication channels.
Live chat is super effective both for online entrepreneurs and their customers. The former discover customer pain points and earn their trust by constantly improving their shopping experience. The latter have a contact form at hand on any page and don’t interrupt their shopping journey searching for it.
Owning a Magento web store means having access to a range of ready-made live chat solutions on Magento Marketplace. For example, LiveChat has a built-in ticketing feature and mobile apps for iOS and Android to keep a customer support team informed when offline. HelpCrunch Livechat mirrors chatting in WhatsApp, Viber or Facebook Messenger. It features emojis and stickers, enables file sharing, and shows when a member of the support team is typing to prevent a customer from leaving.
Emailing is an efficient communication tool as it gives online sellers the power of highly-targeted appeal to their customers, thus helping greatly in building their loyalty. Around 80% of retailers surveyed by WBR Digital, a content and demand generation services provider, admit that email marketing is their greatest driver of customer retention.
Let’s look at several email types and see how email marketing help communicating with customers in an ecommerce business:
- Welcome emails greet new customers and instantly direct them to shopping with a clear call to action.
- The announcement of new offerings engages existing customers or subscribed visitors.
- Shopping cart abandonment emails keep in touch with customers who abandoned the shopping process at the checkout.
- Upsell and cross-sell emails personalize communication with customers and please them with relevant offers.
- Back-in-stock emails give a priority access to products that become available for purchase.
- Win-back emails get to at-risk customers and try to return them back to the store with special offers, discounts, coupons, etc.
There is a convenient tool for integration of Magento 2 store and email software MailChimp that draws together customer and order information, segments customers and enables automated targeted emailing. The service offers several pricing plans depending on the number of emails per month and the number of subscribers. For example, small companies with a monthly plan of 12,000 emails and a subscriber base of 2,000 or fewer addresses can use it for free. A larger company with 10,000 addresses can send an unlimited number of emails for $75 per month.
Social media
Social media is a straightforward way for businesses to engage customers in a dialogue. Ecommerce entrepreneurs should consider several aspects to successfully implement this communication channel:
- Presence across multiple networks. People are rarely equally active in all social networks. As a rule, they tend to regularly monitor one or two of them. Choosing a single social media platform for brand exposure, marketers lose a part of their target audience.
- Consistency. To create a loyal social community, web stores should stick to a consistent schedule. Instead of bombarding followers with never-ending messages or alternating numerous ups and downs, they can experiment with the frequency of posts and monitor subscribers’ reaction to find the most efficient formula of social media activity.
- Reviews. Recommendations can become a strong motivation for a purchase. Encouraging customers to leave their reviews about products and services in social media, companies activate word-of-mouth marketing.
- Focus on promotion. Online sellers must camouflage their intention to sell in social media. The primary aim is to promote a brand, get to know customers, listen to their feedback and correct the development direction if needed.
- Creativity. Would social media marketing be effective if all brands used the same tactics to engage customers? A merely rhetorical question aims to encourage ecommerce businesses to leave the comfort zone and diversify the news feed. For example, once in a while, they can choose customers to take over their business account for a day and share how they use their products in the daily routine.
There is a variety of Magento extensions to build social media presence. Free Social Media Icons extension offers 50+ icons. Linked to profiles, they offer a simple way to follow a company in social media. If merchants want to display photos on a website as well, Social Feed is here to help. It creates one comprehensive gallery of photos posted in social media accounts and offers to share them directly from the website to boost engagement.
Blog
Starting a blog, ecommerce players can reach out to more customers with the history of the brand, success stories, announcement of new trends, recommendations on how to use products and on and on. For example, let’s take a look at this project of Magento website development. The team launched a blog in a web store for fruit and vegetable delivery service. By sharing healthy recipes with ingredients from their assortment, the company increases customer engagement and drives sales.
The blog brings SEO benefits to an ecommerce website. Having analyzed keywords relevant for their niche, merchants can include them in blog articles and optimize their content for search engines. The invested time and effort will result in increased organic traffic.
The last but not the least is an opportunity to start a conversation with customers on the blog and keep it going in social media. Merchants can employ one of the ready-made solutions to add social share buttons to blog posts (Elfsight Social Share Buttons as a possible option). Thus, they can better understand the preferences and interests of their customers.
So how can one start benefiting from blogging in a Magento web store? There is an easy way to go – Magento Marketplace offers a number of blog extensions for Magento 2. For example, the one called Blog does not only perform its primary function, but also offers a convenient blog migration tool. It can perfectly meet the needs of Magento web stores that are planning a migration to Magento 2.
FAQs
Question: What is an FAQ page?
Answer: A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page is a section with answers to common customer concerns. It guides through the most important information about company policy, payment methods, shipping terms, products and services.
This is an example of how merchants can ease the burden on their customer support team and create a single directory of issues customers can stumble upon on the website.
A possibility to create an FAQ page doesn’t go out-of-the-box in Magento. Merchants can go to Magento Marketplace to choose one of the ready-made solutions offered by extension developers.
A few last words
Today, customers don’t want to be limited by a single ecommerce communication channel. They appreciate if merchants offer them a choice. Fortunately, a highly customizable nature of Magento doesn’t limit their possibilities to keep in touch with customers. Live chat, social media, blog, emails, FAQ page – these are the tools for starting and maintaining a buyer-seller dialogue in a Magento web store. Communicating with customers via multiple channels, merchants smoothly guide their visitors to a purchase and inspire them to return to their e-shop again and again.
About the Author: Tanya is Ecommerce Industry Analyst at ScienceSoft, an IT consulting and software development company headquartered in McKinney, Texas. After 2+ years of exploring the cryptocurrency and blockchain sphere, she has shifted the focus of interest to ecommerce industry. Delving into this enormous world, Tanya covers key challenges online retailers face and unveils a wealth of tools they can use to outpace competitors.
