The Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement in Fashion E-Commerce

Do you prefer to buy your clothes and fashion accessories online? If so, you are among millions across the world that do so. In fact, a recent study suggests that the e-commerce fashion industry is growing so fast, it has already crossed the $63 billion mark. At this pace, this segment is predicted to touch the $100 billion mark by 2020. Needless to say, e-commerce fashion retailers are all geared up to make the most out of this segment.

They are devising better customer engagement strategies to get the lion’s share out of fashion e-commerce. Moreover, the healthy and consistent growth of this e-commerce trend leads to more customer data.

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Fashion retailers know the importance of this data as it tells them what customers like or dislike, interests, and their buying trends. As such, e-retailers are always improvising their engagement strategies to attract more customers. Here are some quality customer engagement techniques that’ll help you sell more and retain your existing clients:

Rewarding Your Customers Will Increase Retention

You think only animals seek rewards? Not quite, humans want it, too. Rewards motivate people to make a decision about buying a product. It is true that customers prefer buying from e-commerce stores that give them something in return. In essence, you can get them to do something by rewarding them. You can attract their attention by rewarding them, and even retain them by improving your offers based on their buying trends and choices.

But, there is more to rewarding your customers than just scheduling them to reinforce to repeat the same action again. Once they buy from you and get rewards or incentives, they look forward to repeating that experience. However, they’ll only do so if they liked doing it in the first place.

Hence, it is important to reward your customers with something that they look forward to repeating. In other words, your reward should create an impact on their buying trends and choices so that they happily come and buy from you.

Use Coupons to Enhance Customer Engagement

Various statistics show that around 90% online shoppers look for coupons. In the U.S., the number of online shoppers remains around 80%. These statistics explicitly verify the importance of coupons for online consumers. When it comes to clothing, around 41% consumers seek clothing coupons. Authentic, ad-dedicated, clothing coupon providers such as ClothingRIC help them seek the right deal. To make the most out of clothing coupons, keep a distance from counterfeit coupon providers and only seek reliable, reputable coupon providers.

Personalization Bolsters Customer Engagement

Gone are the days when the ad-hoc approach was prevalent. Today, engaging customers personally has become the new norm. There is no denying that most in the e-commerce fashion industry believe that personalization is the key to improving customer engagement. Likewise, almost 90% marketers see personalization as the way forward.

It seems that engaging customers individually in real-time makes them feel important and comfortable while buying, a fact that you’ll also notice in this survey. Moreover, personally engaging customers makes customers feel confident and valuable. They prefer shopping from e-commerce stores that value their input and feedback and are likely to buy from them again. Commonly, e-commerce fashion industry sees types of personalization:

• Automatic Personalization – it is based on customer’s buying history, behavior, and clickstream data. It helps fashion e-commerce retailers to modify certain aspects of the site like appearance and interaction.
• Customer initiated Personalization – this type of personalization gives customers access to preference page that enables them to control different features of the site. Fashion e-commerce retailers prefer such customers as they spend time adapting the website as they prefer.

Offer Numerous Communication Channels

Communication plays a pivotal role in improving communication between customers and fashion e-commerce retailers. More channels mean your business will likely get more customer feedback. This help eliminates communication barriers and seller and the client and facilitates better customer engagement. As an e-commerce fashion brand, you must use any or all the following channels:

• Email
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Blogs
• Live chat

Though several other avenues are also available, including them here will only stretch the list. Also, adding so many communication channels offer no substantial benefits as you can only use selected ones to communicate.

Replace Brands With Personality

A crucial factor in improving customer engagement is to shift your focus from brand to personality. Why is this important? For starters, your brand is nothing more than what customers think of it, not you. One study indicates that approximately 73% people prefer doing business with brands that provide them a more relevant shopping experience. Today, clients are even willing to share a chunk of their data for the purpose.

This suggests that shoppers don’t think of sharing some of their private data against improving customer experience as a big deal anymore. For e-commerce fashion retailers, it makes sense to focus on the customer and enhancing their shopping experience instead of the brand as online customers love to experience a great shopping experience. Likewise, focusing on individual shoppers will automatically improve the worth of your brand once customers start preferring to buy from your site. Call it as a mutual relationship but that’s how improving one will automatically lead to improvements to the other.

Use Blogs And Content To Educate And Engage

Even today you’ll find businesses that overlook the importance of informative blogs. In essence, they don’t realize or just ignore the effectiveness of blogs. In fact, interesting, informative blogs will go a long way in enhancing customer engagement. Yes, making a blog can be time-consuming affair but when it comes to providing up to date info, nothing beats its usefulness.

One study reveals that around 48% users prefer buying from companies that provide informative content to the buyer. This shows that customers are often willing to buy they are provided enough information about the product. Moreover, adding infographics and other media to your blog will only make it more readable and would help customers take a decision.

Ask Questions And Seek Answers

That’s true, sellers also ask questions and often get useful and educative responses from customers. Social media is the place to be for such discussions. Different social media platform contain thousands of community pages where customers speak their minds and hearts out about a product or service.

Strangely, some fashion e-commerce businesses don’t value engaging customers on social media for some reason. The fact is that such pages significantly help retailers and manufacturers understand the true mindset of clients.

These communities help improve customer engagement and in turn provide useful feedback to improve the product. It is a great idea to create such pages on your social media page as they’ll help you properly engage customers in useful discussions and understand what they want to see in the product.

Harness Behavior And Emotions To Improve Engagements

You may have read about distinctive human emotions, but did you know that they can be used to influence customers to buy? From your site’s layout to faster scrolling, everything counts here. The customer will only bounce away if the design is poor. This means that the first impression goes a long way and helps them decide if they want to stay on the site or not.

To extend their stay, add the surprise factor to your site. Don’t stop there, prolong their stay by adding happiness to the site. This can be anything from jokes to compelling visuals or flash videos. The idea is to make them stay long enough to bring them to the product section. Using human emotions correctly can go a long way in improving your site’s customer engagement.

All methods including in this guide have been proven effective in enhancing customer engagement for fashion e-commerce sites. Though you might find plenty of other tricks to improve customer engagement, try these and have your say if they worked for you.

Author: Usman Raza is freelance writer, an author and content marketing specialist at Headset Zone, and Zensleep. When not working, he’s probably spending time with his family. Follow him on Facebook @usmanraza40 and Twitter @usmanintrotech