Practical Tips to develop user engagement for e-commerce site

 

We talk about user engagement all the time. But how many of us are really able to develop and retain user engagement??? The biggest problem you and me have faced/is facing that we don’t have the time to build relationships with our target audience (which is a full time job in itself). And this is true. We are SEOs. We are already busy with on-page optimization, keyword research, link building and web analytics. And in the remaining time (if any) we are busy in developing and sending reports. This leave us with one important question. Who is going to engage with our target audience? The answer is community manager. He is a professional who is responsible for developing and managing the community. He is the one who will make sure that the members come back and come back often to your site. However this post is not about community managers or how to hire them. This post is about developing user engagement for your website.

 

User engagement leads to repeated visits. Repeated visits leads to brand loyalty and brand loyalty leads to more sales and leads…$$$$$$$$$. Examples are better than empty words. Check out the analytics report of an e-commerce website which has high user engagement:

Now let starts with the million dollar question:

Why people don’t engage with your e-commerce website?

Here are the possible reasons:

1. You have developed a community (like forum) which revolves around your brand instead of your industry or the topics your members really care about. Unless you are a very big brand like iPhone or Dell, nobody would care to discuss about you. So if you sell say cycles, you should develop a community which revolves around the benefits one get through cycling like good health, increased stamina or you can discuss topics on road trips etc. SEOmoz.org is another good example of a online community which revolves around the topic which their target audience really care about (i.e. SEO) and not the software/tools they sell.

 

2. You are too busy to engage with your target audience. To develop user engagement, you need to communicate with lot of members of your community at least occasionally if not daily. Managing and engaging with target audience is a full time job in itself. It is not something which can be done in an hour or two or in your spare time. That’s why you need a dedicated resource, a professional like ‘community manager’ who loves interacting with people, who can retain and recruit new members. If you won’t communicate with your target audience then they won’t participate or stop participating.

 

3. You have lack of activity in your community. Nobody likes to sit in an empty auditorium no matter how grand it is. Same theory applies to your website. You may have best design and tools in your niche but if there is little to no users activity on your website, then your target audience won’t participate. So if you have a forum with 0 discussions and 0 topics, then it will remain the same. Don’t expect people to dive into your forum and start launching threads after threads. You need activity to generate activity. It is a vicious circle. As a webmaster/community manager you should take the initiative and start new threads. Make this your habit and do it daily. At least one post every day. Replies/responses are also equally important. Here your employees/colleagues can come handy. Request them to write their reviews/opinions about the topic being discussed. Gradually inactive members will start participating. An active community will draw new members and you can expect even more participation.

 

4. Your contents don’t stimulate discussion or participation. If you have such contents then people will read and leave. They won’t comment or participate. So develop contents which encourage participation.

 

5. You don’t have audience. If people don’t care what you say or write, then who will bother to comment or participate on your blog or forum. To get audience you need three things: targeted traffic, authority and a platform (where you can demonstrate your authority to your target audience). If you are already getting loads of targeted traffic, then you can use your website as your platform. If not, then you can choose popular blogs or forums in your industry. Linkedin has lot of large niche communities and you can establish your authority there by demonstrating your subject matter expertise. This can later help you in getting an audience for your own site. Another good way to get audience is through Guest blogging and interviewing recognized authorities in your industry.

 

6. Business first, community later. Most e-retailers work with this mindset and develop electronic brochures instead of a highly engaging e-commerce website. People rarely purchase on their first visit to your site and there is a high probability that they won’t make a second visit if your site lacks user engagement (unless off course you are a very big brand like Dell, Apple, Microsoft, Nike etc).

Therefore you need to make your website community centric instead of product centric. I know you won’t believe this. So let me give you some examples. Let start with seomoz.org. This company started as a blog and then gradually built business around its community. Result, it has now more than 6000 paying clients (i am one of them). Even today their website is still community centric and not product centric. Other examples of highly successful community centric e-commerce sites:

 7. You think your industry is boring or intellectually primitive so there is no scope of engaging with your target audience. Actually it is all about your perception and how creative you can be. Thinks which look boring to you may be of great interest for someone else. Say you are in the plumbing business. Now can you develop plumbing communities? Yes. Check out these websites:

• www.worldtoilet.org/ (official website of “World Toilet Organization”)
• www.susana.org/ (official website of ‘Sustainable Sanitation Alliance’)
• www.unicef.org/wash/
• www.toilettwinning.org/
• www.asiacleaningjournal.com
• www.ecosan.org/
• www.makingcitieswork.org/
• …
• …

The list is endless. All these organizations improve toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide. They have members throughout the world. They can also be your potential linking partners if you run a plumbing site.

 

8. You lack human touch. You believe in sending automated messages to your members/clients. The only thing that you have on your ‘contact us’ page is an e-mail address. You interact with your community through your company name. There is no human touch in your business operations and after sales services. All this leads to credibility issues and eventually little to no sales. Show that you are as real as real can be. Publish your team and store (if it exists) photos on your website. Provide your complete physical address with location on Google Maps. Interact with your community through a living person like community manager. Nobody would like to interact/befriend a company say XYZ ltd.

 

How to develop user engagement

User engagement tools encourage your target audience to engage/participate on your website. So if you don’t have them. Then don’t expect any engagement. Here are the tools:

1. Develop High Quality Contents – Content is king and will always be. It can be in the form of an article, image, video, podcast etc. Ensure regular flow of highly quality contents which satisfy the needs of your target audience and you will get user engagement for the foreseeable future.

 

2. Start a Blog/Forum- You need a platform where your target audience can participate on your website. What can be a better platform than a blog or forum. SEOChat.com is popular because of its forum. SEOmoz.org is a brand because of its blog.

 

3. Build a Recognition System- People participate to get points, ranking and recognition. What your are doing to give recognition to your participants or to increase their status in the community?

4. Publish job vacancies in your industry on your website. One good example is ‘SEOmoz market place’. SEOmoz.org sells ‘seo software’ and tools so it can be placed in the e-commerce site category.

 5. Use high quality images on your e-commerce site. An image catalog is more appealing and enticing than a text based product category page. So spend some money on high quality images. Here is an example of good product category page:

6. Run contest and survey on product category pages of your e-commerce site.

 

7. Use that platform for your online community with which your target audience is familiar and which is seo friendly. I recommend using wordpress.org for developing and managing blogs, Vbulletin.com for developing and managing forums and ning.com for developing and managing social networks.

 

8. Send latest news about your industry through weekly or monthly newsletters. Newsletters are great way to engage with members esp the inactive one.

 9. Organize community events (offline meetups, webinars, seminars, online chats, conferences, workshops) which revolves around your community’s topics. People talking to you face to face develop stronger bond with your brand. This is equivalent to developing the same bond through several years of online interactions. Again a good example is seomoz.org. They organize webinars, meetups, office tours and seminars for their members. No wonder they have 80000+ subscribers and 6000 paying members.

 

 

 10. Celebrate Birthdays (of your members) and special occasions (new year, Christmas, valentine day etc) on your website. All this help in developing close bonds with your target audience.

 11. Develop applications on your website which encourage collaboration. Here are few such applications:

• Application through which you can share and rate what is interesting online in your industry. Something like digg

•  Application through which you can create polls (like polldaddy.com) and quizzes on your website.

 

12. Ask lot of Questions- Majority of people register on a website and then abandon it. This is because nobody cared to engage with them. Make sure there first visit is not their last. Ask open ended questions from your new members. These are not technically questions but statements which encourage for a response. Like what is your opinion about …….? How you started in this industry?, How did you find us etc. Ask people lot of questions about themselves. Introduce the new member to existing members. Encourage old members to welcome new members. Encourage new members to participate by asking his opinion on current hot topics in your community. Invite them to the groups they might be interested in. Spend more time on the new members than on the existing members.

 

13. Give recognition to active members. Interview them and publish the interview on your website. This will also create a desire in new members to be featured. Give some control/power to your long time members. Like you can make them moderator or community manager.

 

14. Post Daily – post at least one new item on daily basis and make sure that it stimulates participation.

 

Measure your User Engagement

As a certified analyst it will be blasphemous for me to end the post without talking about measurement and analysis. If you can’t measure your efforts, you can’t manage them. It is as simple as that. One of the best tool to measure social engagement and determine social engagement sources and your top influencers is PostRank Analytics. Unlike Google Analytics, you need to be aware of only three terms to understand the postrank analytics reports. These three terms are:

Engagement Events – These are the activities performed by individuals after they engage with your contents. These activities can be: ‘leaving a comment’, ‘bookmarking’, ‘sharing on facebook, twitter’ etc.

Engagement Points – It is the numerical value assigned to an engagement event. Highly engaged events like ‘commenting on a blog’ gets higher engagement points.

Engagement Score – It is the total number of engagement points earned by a piece of content like ‘blog post’.

 

This post is very much a work in progress. If you have more cool ideas then please share in the comments below.