5 Tips for Automating Your Customer Engagement With Web Push

Today’s social media and digital marketing landscape is largely rooted in connection. People across the globe use various platforms in order to connect with the people (and brands) that they enjoy. While this has always been true for personal relationships, it is a newer concept for the marketing world.

Old marketing involved one way communication that broadcasted a blanket message to the masses. This can include things like newspaper and magazine print ads, TV commercials, and even some early digital marketing initiatives. Does that type of marketing exist today? Sure. Is it successful? Not as much as it used to be, and it is only losing effectiveness.

Instead, for a brand to be successful today it must take the time to meaningfully engage with its audience. While there is nothing wrong with that, any busy marketing professional will tell you that it is much easier said than done.

Customer Engagement

Part of why customer engagement is difficult is because it is multifaceted. Some of this engagement is more focused on social interaction and reputation management- say responding to a negative tweet or reposting a positive client testimonial. This is all certainly important, but there is much more to consider.

Customer engagement should also involve creating personalized marketing content that helps a customer feel more of a connection to the brand they are considering shopping with or using. This engagement should help secure sales, as well as secure your customers for future sales as well. We all know the value of repeat customers!

Does this mean that you need to make a unique marketing campaign for each and every person out there that might be interested in your product or brand? Of course not! Instead, you can rely on automation to help create personalized, relevant content that will help bolster your sales and customer relationships.

So, can you really automate customer engagement? Absolutely! Web push in particular is a great platform for automating customer engagement at various stages of the buyer’s journey (and beyond). Here are 5 tips to help you get started.

1. Make smart recommendations based on user behavior

The amount of options today’s consumer has is at an all time high. No matter what industry, a customer will have to make decisions about which brands and which products to buy. From a marketing perspective, you need to ensure that you are keeping your brand at the front of their mind so that they are more likely to choose you over your competition.

A great way to do this is by setting up a web push campaign that makes smart recommendations based on user behavior.

For example, you may set up an automated campaign for any user that lands on a certain product page (such as the ‘Smart Watch 2000’). This will trigger and send automatically once they leave the page and gives them some relevant info that might encourage them to buy.

You can also turn this easily into a type of drip campaign by continuing to regularly engage with your customers until they convert at your website. By slowly dialing up your messages you can keep them interested and engaged without pushing a hard sell right at the beginning. If a user clicks your notification, they will continue to receive your drip campaign messages.

Pro tip: See below and make sure you first enable in your settings to track notification clicks as events.

After sending notifications sharing product info, reviews, or other relevant info, you can finish your campaign by offering a discount code in order to further encourage your subscriber to convert. Drip marketing is proven to be really effective and is a great way to automate customer engagement.

2. Maximize sales by targeting abandoned carts

Of course, no conversation about customer engagement would be complete without mentioning targeting abandoned carts. Current abandonment rates average around 70%. There is no excuse to not set up an automated campaign to try and retrieve at least some of those carts.

As you can see in the above chart, people abandon carts for a variety of reasons. We’ve already discussed what you should do to help decrease your overall cart abandonment rates. Today we wanted to remind you how easy it is to automate this effort.

A cart abandonment notification is easily set up as a triggered notification. Set it up once, and it will send out going forward to any subscriber of yours who abandons their cart for a certain amount of time. You control what that amount of time is, as well as what your message is.

This is one of the easiest ways to automate customer engagement and boost your sales. Any ecommerce site should take advantage of this. If you don’t see your conversions increasing, consider changing your notification copy. Including something like a discount code or using a sense of urgency can help you secure the sale.

3. Improve customer retention by engaging post-sale

Your work isn’t done once you get a subscriber to convert! That is a great first step, but it should not be your last step. Instead, your customer engagement should extend through the shipping process and beyond.

Much of this engagement can be automated, including sending shipping notifications that will alert users when their order is on the way. This is a quick and easy way to engage your audience and provide them with information that they will appreciate. Not only that, a positive shipping experience is a great way to boost customer retention. Keeping your customers updated on their order gives them confidence and is something that will stick with them when they are in the process of making a future purchase decision.

On the flip side, a negative experience is a surefire way to lose the trust of your customers and may result in them not shopping with you again. In fact, over 50% of customers say they will never shop with a company again after just 1 negative experience.

4. Reward your best customers

Another meaningful way to engage with your customers is by rewarding them. People love rewards, it’s as simple as that. Incorporating some type of a rewards program or thank you program is a great way to positively engage your customers and keep them coming back for more.

A rewards program is certainly something to consider with your ecommerce brand. In fact, one of our favorite digital marketing tools is ReferralCandy which will help you create and manage a referral rewards program for your ecommerce business.

Use web push to help promote your referral program with a simple triggered notification. The above example shows how you might set yours up. After that you can select your trigger, for example once a subscriber makes a purchase with you.

You can also easily reward your customers by sending campaigns that feature early access to sales, special promotions, or other perks. All of these benefits result in your subscribers feeling like you care about more than just getting the sale. Best of all, you can automate these campaigns so that it doesn’t take a lot of work or time on your end.

5. Make their life easier

Finally, a great type of customer engagement involves making their life easier. This can include some earlier tips we have talked about such as alerting them that their item has shipped, but it extends to other areas as well. If you do not have an ecommerce business, you have a lot of opportunities as well to engage your audience.

For example, if you have a messaging system at your website, use web push to alert your users when they have a new message. Do you schedule appointments? Send appointment reminders! These types of notifications are not just highly relevant, they are highly beneficial. It is a great way to keep your subscribers coming back to your website.

These types of messages have high click through rates because they are so relevant to the individual subscriber. It is a great form of automated customer engagement that will keep your subscribers happy with their experience at your website, helping to keep them from switching to your competition.

Wrapping Up

Customer engagement is crucial for success, but it can take up a significant amount of your time. Automating some of this work with various web push campaigns frees up a lot of time that can then be spent doing other things.

Keep in mind that choosing to automate some of your customer engagement doesn’t mean you don’t care about your customers. In fact, it is just the opposite. The more time you free up, the more you will have to dedicate towards creating new projects, new content, or engaging with your customers in other ways (just to name a few).

How do you handle customer engagement? We want to hear! Share your story or alert us of some tips we forgot to mention. Comment below or send us a message.

If you want to get started with web push notifications, head over here to start your 14 day free trial!