Changes Coronavirus is bringing in E-commerce Customer Engagement [Experts Opinion]

The COVID-19 crisis has struck the world like anything! It has become a defining event of the year 2020.

People are facing difficulties, their health safety is at risk, and new challenges of remotely working are coming up. However, they are coming to terms with the dreaded reality. People have learnt how to temporarily disconnect from the world.

To say that we are living in unprecedented times is an understatement.

The pandemic has driven consumers indoor. Ecommerce businesses are finding it difficult to maintain customer engagement amidst the corona crisis.

It has changed the way we live, work, shop, and communicate. People have started working from home and sticking to the essentials only. Even when stepping out of the house for essential purchases, they are under constant fear of infections.

Now that consumers are strictly following stay-at-home orders, how have social isolation and distancing transformed the way consumers browse, shop, pay or even interact?

Take a look at these statistics from a consumer survey by Engine:

• 54% of consumers have cut back on shopping stores for non-essentials
• 42% of consumers have increased online shopping

With a rapid shift in the buying pattern, how are the online businesses redesigning their strategies to keep up with customer engagement?

Here are some of the experts’ opinion on how they creatively deal with this crisis and keep up with customer engagement.

 

 

 

Shivbhadrasinh Gohil, CMO at Meetanshi

Meetanshi is a Magento Development Company that offers Magento extensions to enrich the stores and make online shopping better each day. Owing to the current crisis, the store owners may face financial crisis and difficulty in thriving the online business. Keeping this in mind, our marketing team has taken certain steps to keep up the game of customer engagement which includes offering discounts on every purchase, and best possible support service via live chat as well as on call. We also offer personalized demo for potential customers and thus help to make a calculative decision to invest in a Magento extension amidst the crisis.

 

 

 

Calloway Cook, President of Illuminate Labs

Our business shifted to a customer engagement strategy that focused primarily on email marketing in the wake of COVID-19. We were looking to cut paid ad costs until the pandemic is over and customer spending normalizes. Email marketing is free and allows you to drive revenue and engage with your most loyal customers in an organic way. Now is the time
for eCommerce businesses to focus on recurring revenue rather than paying for exposure and new leads.

 

 

 

Andrei Vasilescu, CEO and Digital Marketing expert at DontPayFull

Invade social media

People are stuck at their homes and consuming every social media content to kill their endless times. During this lockdown period the requirement of consumable contents has increased to 6 to 10 times depending on respective social media platform. So, now your social media contents have become the most powerful weapons to engage your audience and customers. Keep sharing informative and useful contents along with your promotional messages through your business profiles in social media networks. Host funny, even stupid contests in social media platforms in which most of your followers will readily participate now. Surfacing in the social media platforms with different contents will keep your customers and audience greatly engaged to your eCommerce business. This will help you to get a huge brand exposure which in turn will provide you great revenue in the post-pandemic period. Your efforts in the social media will be more effective if you share your social media contents several times a day.

 

 

 

Saloni Doshi, CEO of EcoEnclose

Many of our customers are other business owners. As a small business owner myself, I know how tough the situation is right now. So we created an entire Resource section dedicated to helping business owners navigate the pandemic. This includes a spreadsheet that we keep up-to-date about the latest funding opportunities, guidance on leadership and communication, and how they can transition their business to eCommerce if they haven’t already done so. During this difficult time, it’s not always about promoting your product. Finding ways to help support one another instead can leave a bigger, more positive impact!

Are you an E-commerce business owner too? Can you relate to them? I and the readers would like to read your thoughts on the topic in the Comments section below.

Also, please share the post via social media among the business owners.

Stay safe, stay home.

Thank you.