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7 Reasons Why Your B2C Business is Plagued by Poor Customer Engagement
Having a long-lasting, loyal customer base in today’s hyper-competitive environment can be extremely difficult for businesses. Also, with brand loyalty fleeting, the cost of customer acquisition is shooting up at a staggering rate. Taking proactive measures to enhance customer engagement is the only viable solution for brands to overcome this challenge.
But to take customer engagement to the next level and deliver better experiences, it is necessary to first understand the existing problems. This blog sheds light on the critical problems affecting customer engagement and ultimately taking a toll on your business’ conversions, profits, and customer retention.
Following are the top 7 reasons why your brand might be failing to keep customers engaged.
1. Poor Website UI/UX
Source: Codism
Your website is your business’ digital storefront. If the design and user experience are not attractive and user-friendly, customers will not stay on your website long enough. Outdated designs and a sluggish user experience can easily drive away potential customers and affect your business.
2. Oblivious to Customer Problems
Source: WiredPlus
Enhancing customer engagement can be very tricky, especially when you are not aware of the problems customers are facing. Setting up an effective customer feedback system is necessary. This can help you gain crucial insights into the key improvement areas of your product/ service. As a result, you can make required changes and enhance customer engagement significantly.
3. Reliance On a Reactive Engagement Model
Source: JFG
Gone are the days when customer engagement and service followed the reactive route. Engagement today is the outcome of your marketing outreach efforts. You can’t expect customers to easily get attracted to your brand. Instead, you have to strive hard and proactively create brand stickiness to keep your customers engaged.
4. Absence of Personalised, Targeted Strategies
Source: Froggy
Customised and targeted marketing strategies are beneficial for brands to deliver personalised and relevant experiences to their customers. The more customers relate to your product/ service, the more it helps in keeping them hooked to your brand for a longer duration. However, if you fail to incorporate the personalisation element, your brand is very likely to create a bad first impression and fail to engage the potential customers.
5. Not Having an Omnichannel Presence
Source: Packaging Strategies
Interactions across different channels and mediums help in reinforcing customers’ trust in your brand. Omnichannel presence also enables brands to be consistently visible and accessible to potential customers. This also plays a huge role in boosting customer engagement levels.
6. Low Bandwidth and Inadequate Resources
Source: OnlineBusiness
Time and resources are imperative when bringing effective customer engagement strategies to fruition. However, most brands fail to recognise the value of these factors. As a result, they do not have the time or resources to focus on customer engagement strategies and end up struggling to connect with their customers.
7. Lack of Powerful Customer Communication
Source: REVE Chat
Communication is at the heart of your business growth. It has the power to make or break your business. Establishing and maintaining seamless customer communication across both online and offline channels is a vital necessity. It can drive high customer engagement, and thus deliver substantial outcomes for your business.
Customer engagement can be a hard row to hoe for every business, irrespective of its size and type. Get rid of the above mentioned 7 problems to successfully step up customer engagement and boost your business growth. Craft meaningful strategies and improve your brand’s customer engagement metrics with TIC. Contact us to know more about how our seasoned marketers can help you drive up customer engagement for your business.
Marketing: Your Business’ Engine That Requires Regular Maintenance
For any business today, having a well-thought marketing strategy is essential to achieve its desired growth goals on a regular basis. Without one, it can be difficult to stay on top of the ever-changing media landscape. However, a meaningful marketing strategy is not just about great ideas and practices but also about being consistent with marketing efforts.
Marketing is like your business’ engine. It needs constant checkups and servicing to keep running. In absence of these maintenance activities, the whole system can grind to a halt! Hence, marketing cannot be treated as a standalone, one-off activity. It should be an ongoing process that requires commitment and discipline over an extended period of time.
The key thing here though isn’t just making sure everything falls into place, it also needs strategic optimisations on top of this careful planning. This is because there will always be changes happening within today’s dynamic market environment. And when not managed properly, this could lead to severe disruptions in the marketing processes, and ultimately, in the business outcomes.
Short-termism in Marketing is Affecting Businesses
For any business today, having a well-thought marketing strategy is essential to achieve its desired growth goals on a regular basis. Without one, it can be difficult to stay on top of the ever-changing media landscape. However, a meaningful marketing strategy is not just about great ideas and practices but also about being consistent with marketing efforts.
Marketing is like your business’ engine. It needs constant checkups and servicing to keep running. In absence of these maintenance activities, the whole system can grind to a halt! Hence, marketing cannot be treated as a standalone, one-off activity. It should be an ongoing process that requires commitment and discipline over an extended period of time.
The key thing here though isn’t just making sure everything falls into place, it also needs strategic optimisations on top of this careful planning. This is because there will always be changes happening within today’s dynamic market environment. And when not managed properly, this could lead to severe disruptions in the marketing processes, and ultimately, in the business outcomes.
Source: Smart Insights
When it comes to marketing strategies, a large number of businesses today are focusing too much on metrics and expecting quick gains. Whether it be social media marketing, paid advertising, SEO, or any other aspect, organisations are expecting great returns within the first few months. However, this does not happen as marketing campaigns take time to drive desired results.
While this approach of marketing may signal growth in terms of numbers, it fails to persist in the long run. Ultimately, this can hamper your brand-building efforts and can also take a toll on your long-term business objectives. Hence, it is always advisable to rely on long-term marketing activities to achieve strong and sustainable growth for your business.
‘The Perfect Marketing Strategy’ is a Myth
Source: Zoho
When implementing a marketing plan for your business, it is important to understand that no strategy is ever suited to drive positive outcomes repeatedly. Every marketing plan requires regular adjustments and tweaks in order to consistently meet business objectives for a long period. Relying on a single strategy can never create stability or a sense of predictability within the marketing department.
With this short-term oriented approach, businesses and marketers concentrate their budgets only on on-demand generation and bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns. As a result, they fail to address one of the major marketing objectives of every business – customer retention. However, keeping your marketing strategy flexible and making constant optimisations could significantly outweigh the benefits of short-term tactics.
Why Marketing is Not a One-time Affair?
- Time – It is important to follow a single digital marketing strategy for at least a year before you start to see positive results.
- Connections – Creating genuine connections and relationships with customers requires time. Trust cannot be built within just a few months.
- Expansion – Short-termism compels you to target only your most likely buyers. This prevents you from extending the reach of your brand.
- Customer Retention – While short-term strategies only focus on customer acquisition, employing the long-term approach can also help you to significantly improve customer retention rates.
To give your business the best chance of growing, it is thus important to stick with a single but flexible digital marketing strategy for an extended period of time. Only then can you start expecting returns from your marketing efforts. Instead of running behind quick gains with short-term tactics, focusing on long-term strategies can be useful for your business to get the best outcomes at every touchpoint.
5 Sureshot Strategies for a Successful E-Commerce Website
With the growing number of internet users, worldwide e-commerce sales are expected to grow to 5.4 trillion US dollars by 2022, according to a report by Statista. The rising preference of people to buy products online is boosting profits for many e-commerce businesses. These online stores initially catered mostly to Gen Z and millennials with personal care, electronics, wellness, etc products. However, e-commerce businesses have soon expanded their customer base by becoming the backbone for supplying essential items as well.
To successfully sell products online, it is important for your store to have an effective digital presence. A strong online presence gives your brand the perfect platform to communicate with your target consumers and compel them to buy your products. Here are 5 simple yet highly effective tactics that you can implement to build and manage a successful e-commerce website.
1. Keep Your Website Design Clean and Simple
Image Source: Usability Geek
Design is an important element of your online store’s website. Without a clean and clear design, visitors are likely to lose interest in your e-commerce website. On the other hand, a smartly designed website with a simplistic colour scheme and elegant fonts can compel visitors to stay longer on your online store.
Your e-commerce website can also prevent the use of heavy elements such as extra-large images, files, and too many ads to ensure faster load times. Besides, simple web design also makes sure that visitors are not distracted but are fully engaged while exploring the range of products you are offering. A fast-loading website not only appeals to your website visitors by reducing bounce rates but also increases your conversions.
2. Make Navigation Easy for Visitors
Image Source: Convertcart
Everyone loves online stores that are seamless and easily navigable. It is thus important for the navigation of your e-commerce website to be clear. You need to make sure that various sections, categories, sub-categories on your website are properly described and visually defined. This enables website visitors and shoppers to find their preferred goods quickly and without any hassles.
You can include your online store’s main navigation menu at the top of the page or on the left-hand side of the page. Further, you can organize product listings using meaningful categories, subcategories, and labels. Most importantly, your e-commerce website should also have an in-search feature that not just helps users find the products they are looking for but also shows relevant items.
3. Use High-quality Product Images and Graphics
Image Source: Imagekit.io
Adding good-quality images to your e-commerce website is a simple and effective way to improve your site’s user experience. It is therefore recommended to always use professionally clicked product images in your e-commerce website. Such high-quality images let visitors have a closer look at the product and strengthen their purchasing decision.
Ensure that the product images that you use on your online store are not too small or pixelated. Use of high-resolution images can also help in driving longer visit times and reduce bounce rates, thereby boosting your site’s SEO. This helps in improving the credibility of your brands and increases the chances of visitors willing to buy products from your online store.
4. Ensure Your Site is SEO-friendly
Image Source: Serp Wizard
You have spent a great deal of time setting up your e-commerce site. Yet your website fails to rank higher on the search engines and witness increased traffic? How can you overcome this obstacle? Search Engine Optimisation. Having a strong SEO strategy in place is a must so as to witness higher brand impressions and clicks and thus, better sales.
While optimising your e-commerce website for search engines, it is important to take into account relevancy as well as ranking difficulty. Using internal links can be a great way to enable search engines to crawl and index your pages. Faster load times and a responsive design can also help your website appeal to both, searchers and search engines, and thus, improve your website traffic significantly
Establishing and maintaining a website for your e-commerce business can be a daunting task. But it is possible to achieve your desired web traffic goals and boost your sales with the help of above mentioned simple steps. By following these tactics, your e-commerce website will not only witness increased visitors but will also convert like crazy. So, what are you waiting for? Implement these strategies and give your online store the sales it deserves.
6 Web Design And Development Trends Dominating the Industry In 2021
Design and development have become the most important aspects of building a website today. The reason being, most brands across the globe have now realised the necessity of building an online presence that is attractive and which delivers a seamless user experience. However, to achieve this, it is important to always stay on top of the latest website design and development trends.
The pandemic outbreak in 2020 has highlighted the significance of strengthening online presence for better reach. As a result, brands and businesses are focusing on making their websites more appealing and user-friendly. To make this easier for businesses, we’ve put together a list of the biggest and most effective web design and development trends in 2021.
1. Progressive Web App Development
Image Source: Railsware
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are websites that combine the best of both – mobile applications as well as web-based applications. These websites are intended to deliver a high level of performance regardless of device or network condition. PWAs are comparatively more interactive and responsive than conventional responsive websites. They are built in a manner that enables them to behave like native apps.
The advent of PWAs has been beneficial for global brands like Amazon, Twitter, Forbes, etc in order to improve the loading times for their users. Features such as push notifications are helping brands in making their websites more interactive, thereby increasing conversions and decreasing bounce rates. PWAs are also proving to be a great asset for businesses by boosting their time on-site and significantly improving re-engagement rates.
2. Dark-Themed UI
Image Source: Prototypr.io
For a long time, a white background was considered to be the only option to create empty spaces on a website or an app. However, a few years ago, mobile applications started offering dark-themed UI options which garnered a lot of appreciation. Owing to its popularity, website designers have also started creating dark-themed user interfaces and we believe that this trend will continue to rise throughout 2021.
As far as user experience is concerned, dark themes are extremely useful for users as they help in minimising digital eye strain. The dark mode utilises minimal device energy and saves a lot of your device’s battery time. By increasing contrast, the dark theme UI makes design elements more visible, which is crucial in making your website look more appealing.
3. AI-Powered Chatbots
Image Source: Mesheble
Artificial intelligence based chatbot is a software that is designed to understand and simulate human conversations. These chatbots help businesses in speeding up their operations through voice or text chats and also improving the customer experience. By collecting data, answering frequently asked questions, and providing solutions for various other customer concerns, AI-powered chatbots are useful in reducing customer drop off rates.
Powered with speech recognition techniques and cognitive intelligence, AI-driven chatbots are capable of replicating human conversations with precision. The interactive feature of AI-powered chatbots makes the users feel valued and enhances customer satisfaction rates. As a result, prominent B2C businesses have started adding AI-powered chatbots to their websites and we believe many more companies will continue embracing this trend in 2021.
4. Single-Page Websites
Image Source: Skenix
Long and extensive web structures no longer attract users. Brands today are compelled to build single-page websites as they are much easier to navigate and utilise less time of site visitors. Visitors of single-page websites can find everything – right from the brand’s offerings to contact details, on the same page. With no new URL to navigate to on the website, these websites consume less space on servers.
The simple and creative design layouts used in single-page websites deliver faster and seamless user experiences. These websites enjoy a simpler deployment process and are also extremely cost-effective. Moreover, designers also get to try their hands on minimalistic yet responsive designs that offer user-friendly interfaces and are also more attractive.
5. Voice Search Optimisation
Image Source: Techwyse
From Siri and Alexa to Cortana, voice-controlled digital assistants are one of the easiest ways to make internet searches today. Owing to this technology’s user-friendliness as well as accuracy, more and more people are making voice-based searches. This has highlighted the need for websites to optimise their websites for voice searches, so as to not miss out on valuable traffic and leads.
Users these days show a great interest in voice recognition technology and so, businesses have started adopting this feature to ensure higher customer satisfaction. This will also prove to be quite beneficial when it comes to serving multilingual customers. Big organisations such as Apple, Google, and Android have already incorporated voice search into their UI/ UX design process and many more global enterprises are likely to follow suit.
6. Motion UI
Image Source: Tech9logy Creators
Customers today don’t only expect websites to be faster and mobile-friendly but also want their digital experiences to be visually rich and interactive. As a result, Motion UI is quickly gaining prominence as a great tool to deliver a more engaging user experience. Motion UI is a front-end framework that is useful in developing fully responsive websites as well as mobile applications.
With Motion UI, businesses are able to add complex animations, dynamic transitions or even interactive elements such as slide, spin, bounce, etc on their website. The apt use of such effects and elements can be a great way to draw visitors’ attention to an important position on the page, such as the call-to-action button. Motion UI is compatible with all web technologies and can be used anywhere on a web page – header, footer, or menus.
Staying abreast of the latest web design and development trends, even amid a constantly changing landscape, is indispensable today. The above mentioned design and development trends are dominating the industry in 2021 and are likely to continue doing so in the future as well. Incorporating these trends into websites can help brands attract more audiences and stand out in the market.