Among the main objectives of an online store's communication strategy should be its engagement. Many e-commerce owners spend hundreds or thousands of euros on marketing actions, but they are still not very clear about the importance of engagement to achieve effective long-term results.

What is engagement and how can we improve it in our Shopify store ? Keep reading to find out why it is essential to increase engagement and what steps you need to take to achieve it.

What is the Engagement of an online store?

Let's go back to the term "engagement" . What does it mean to get the customer or user to engage with your store? This is certainly not about you asking users to marry you. But that's the core idea: you need to build a long-term relationship with users, which translates into recurring purchases and loyalty to your brand.

It's most common that you don't know your customer or their behavior when they come to your online store. You don't know what they are really interested in. Your customer does not know you either and may continue to deepen the relationship with your store or leave without taking any action.

In this context, engagement consists of ensuring that your customer continues to interact with your online store in a variety of ways.

How to measure engagement with your online store's customers

There are various signs that your customer wants to move forward in the relationship with your online store. For example:

• They subscribe to your newsletter.
• They open and respond to your emails or to a Call-to-Action.
• They maintain contact with your store via email
• They tell you about their interests and preferences in terms of the products they are looking for.
• They buy your products on a regular basis.
• They comment positively about the product on social networks.

The opposite of having "engagement" is to have the user arrive at your store and leave without interacting with your website. It is important that users stop being mere visitors and become "contacts" or "leads". A user will not necessarily perform all the actions we have mentioned, but if there is engagement, they will perform some of them.

How to improve the engagement of your Shopify store?

There are different ways to analyze and improve the engagement of an online store. We are going to focus on one of the easiest to measure that is also among the most effective, which is email marketing.

Your goal is for new and returning users who come to your online store to have greater interaction with your brand. That is to say, to advance the relationship. The first step is to bring them into your sales funnel, but it doesn't end there. Ideally, they should become recurring customers and ambassadors of your brand, although only a fraction of them will do so.

Let's review the 2 main aspects you need to control:

1. Integrate Klaviyo with Shopify and prioritize your newsletter

A Shopify store's newsletter is the basis of engagement . If you are able to obtain the user's email address, you will be present in their email inbox. You will not be dependent on them by clicking on a Google page or remembering your website's domain.

To achieve this goal, you must understand how the customer journey works. While you can collect your customers' email addresses and add them to your mailing list with their permission, it is not a requirement for them to make a purchase... yet.

Allow your customers to subscribe to your newsletter for free and provide them with valuable content to get them into your sales funnel. With Klaviyo , you can create attractive subscription forms, which you can place on a landing page or even on your homepage to capture as many leads as possible.

2. Target your customers to offer them the content they are interested in.

A long list of customer profiles does not guarantee that we will have a good engagement. In fact, it is often very difficult to increase user engagement if you don't know how to measure it. By running an email campaign with Klaviyo , we can access statistical data such as engagement, click-through rates in the last 30 days, and whether they have clicked on a link or the average order value. This information allows us to identify the sets of users who are engaged with our store and their degree of engagement, by percentages.

It is very important that you can segment your mailing lists. Target your more sales-oriented messages on the leads that do interact with your newsletter: specifically, those that we can classify as "very engaged" and "somewhat engaged."

As for those who are not very engaged or do not open the emails, your goal should be to fine-tune your campaigns as much as possible to get their attention. You can follow different strategies:

• Offer them a highly attractive discount for their first purchase.
• Create emails with breakthrough subject lines, which encourage users to "click" and can generate interest.
• You can perform different A/B tests. Evaluate their level of response to different types of content or delivery time.
• Lastly, you can give them the option of unsubscribing from the list, which will help you clear your mailing list by removing those profiles that do not generate results.

Remember: having a mailing list with a high percentage of engagement is the most important factor. If a high percentage of users do not open the emails, you need to achieve the highest degree of effectiveness in your campaigns.

Results: improve your Shopify store engagement

As you increase the percentage of leads that are highly engaged with your online store, the more effective your campaigns will be and the more sales you will generate.

At Webmefy, we help you analyze the engagement of your online store users as well as attract more potential customers to your sales funnel. Are you interested in talking to us about your online store? Contact us.