Making your Shopify online store more engaging

Having an engaging online store is your best bet toward improving your profit. Decent marketing will bring an audience to your store. But whether or not they will stay and do business with you is largely based on how engaging your store is. So, let's take a more in-depth look into making your Shopify online store more engaging.

What makes for an engaging online store

Whether or not your store will be engaging is based on a couple of factors. After all, all Shopify stores are different. And in order to work on improving customer engagement, it is important to understand the factors that make them so.

Design

For you to have an engaging Shopify store, it is first necessary to design it properly. On the one hand, you have the store design that your customer base expects from your type of store. If you take a closer look at Shopify, you'll see that stores that sell similar products also tend to have a similar design. This is not by accident, as certain design types complement certain products. Even within these design types, there is room to experiment and try out new ideas. The colors that you use, the fonts, the placement of visual elements... All these can be modified. But, it is important to stay within certain parameters. Your goal is to build a store that your customers will find comfortable to shop in. And the only way for them to feel comfortable is to make your store feel like something they've experienced before. This is why it is useful to see what your competitors' stores look like, and what elements they all have.

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The second thing to consider in regard to store design is brand incorporation. Namely, while in some ways you need to make your store feel like all the others so that your customers will feel comfortable, you also need to make your store stand out. To do this, you need to consider your brand. You need to find ways to seamlessly weave your brand into your store. By doing so you will connect it to your marketing, and establish decent conversion rates. So, building an engaging Shopify store is a balance between comfort and brand incorporation.

Personalized content

Not so long ago it was completely acceptable for stores to promote generic content. You write a couple of marketing tropes and push them as if they were a genuine representation of your store values. Well, these days are gone. If you wish to get any notable engagement from your customers, you need to personalize the content that you place.

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Alt: Personalize.

Personalization is a large subject of its own accord, so we will only give you the basics here. Namely, what it means is that you make your content with your customer base in mind. You first segment your customers into different groups. And then outline what type of content stands to be most effective within each group. This dynamic content is far more likely to gain customer interest and yank them out of the standard indifference towards marketing.

What this means in the context of Shopify is that you need to avoid static content. Web stories come as a natural suggestion. Since they are in widget form, they'll be fairly easy to update. Therefore, you can make web stories for every segment of your customer base, and take a step forward to full personalization.

Seasonal offers

Similar to content, you should avoid having generic offers. Yes, it is profitable that you promote a certain product from time to time. And customers of all ages and genders always welcome discounts. But, to make your offers stick, you need to approach them with personalization in mind. Ideally, you will gather customer data and figure out what your customers like and when. All demographics have a certain season when they are more likely to need the product you have. And offering the right product at the right time can do wonders for your marketing and profit margin. Customers will not only engage with your store but even recommend it to their friends and family.

Steps towards making your Shopify online store more engaging

So, design, personalization, and seasonal offers. Understanding these three will go a long way in making your Shopify online store more engaging. Now, let's outline a couple of steps you can take toward better engagement rates.

Do research

When it comes to managing an online store you can never do too much research. Be it that you are trying to figure out your audience, keeping track of ongoing trends, or looking up different business models. What makes a store engaging isn't set in stone. And ongoing trends can heavily impact how effective your store is. So, make sure that you keep doing research, even if you feel that your store is doing good.

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Design a top-notch store

While Shopify gives you a ton of themes, templates, and design options we would advise you not to opt for the first one that seems suitable. Designing a store is rarely easy, especially if you wish to incorporate all the important aspects into account. This is why most shop owners either hire a professional to advise them or have one create a store for them from the ground up.

Use web stories with Shopify

A clear example of modern engagement trends is using web stories along with Shopify. Web stories can not only improve your store but also warm up your leads to it. They also give you an easy way to create dynamic content, which is slowly becoming the crux of modern marketing. Therefore, searching web stories will be worth your time, even if you don't wish to directly use them in Shopify.

Actively tackle marketing

How engaging your online store is will be dependent on your marketing. In order to work on customer engagement, you need to understand the customer's journey and their motivation for visiting your store. So, apart from working on your store, make sure that your marketing outside of it is also well optimized. Everything from branding, to content creation and email, offers to need to be in line with your store. You'd be hard-pressed to find an engaging store that doesn't do marketing well. After all, most of the knowledge you need for store engagement is easily used for marketing advancement.

Final thoughts

Once you understand the basics, making your Shopify online store more engaging can be manageable. You need to outline where your store falls flat when engaging customers, and improve upon those factors. But, before you do so, we would advise you to set up an analytics system to keep track of customer engagement. The process of solving a problem with engagement is one thing. But finding out precisely what the problem is is completely another. Without an analytic system in place you can hardly hope to outline what the issues are with the ongoing customer engagement, and what factors need working on.

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