How to enhance customer engagements throughout the customer journey with Hippo

It is the journey, not the destination that matters. This familiar saying can ring well for marketers and businesses. The purchase or transaction is not what makes your relationship strong. It’s your engagement with your customers. How easy and joyful their experience is with you and what you do to enhance customer engagements throughout the customer journey.

What is a Customer Journey?

A customer journey map depicts the customer journey visually (also called the buyer journey or user journey). It enables you to communicate the story of your consumers’ engagements with your brand across all touchpoints. Whether your consumers contact you through social media, email, live chat, or other channels, mapping the customer journey ensures that there are no gaps in engagements.

Optimizing the customer experience at each stage of the journey focuses on your customers and places them at the centre of everything. This creates a sense of loyalty and keeps people coming back for more. As a result, brand loyalty grows, resulting in happy consumers that select your brand over others.

Let us consider an example:

You have a grocery store that has been providing quality and fresh groceries across your locality. And you decided to start your online marketplace(either your shop or you became an aggregator for grocery providers across your town).

To know more about starting your grocery store, explore Yelo.

Inviting Prospects

The very first thing you can do is gather all the information you already have about your customers, get it in a CSV and upload it on Hippo. Alternatively, you can get the phone no. of everyone who has paid you online, and send them the same invitation.

From there you can send them a notification on WhatsApp or SMS telling them about your shop going online and now they can get groceries delivered to them in a matter of minutes without getting out of their home. Invite them to signup and ask their friends and families to sign up too for a referral bonus.

Targeting incomplete signups:

There can be few people who left in between signup. Maybe they filled in their email or no. and nothing else. Hippo can save even the incomplete data and let you again invite them through email or SMS to complete the signup, incentive can be used to motivate them.

You also need to welcome them on your website. With Hippo, you can use beautiful templates provided by default or create one from scratch, and add content that is relevant to you and the customers.  Hippo will send emails automatically as soon as someone signs up within seconds without you worrying about it. 

Improving purchase experience

When people start exploring, Hippo keeps you aware of what people are looking for and what they are adding to the cart. When a customer places an order, he has to be notified with a thank you message. Proper follow-ups on the order and delivery instructions go hand in hand with delivery management. Numerous studies have proved that people love to get regular updates on their orders.

But business isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The majority of visitors to your website are not going to make the purchase. Your visitors can be categorized into two segments:

• those who only explore your marketplace
• those who show intent on buying, i.e., those who have added items to the cart.

And even those who put items in their cart are not sure whether they will make the purchase. People leaving items in the cart and not completing the purchase is called “cart abandonment.” The average cart abandonment rate is around 69.57%, whereas for retail it is around 72.8%. This means less than 28 out of 100 people who add items to the cart usually make the purchase.

Recovering abandoned carts.

Hippo can not only track people who leave items in the cart and segment them, it can also help you target them. You can show a popup to any person clicking back on the cart or checkout page and ask them for the reason they are leaving. Hippo can immediately send a personalised message to the customers, telling them about the items that are left in the cart and a link to continue where they left off. A  discount voucher can also be provided to motivate them along with previous customer reviews and anything else that would help them complete the purchase. You can use any channel to target abandoned carts; email, WhatsApp, SMS, push notifications, etc.

A study showed that personalizing retargeted ads can lead to ROIs of over 1,300%, and that’s with Facebook ads that have a conversion rate of 9.21%. Not everyone uses Facebook either. Now imagine if you could send these same retargeted messages to all your visitors, on a platform where they will see it, and that too, for free! Hippo can send personalised messages to people on WhatsApp, which is used by almost everyone and has an open rate of over 98%.

Also read Cart abandonment recovery through WhatsApp.

Turning visitors into buyers

You also have to target window shoppers (who are visiting your marketplace but haven’t bought anything yet, and inactive users (who have not visited your platform in a while). You can provide first-time buyer discounts to window shoppers and provide product updates to the latter.

Retaining customers

Now that people have bought groceries from you, there is another thing that needs to be catered to; customer churn. Churn rate, also known as attrition rate, is the rate at which customers stop doing business with a company over a given period. You need to retain your customers because customer acquisition is costly, and you will eventually run out of customers if you can only sell once to a customer. 

You can’t eliminate your customer churn. But you can do numerous things to minimise it. All you have to do is make sure your customers don’t face any problems. If they do, problems are sorted as soon as possible, and ultimately a connection has to be built. You can do this by:

Providing real-time support

Never underestimate the ramifications of poor customer service. When a customer has a bad experience, he will never buy from you again and will tell others about it too. Even mediocre service can have disastrous consequences for your business.

You should always strive to provide exceptional and memorable client service. This could help you identify problems you were previously unaware of. And a customer who has an exceptional experience may become an advocate for your brand among his friends and family.

Personalizing customer experience.

Personalisation is one of the most powerful tools you can use when it comes to improving customer engagement. Personalisation can help you build trust, enhance brand loyalty and boost sales. The more personalised your services are, the more likely customers are to favour your brand over your competitors. When businesses take a personal approach to their marketing strategies, they show consumers that each relationship is unique and important. That’s something consumers appreciate because it shows that the company cares about them.

There’s no such thing as too much personalisation for today’s customers. Customers crave brands that understand their individual needs and provide personalized experiences every time they interact with them. And companies know this. A recent study found that 77% of businesses already provide some form of customer experience personalization.

Read how to reduce customer churn and increase retention.

Conclusion:

Jimmy Johnson once said, “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.” Knowing when and how to engage with which of your customers can provide you with that ‘extra’ and give you a competitive edge.

Hippo with RFM analytics can help you understand which visitors you need to target so that you don’t waste your resources and can help you set your priorities straight. e.g. you can’t spend the same resources on your visitors who add items to the cart and those who don’t.

Moreover, Hippo can reach out to every one of your customers and engage with them on a personal level, and provide support to them before during and after their purchase.

Hippo can be integrated into your existing POS in a matter of seconds. Book a demo to get a 14-days free trial.