Do you remember the early days of your ecommerce brand, when you seemed to spend way too much time googling “How to Start a Business”? Well, now you made it – congratulations! – but your work is far from done.
For example, did you perhaps notice that your store traffic is OK, yet that’s not translating into higher sales? Or, maybe, customers end up placing items in their cart but fail to complete the purchase? Whatever your specific issue, we can help you get your ecommerce mojo back and drive your online store towards a brighter future.
Sure, you could opt for cutting-edge solutions, such as AI in contact center. But something as simple as interactive content can work wonders for your store.
Ensuring that your ecommerce store remains productive and successful over time requires keeping your online shoppers engaged and interested. How can you do that? That’s exactly what our guide right here is all about.
Interactive Content: Definition, Importance, and Benefits
You might already be aware that interactive content is one of the pillars of a great user experience. But what exactly qualifies as interactive content, anyway?
When we talk about “interactive content,” we refer to anything from written content to visual to animated content that encourages your audience to get engaged and participate with it. The opposite of interactive content is “passive content.” That includes anything from e-books to blogs, from guides to white papers, and it generally doesn’t demand the reader’s complete focus and engagement.
When your brand creates and shares interactive content, you’ll be able to reap lots of amazing rewards, including:
- Higher customer engagement
- Increased traffic and conversion rates
- Enhanced brand awareness
- More accurate customer insights
How Can You Incorporate Interactive Content into Your Ecommerce Strategy?
Now, let’s take a look at some practical ways to create and use interactive content to boost your ecommerce functionality and overall site.
1. Start Simple with a Chatbot
It may sound far from innovative or revolutionary, but a chatbot can still do great things for your online store. For example, suppose one of your customers has a question or doubt about one of your products, but because your store is online, there’s no actual sales representative to talk to.
Cue the chatbot. Friendly, knowledgeable, and always available, this little character is powered by artificial intelligence and works using Natural Language Processing (NLP), which makes it sound and interact pretty much like a human being.
With a chatbot, you can achieve a wide range of benefits, such as:
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Enhancing the user experience
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Helping customers navigate your online store
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Answering questions that enable customers to complete purchases
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Upselling or cross-selling your products
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Providing customer assistance in real-time
And, to ensure that your chatbot works well on mobile, too, remember to run regular, on demand performance testing.
2. Make Product Descriptions Actually Interesting
Another way to make your online store more interactive and personalized is by working on creating engaging product descriptions. Consider a product description like the following:
V-Neck sweater, in cashmere, available in five colors and a range of sizes. Great for fall and winter.
Now, that doesn’t really do much in the way of offering your online shoppers a real-life experience of your product, does it? How about, then, something along these lines:
When those crisp fall days arrive, nothing will make you feel comfier and cozier than our baby-soft, luscious cashmere sweater. Wrap yourself up in its natural warmth, and choose the color that best matches your style and personality – from mustard to emerald, from scarlet to cream, your fall and winter closet will look brighter than ever.
How do you think the above description would make an online shopper feel when it comes to providing a tangible feel for your product? Statistics prove us right, with surveys showing that 87% of shoppers believe that the way in which a product is described can highly influence their decision to buy it.
As you can see from the example above, you don’t need to write an essay in order to convey the main features that your product encapsulates. Just a couple of well-constructed sentences with evocative keywords can be enough to lead your online shoppers to purchase your fabulous items.
3. Keep Shoppers Engaged with Product Recommendation Quizzes
Product recommendation quizzes are another fantastic way to boost your customers’ engagement online – and drive them to make a purchase from your online store. Did you know, in fact, that not only are quizzes super-popular, but they’re also one of the most widely shared types of online content?
Yes – research from BuzzSumo has revealed that, on average, quizzes get shared a whopping 1,900 times, which is way more than any other content type. So, it’s time to get creative and put together a fun, interactive quiz for your ecommerce store.
First of all, you’ll want to make it relevant to your store and the type of products that you’re selling. For example, if you sell activewear clothing, you could write a quiz using Octane AI along the lines of “Discover your workout type.” This will include questions about your customers’ age, gender, eating habits, and preferred ways to exercise, and it might even ask them what their main hurdles and challenges are when it comes to finding the right clothes to work out in.
Then you’ll be providing a range of results depending on your customers’ answers, and each one of them will link to a specific product from your online store. And hey, presto! Something as quick, easy, and inexpensive as an online quiz can instantly generate a boost in customer engagement – and sales.
You can try Octane AI for free for 14 days and build your quiz in a few hours.
The benefits of quizzes for ecommerce stores:
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Learn more about your customers.
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Collect zero-party data from your customers.
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Increase conversions with more accurate product recommendations.
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Personalize your customer’s shopping experience.
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Grow your email and SMS lists.
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Boost AOV and LTV.
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Generate increased sales.
4. Include Captivating Interactive Videos
We couldn’t write a guide on interactive content without mentioning video, right? Yes, video content is still one of the most popular, effective, and successful ways to drive customer engagement.
However, video content itself isn’t necessarily interactive. To prompt your audience to make a decision (such as purchasing your products), you’ll need to create videos that put your customers in the center of the action, letting them decide how the story goes and making them feel in charge of its ending.
When it comes to video content for your ecommerce store, there are so many possibilities that they might feel a bit daunting. Let’s break them down for you then:
- Branched paths: these videos let you create a range of different storylines and allow your viewers to decide how they develop and end.
- 360-degree videos: these are multidimensional videos that offer your customers a complete, detailed view of your products from all their different angles.
- Shoppable videos: these videos let your online customers click on a product to get information on it – and buy it.
- Input videos: these videos allow your customers to enter specific information while they’re watching and offer personalized product recommendations and other interesting tips and resources.
To take your interactive game up a notch, why not also include a video chat for free? This will serve both as a way to engage your customers and offer them great, real-time customer service and support.
5. Consider Incorporating an Interactive Infographic
Infographics are great ways to enhance your ecommerce store engagement. Traditionally, an infographic consists of a series of visual elements and very little text. They’re compelling, easy to understand, and super-shareable.
You could, for example, use infographics to easily and clearly explain complex concepts, such as RDD. But what makes an infographic interactive? Take a look at the list of interactive features for infographics below:
- Scrolling icons
- Hover icons
- Quizzes, polls, or even videos
- Decision paths that are revealed based on your customers’ information
By incorporating these elements, your infographic will go from static to multidimensional, which instantly gives it a much more immersive, engaging quality. The result? More ecommerce traffic, more clicks, and more sales.
6. Make Your Emails Interactive, Too
Have you ever thought that you could turn your standard email newsletters and marketing campaigns into a powerful engagement tool? Interactive content lets you do that.
Consider this: the majority of emails that customers receive from ecommerce brands can be described as dull and samey-samey, at best. But standing out from the crowd isn’t too difficult – you’ve just got to inject a good dose of personalization into your emails.
In the case of email, personalization and interaction go hand in hand. Here are some foolproof ways to craft customized messages that make your customers go from “Nah” to “Wow”:
- Interactive quizzes (yes, again!)
- 360-degree views of your products
- Hover icons and special effects
- Video reviews and ratings
- Image carousels
One word of caution, though. In order to keep your emails readable and easy to digest, we recommend only choosing a maximum of two elements from this list and keeping the background text static and written in a clear font. Adding too many interactive elements to your email, in fact, might end up having the opposite effect: it could hugely slow down your email load times, making your customers feel frustrated and more inclined to delete your message.
7. Stand Out by Including a Calculator
Now, this might not necessarily apply to all ecommerce stores out there, but it’s still worth a mention on our list. Incorporating an online calculator could be a great way to boost customer engagement and guide more people towards a purchase.
With interactive calculators, you can ask your online customers to enter specific information in exchange for a customized result that gets delivered to them right away. And, guess what? Your brand can benefit from this in another, perhaps subtler way.
By collecting important data on your customers’ likes, dislikes, and needs, you’ll be able to prepare tailored offers and customize your communication with them to a whole new level. Take a look at some of the most popular types of interactive calculators below:
- CSAT score (customer satisfaction score) calculator
- ROI calculator
- Price calculator
- Savings and discounts calculator
- Investment calculator
Interactive Content for Ecommerce, Done Right
Incorporating interactive content into your ecommerce store is a winning strategy to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction and encourage loyalty and repeat purchases.
This happens because interactive content puts your customers at the center of the attention, lets them decide (almost) everything about their shopping experience, and provides them with fully customizable products, services, and solutions that add real value and meaning to both their customer experiences and their lives.
From captivating quizzes to calculators, from immersive infographics to compelling videos, the choices are almost boundless. The only question remaining is: what will you use on your ecommerce store?
