With your focus centered on marketing your products to a diverse, global pool of customers, it is more important than ever to find ways to not only attract buyers but also keep them for the long haul. This is a proven way to expand your ecommerce business, enhance your brand and credibility and boost sales. Although bringing your goods and services to foreign customers has numerous challenges, working to maximize customer engagement will help you to overcome many of these obstacles.

Customer engagement defined.

Whether you are working with buyers in your local area or from around the globe, it is vital that they become connected to your brand, your business and your merchandise. This process involves several important components.

Providing customers with an omnichannel experience. 

Even though your customers live in a different country and will be submitting international payments on your ecommerce platform, you should still enrich their shopping experience by being available on several platforms. Should they have a question or concern or need to resolve a problem, they should be able to contact you via phone, email, on your website, and even through live chat. This remains true even if their native language differs from yours, which underscores the importance of establishing relationships with locally based financial institutions, customer service representatives, and legal experts familiar with the laws and regulations specific to the area.

Working hard to encourage your customers to get involved. 

Thanks to the internet, distance is no longer an insurmountable barrier when it comes to bringing shoppers into your brand family. In fact, social media provides you with the perfect mechanism to stimulate dialogues, share experiences and exchange all manner of textual and visual digital content. Once you begin to attract feedback from international shoppers, you will quickly discover that more will follow. This is because when consumers have the opportunity to read testimonials and view digital content from people like themselves, they will be more likely to trust an international company and ultimately become a customer themselves.

Launching an effective loyalty program. 

Regardless of where they live, customers love to be rewarded for buying your products on a regular basis. For your international consumers, participating in this type of initiative even helps to minimize the sting of the inevitable transaction fees they may need to pay in order to make purchases from you. Your loyalty program can furnish people with incentives for repeat business as well as for referring friends and family. Just be sure that you know your buyers’ preferences so that you can tailor a loyalty program with the free products or discounts that will be the most valuable to them. Setting up a tier structure through which shoppers can progress as they buy more merchandise can be a fun way to keep their interest level high.

Optimizing your website for international mobile users. 

Americans aren’t the only ones who are embracing their cellphones in all aspects of their lives, including for shopping. Start by using analytics to determine who your brand’s mobile audience is as well as the most popular keywords they are using for their searches. Then optimize your code to ensure that your website loads quickly and completely. This is especially important for many international customers who have to pay for data or have limited bandwidth. With this in mind, strive to create a mobile site that is pared down to only what buyers need to know, with more detailed information available via links.

Grabbing attention with push notifications. 

Smartphones also make it possible for you to communicate with your entire customer base or with segmented groups in real time. This keeps your brand at the top of their minds with incentives to re-engage, express an opinion, click on your website or explore a new product offering or relevant accessory.

Personalizing your relationship. 

Even if you have thousands of consumers in your database, analytics and technology now give you ways to tailor each person’s experience with your store and brand. By taking advantage of data that you have collected regarding a person’s shopping history, you can make targeted recommendations customized just for them. By entering into this bespoke interaction, you will also be able to stand out from your many competitors, an advantage that is even more important for international sellers.

Creating compelling video content. 

Far more than static text or images, videos are more visually appealing and immersive. What’s more, they are extremely sharable, providing you with free advertising when customers send them to their friends and family. Although it can seem a bit intimidating at first to create this type of content, it gets easier with time. Alternatively, you can hire an expert to make interesting and immersive video content that you can feature on your own web page as well as the social media sites your international customers prefer.

Soliciting customer feedback. 

When you actively ask for opinions from your buyers — particularly if you put some of their suggestions into action and publicize the fact that you did — your international customers will enter into an enriched relationship with you and your brand. More than merely transactional, this dynamic quickly becomes a dialogue in which each participant feels valued and listened to.

Once you implement a robust combination of these elements, your customer engagement strategy will truly become a cornerstone of your internationally-facing ecommerce business.

Getting the word out about your products to your global customers can represent even more of a challenge than you may have found when selling domestically. That is because you need to overcome more than stiff competition when entering into the international marketplace. Working hard to foster a culture that demonstrates to each foreign buyer that they are unique and valued members of your brand and team will encourage many of these buyers to become strong ambassadors, ultimately leading to enhanced products and services for consumers and elevated profits for you.