How to Create an Engaging Magento Shop

How do you set up an engaging Magento shop? If you’re already set on using Magento as your platform, then you can already check one important item off your list. It comes down to configuring your store and making the most of what Magento has to offer for ecommerce businesses.

In all honesty, creating an engaging online shop is a combination of a good number of things. You need to account for customer feedback, constantly adapt to customer behavior, use specific extensions and apps, and make the most of your content. Here are some tips that should help you start out with a bang.

Pick the Right Theme

Engaging customers and potential customers is not all about being flashy. Yes, an aesthetically pleasing storefront matters. But an ecommerce shop is not like a blog. It’s a website on which navigation is very important.

So, the first step in creating an engaging Magento shop is using a modern Magento theme that’s aptly optimized for ecommerce.

You want a theme that’s responsive on even lower-end devices. You also want something that’s compatible with all popular browsers to make it accessible to a wider range of visitors.

It’s also great if your theme has premade layouts for the important pages. But, you may also need a customizable theme. So be sure that you can input your own ideas.

What’s important is for visitors to have well-defined and easily accessible store pages, search engine features, filters, galleries, and so on. It’s probably a good idea to implement layered navigation into your theme as soon as possible. Even if you’re not launching your store with hundreds of products.

Never Underestimate the Power of a Blog

Customers can only shop for items for this long or often. If you’re not selling daily consumables, you might want customers to revisit your store often and not only when they’re looking to buy. Keep them always apprised of new products and they may have more ideas to buy more frequently.

One way of keeping customers engaged is to set up a blog. Many Magento themes feature dedicated blog sections. Monetize all that space. Don’t hard-sell products though, but focus more on providing unique insights, tips, advice, and news for customers and consumers.

It can be about the brands you’re promoting, your own store, future product releases, and a variety of things. You can also offer information that helps customers shop smarter and easier. One example of that, of course, would be using your store.

There’s only so much engagement that you can attract with product descriptions and catchy sales pitches. Some shoppers are content-driven and they want more than the basic sentences and spec sheets. Give your visitors a chance to do more than just shop on your store’s page and you’ll keep them engaged and coming back for more.

Customer Segmentation

Targeted advertising works for one simple reason. You’re speaking directly to a specific audience or demographic. You’re not just talking about everything you have to offer. More targeted than that, you’re promoting the products that those customers need and want the most.

There’s no room for fluff in targeted advertising. But with Magento’s analytics and customer segmentation extension, you can do just that. You can offer specific user groups a personalized experience whenever they visit your shop.

This means that their eyes would constantly land on things of interest. Customers never get bored or overwhelmed by the number of ads and notifications regarding products they have no history of buying.

To create the best customer segmentation, make use of Magento analytics, customer transaction history, behavior patterns, and wishlists. It’s not as hard as it sounds since most of these can be automated.

Offer Important Shopping Tools

Speaking of wishlists, this is definitely a tool that you should implement in your shop. Along with it, you can also include the following:

  • Sizing options
  • Quick buy button
  • Picture zoom
  • Product ranking
  • Product comparison
  • Stock availability
  • Emailing the link

These tools help to make the customer feel like they’re getting tons of information and other options to check up on the product. Something as simple as a comparison feature can be engaging enough to prevent users from leaving your store.

Why? Because it makes shopping easier. Potential customers won’t have to open up dozens of new browser tabs and switch between them to compare products. It also allows you to showcase multiple products at the same time, and doing so in a manner that keeps store visitors engaged.

Mobile Optimization

When creating a mobile page for any sort of online store, the presentation space you have to work with is much smaller. This means you have to do more with less and keep visitors engaged.

How do you do this? Well, Magento offers various ways to optimize a website for mobile devices. One is through specialized templates, skins, and layouts.

Mobile themes allow you to showcase everything you have to offer but in a way that’s not overwhelming for mobile device users. Not to mention that mobile themes are designed for functionality and fast navigation too.

If you’re not able to optimize your store’s page and make it fast-loading, visitors won’t stay long enough on it to be engaged by whatever content and products you have to show them.

Also consider being more selective about what you display on your store page for mobile users. Start with the best-looking or best-selling products first.

Limit the number of photos to speed up the loading times and highlight the most important bits of content. In other words, don’t rely just on the backend or on your developers. Get more creative with garnering interest from your mobile visitors.

Showcase Important Features on the Home Page/Landing Page

Every online store has a home page or a landing page. It’s where potential customers first land on your website, provided that they don’t get redirected from a product link elsewhere.

Some of the things you may want to highlight include payment methods. You would be surprised to see how many customers you can get by offering multiple payment methods. But, in most cases, they never find out about them until they reach the checkout page.

Pique their interest to spend more time on your store by showcasing some of the features or benefits of shopping there. Putting up icons for a few payment methods and payment processors won’t take up much screen space. This may even make some visitors more inclined to shop there even if you may not carry their favorite items.

If you have reward programs, free shipping, and other types of campaigns, make sure to highlight them. Also, use notifications so that they appear from time to time on all sections of your website. Remind potential customers that there are some cool benefits waiting if they stick with you and shop on your online store.

Some things should be highlighted for every customer. Things like free shipping, merchandise returns, gift cards, and returns for store credit. These are benefits that every customer would like to know about.

But, remember the customer segmentation feature on Magento. Use it to display specific discounts for high-volume buyers or niche customers.

Sometimes Less Is More

Obviously, there’s a lot of information you have to display on your webstore to drive interest and keep customers engaged enough to continue shopping and make a purchase. However, don’t mistake highlighting key aspects of your store with flooding every page with photos, fancy graphics, animations, and other things of that nature.

While some may be impressed, keep in mind that the heavier your website is the slower it loads. You really want to avoid this because there’s no way to keep people engaged if your pages won’t even load properly.