How Growing E-commerce Stores Stay Top-of-Mind With Potential Customers

Getting someone to visit your e-commerce store is one challenge. Getting them to come back is another. Most online shoppers visit and vanish, never to be heard from again,despite the best efforts of thousands of brands trying to capture their attention. Once you've hit the website or app that caught their eye, your job is done.

For growing e-commerce brands, this is the reality they face day after day. A potential customer lands on a product page, spends a few minutes browsing, and before long, their attention has drifted. It’s not personal; there are just too many competing distractions in the form of other stores that could meet their needs.

The primary purpose of e-commerce brand marketing used to be attracting attention and driving traffic. Now, it’s increasingly about learning how to keep that attention so that increasing numbers of visitors become customers rather than vanishing into thin air.

The Attention Economy

Online retail is mercilessly competitive. Consumers have limitless choice and no loyalty unless incentivized by something other than the product itself. Even if someone loves a specific store, it’s highly unlikely they’ll remember it on a busy online shopping day without being actively reminded.

Email marketing used to do the trick. Build an email list, send out regular newsletters, and people would remember to check in on a store. While email marketing is still a thing, it has been partially undermined by how ubiquitous it has become. The average person now receives dozens of email marketing messages each day. Open rates are in a race to the bottom.

E-commerce brands once turned to social media for keeping their brands visible after that crucial first visit. The premise was simple: build an audience on one or more platforms and then share content regularly enough to keep people coming back. Organic reach on most platforms has plummeted though.

Reaching customers through social media now requires paid ads for many of the same reasons email marketing has become more challenging. Customers scroll through social media posts, can easily ignore or delete an ad unless the timing is perfect and engaging with content is getting increasingly rare as users encounter hundreds of posts every day.

New and Improved Channels for Staying Top-of-Mind

The fastest-growing e-commerce stores have moved away from relying solely on emails and social media channels. They’ve embraced several channels to keep themselves visible rather than hoping people will get around to checking an email or scrolling through a feed.

One channel that many of the fastest-growing stores are using is browser-based push notifications that allow them to reach customers even when they aren’t actively shopping online. Platforms that enable a push ads network make this possible by allowing shops to send notifications about promotions or other updates directly to potential customers without interrupting what they are doing.

This creates touches that have customers see these notifications instead of competing with numerous other emails in overcrowded inboxes. Push notifications can be used for everything from promoting new products to encouraging return visits.

Text messages may be the most overlooked return strategy but on the verge of a

renaissance. SMS messages have far higher open rates than emails, which makes them an attractive option for brands looking to stay in touch with past customers.

That said, people tolerate far fewer messages on SMS than they do on email, making it essential for brands to be smart about how they deploy this strategy if they decide to use it. The most successful stores use SMS channels only for high-value messages such as shipping notifications or alerts about products that customers have expressed interest in.

Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads can also help e-commerce brands stay visible after visits as they once again scour the web. Retargeting works for people who visit the store and abandon cart. In this case, retargeting ads will follow them around, reminding them of the item they thought about purchasing and showing them ads for something else that they may prefer.

Retargeting also works for higher-value items where someone needs time to think about a potential purchase. Instead of bombarding them with ads until they buy or die as low-quality retargeting tends to do, growing stores master the art of subtle retargeting that makes the item seen everywhere without making people annoyed enough to purchase elsewhere.

Bringing It All Together

Stores that understand the importance of staying visible to their potential clients don’t pick one channel and hope for the best. Smart e-commerce stores create an ecosystem in which multiple channels work together without overburdening potential customers with messages.

A customer might go to the store, look around, receive a push notification a few days later alerting them to a sale, see a retargeting ad promoting the product they initially looked at, and then receive an SMS message alerting them that their desired item has finally returned to stock.

Every touchpoint for every store has to be coordinated so as not to annoy. The last thing anyone wants is a dozen different messages from a dozen different sources waiting for them when they open up their phone or computer in the morning.

The “sweet spot” for how often and how many notifications return to your customers is going to differ across business categories and items; high-involvement decisions tend to result in multiple touchpoints while everyday purchases require limiting touches.

The key is timing notifications so they are sent at convenient times rather than inconvenient ones. A notice sent during business hours about a flash sale gives people time to consider it. A notification sent at 3 AM just annoys people. The sweetest timing also applies to cart abandonment reminders which work best when sent 1-24 hours after abandonment instead of immediately or a week later.

Creative Touches That Keep Customers Coming Back

Staying visible is not just about returning value. It’s more about giving people a reason to care when they see your brand name in their inbox or notifications. Generic forget-me-nots only count as noise in an already overcrowded world. Unique personalized recommendations or nostalgic messages that genuinely remind people why they visited get a qualified response.

These growing stores put significant energy and effort into making the experience for returning customers seamless once they do return. After all, the point of being visible is making sure that it’s easy for someone to purchase from you after hearing about you again. Slow loading pages, hard-to-navigate websites, and long checkouts are problems unique to

individual brands that even creative marketing tactics can’t fix.

What Actually Drives Return Visits

Quality also plays an essential role in ensuring customers come back regardless of how clever a return strategy might be. Many brand managers build their business return strategies around exploring new and improved channels while building their email lists as backup systems in case other systems fail. The fastest-growing e-commerce stores understand this reality and create clever but non-annoying systems around returning customers that balance visibility and customer experience.