5 Reliable Ways To Boost Your Social Media Engagement

Achieving customer engagement is one of the key aspects to boost the conversions. This engagement is not just essential on the website. In the world where the social media presence is the deciding factor, staying in close knit with the customers at the various social media platforms is the key.

Are struggling in achieving this milestone for your eCommerce store? Then, you are at the right place. For all the online marketers, the write-up has compiled some of the key points that may help you enhance your visibility on the social media. Check them out.

Understand the audience behavior

Finding your niche market is the key component of creating a successful engagement. While the hitting the right target audience can help you customize the campaign, getting an insight of the user behavior will help you strike the pain areas. Use the social analytical tool to understand what they are looking for and what are the things that intrigue their interest. This will help you refine and customize your messages as well as posts. Choose the right channel for promoting your products. The choice of the social media platform should depend on the user behavior. For instance, Facebook and Instagram are perfect for fashion stores while the sites offering educational stuff should target LinkedIn, Twitter.

Select the right time for the post

A study reveals that a Facebook post goes ‘stale’ after about 1 hour and 20 minutes. While on Twitter, 95% of re-tweets happen in an hour. So, no matter how strong your content, you need to find the right time in order to get maximum hits. Compare the activity of the audience on different days and different hour of the day. Post the most engaging contents when the users are most active on the Internet. Here are some of the suggestions for posting on the various social media platforms.

• Twitter – Post at least 14 times per day. The best timing for the post starts from midnight to 10:00 p.m. Never post more than once per hour.
• Facebook – 2 posts per day, seven days a week, 10:08 a.m. and 3:04 p.m.
• LinkedIn – 1 post per day is enough, and the ideal time is 8:14 a.m. No post is recommended on weekends

Provide Social Login options

Studies have shown that 77% of users believe that social login is a good registration solution. These figures explains the importance of social login option in your eCommerce store. The login and checkout option reduces the risk of the abandoned cart and reduces bounce as well as exit rates. Moreover, it even provides you with the social media details of the users. This can be further used for follow-ups and reminders ads. These follow up notifications have been observed to have been to have more conversion. At the same time, it is less annoying for the customers than the email and SMS prompts. The Prestashop Social Login plugin is one such option that can provide your visitors to browse through their social media account without going through the lengthy registration process.

Response quickly

Just engaging the customers by attracting their likes and comment s are not enough. The customers are more likely to use these platforms to file their complaints and dissatisfactions.  Be active enough to resolve the queries and take the negative feedbacks of the consumers further. Any complaint will attract double the attention than the positive ratings. While the social media platforms offer a convenient means to stay in touch with your prospective customers, it may turn hazardous if not handled properly. You need to stay on your toes while sending your responses. Auto-responders may add to the negative image. At the same time, make sure that you appreciate the positive response of the users as well.

Engage with the audience on a personal level

When every eCommerce business unit is adopting the same strategy, you need to find out a way to stand out from the crowd. Creating a personal connection with the customers is the way. Many eCommerce giants send birthday wishes along with their product promotion mails. The personalized messages will help create an emotional bond with the consumers. However, make sure that you intervene in the personal space of the customers. 

Conclusion

Most of the eCommerce store users are still on the fence about introducing the social login option on their store. While other who have installed this option have failed to make use of the same for boosting the social engagement. The Knowband store offers a simplified option to add this functionality on the various eCommerce platforms such as Prestashop, Magento or OpenCart. The social login plugins facilitate the registration process and help the store owners tap useful information. Find your solution and take your business to the next level.

5 Time-tested Add-ons that can Tackle your Abandoned Carts

Shopping cart abandonment is a prominent and likely inevitable problem in the eCommerce scenario. Ignore the situation is like running the risk of missing out on a potential honeypot of new and repeat customers. The curse of abandoned cart depends on how you handle it. You can either ignore it or you can find out ways to handle it. This blog has specifically compiled some of the addon and plugins that can come handy for the Prestashop store owners. The users that didn’t reach the payment is actually an opportunity for the future. The Prestashop abandoned cart module can utilize the unconverted accounts for future sales by following up with the users through email pitches and other such tactics. By sending reminder emails, you will be able to follow-up with those prospects who failed to complete the purchase and left their cart abandoned.

At the same time, the below-listed addons can reduce the possibility of abandonment. Arm up your store with these plugins and take your business to the next level.

Social login addon

Not having the option of guest login is one of the main reasons for the abandoned cart. While you can always give the option of guest login to your visitors, providing them the option of social logins is another way to convert these random visitors into the lead. The Prestashop Social login plugin is one such addon that provides a one-click check in for the users. 

Here are some of the features offered by the plugin.

• Allows the customers to sign-up directly using their social accounts. The Quick login makes shopping easier by reduces unwanted check in process. 
• It is mobile, tablet and desktop Responsive. It is quite easy to install this plugin on your Prestashop store. 
• The admin can enable/disable social accounts from the back end of the web store. 
• It helps track the most popular social accounts used by customers based on the reports generated. 
• Thus, enables follow-ups and future conversions.
• The extension can be used on any eCommerce store and is compatible with multiple themes 

One page checkout

The lengthy checkout process and long forms are one of the turns offs for the online shoppers. Keep the entire checkout process as simple as possible. The Prestashop one-page checkout module is one of the ways to keep the checkout process hassle-free. Minimizing your checkout flow. it makes sure that the visitor is not annoyed just before making the payment.

The module can optimize the conversions by offering following benefits to the users.

• It not just makes the checkout process fast, but secure as well.
• It has an in-built Facebook/Google+ Login.
• It enables product image preview even in cart section
• Offers option to add coupon code at the checkout page along with the convenience of changing the product quantity in the cart
• Allows the user to remove any product from the cart
• The plugin is mobile and tabs responsive and compatible with all browsers

Return manager

Nothing can stop the customer from placing the order more than the lack of return and refund guarantee. And in order to ensure the customers, you need to be sure of handling the return request efficiently. The Prestashop return manager takes this pressure off your shoulder. It adds the functionality of managing the return requests for any order placed by registered or Guest user on a PrestaShop store.

The features offered by the plugin to the users are as follows.

• It provides 3 options namely Get Credit, Replace or Refund to customers 
• Creating an interface in between the customer and the admin, it allows fast processing of the return requests.
• The customers can even return the partial quantity of purchased products.
• The mobile responsive addon allows the shopper to view his return status and history in his account.

Payment options

The prices of the product and the shipping charges are considered to be the main reason for abandoned carts. As the end-users can always compare the prices of the product with competitor site. However, this is not the only reason. Not providing enough payment option to the shoppers can cost you some conversions. Prestashop Paypal Direct Payment is one way to allows the admin to get the payment into his Paypal account directly even from the customers who don't have a Paypal account. Thus, the customers can make the payment using their credit or debit cards.

Listed below are some of the benefits of using this extension.

• The module does not redirect the users to PayPal page for making the payments.
• Customers will make the payments right from the website interface itself.
• The module supports 24 currencies from around 190 countries

One click checkout

The unwanted hassles and too many procedures to be followed before landing on the payment gateway is hazardous for an eCommerce store. Imagine a person already has a few products added in the cart, but he has no intentions of buying them as yet. Now if he wants to buy one product, he'll have to remove all the products from the cart, in order to make the payment for one. He would rather switch to another site than getting all these edition and deletion. The one click checkout module allows your customers to do a quick checkout with a single product without modifying their existing cart. Thus, he can make the transaction of a single product without removing the products from the cart.

Features offered by the addon is as follows:

• Can be Customize as per your need. 
• The 'Buy Now' button can be easily customized to match the theme.
• Holds the current cart and checks out the current product only.
• It can be translated in 17 different languages.

Over to you

Despite the fact that 67.45% of the customers are not completing their purchases online is scary for some eCommerce store owners, it opens up a huge opportunity for them. Identify the vital reasons of conversion killers that affect a user’s shopping behavior and capture his interests with innovative improvision. 

Simple Approach To Protect Your Customer Data From Hackers

Have you ever been hacked? If No, that’s great.

Have you ever been on an attack but saved the data breach? If yes, congrats because you are serious about keeping your customer data damn safe. 

In today's scenario, it should not come as surprise if someone attempts a breaching into your customers' data. It has become pretty general nowadays considering that more than 9 billion customers data record have already been stolen by the hackers since 2013. 

So, if you have ever been hacked or there has been a breach of your customer data, it's because you have not applied correct security measures to safeguard your customer data.

How would you safeguard yourselves?

Hackers with higher ambition would try to breach into the big names but the smart ones will mark the medium and small enterprises into their list. The small and medium enterprises generally leave a loophole in an attempt to save some cost, and that’s where the black hats get a chance to peek into the customer data.

If you want to secure your website and customers data from breaches, you can take a few simple steps like these to immune your site.

1. Use a secure social login plugin

Depending on your CMS, or eCommerce platform search, analyze, test, and implement a secure social login plugin for customer logins. Social login allows the customers and users to sign-up or login to your website using their social media account credentials.

The traditional account registration through emails addresses is not much liked by the users. Moreover, the email based registrations leave the customer data vulnerable to breaches and attacks since you are storing the account authentication information on your server. 

By using social login you can easily eliminate this vulnerability as with this, customers don't need a dedicated email address and password to log in. They simply use their Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Instagram account to login. 

The authentication data is just verified by your website, you don’t really store them on your server. That part is still safe on the social network account of the user. So, when you don’t even store the customer authentication data with you, how can someone steal it from you? Not possible. That’s why implementing a social login on your website is damn crucial.

Knowband offers the social login modules and plugins for Magento, PrestaShop, and OpenCart. It's a secure module that offers more than 14 social login options like Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, Yahoo, and much more. 

• Social login for Magento
• Social login for PrestaShop
• Social login for OpenCart

2. Host on cloud 

Some of you might disagree with this point, as the cloud might not be able to serve best for the bigger enterprises. However, it is still the best way for small and medium sized businesses to host on the cloud. Microsoft Azure and AWS can be a good choice. In fact, the Azure Marketplace offers the hosting for almost every popular platform. Recently Microsoft has also partnered with PrestaShop for scalable cloud hosting and maintenance solutions. 

Hosting on bigger cloud servers like Azure and AWS will secure your website with the high-end security these companies provide.

3. Encrypt your customer data

It doesn't matter if you have hosted on a private or a cloud server, hackers might eventually find a way to your customer data. In that case, the best way would be to encrypt your customers' data using high-end hashing algorithms. This encryption will ensure that no one else can decipher the data except the one who has the key.

In this way, even if someone even breaches into your customer data, they won't get anything useful except the gibberish and encrypted texts. Of course, you will have to keep your decryption key safe with you.

4. Use two step authentication 

Two step authentication will add an extra layer of security to your customer login. The customers after entering the correct credentials will be asked to provide a temporary One time password sent to their mobile number for logging into their user account on your website.

By using this authentication process on your site you can ensure a safe vault for the customer data. Even if someone is smart enough to bypass the first step authentication of email and password, he won't be able to log in until the second step verification is done. As the access to the second step authentication data will be with the original user, it's not possible for the black hat to breach into the account. 

A similar two step verification is also used by the Google for securing the Gmail accounts.

5. Don’t give full access to every employee and don’t encourage BYOD

The biggest loopholes are created from within the organization. I am not pointing that there is a mole in your organization, but even a small mistake by your employees can put your customers' data at risk. To prevent such vulnerability, it best if you allow only a limited access to your employees according to the job they perform. Provide the access to the customer data to only the limited people whose tasks are associated with the customer information. The lesser the access to the customer data the more it is secured against breaches due to mistakes.

BYOD or Bring Your Own Device culture can be great for the convenience of your employees but not for the security of your customer data and other crucial data. It's best to use the company's hardware for all the organization's related work. If employees are allowed to use their own hardware, it obvious their system will have crucial data and information stored on them. Just imagine what could happen to the data if any of such systems get lost? Moreover, it is also not ensured that employees' private device is well secured with latest updates and anti-virus protection. It's best to give them the well-secured company's hardware and do not allow them to do any office work on any other private system. 

Final thoughts

It's a simple list of simple ways to achieve a great security of your customers' data. You can realize these tips without facing any hard time. Just the straight forward cautions to get serious security. Finally, you must understand the importance of safeguarding your customers' information, it's no more an option but a necessity. Sooner you realize, better it is for your business.