Making of a Merchant: Engaging Your Customers

How do you make sure that your customers return?

This is actually a really interesting question to answer because there are so many different ways to do this.  The hot thing right now is through content creation.  By creating content that your customers value, or find useful, they’re more likely to come back.

Starting up a blog on your site is the easiest and best way to do this.  Blogs are easy to maintain and they can be fun to engage with. Using a blog you can connect with your customers directly and have a conversation with them. There are many different things that you can post about in your blog.

The most obvious things to talk about include new merchandise, improvements to your store, or maybe getting more stock on an item.  I’ve also seen blogs that are used solely as a way to introduce promotions.  These are direct, but there’s a lot more that you can get out of your blog.

Your blog is your gateway to the customer.  That’s how I like to see it.  Use your own creativity and find out what exactly your customers would like to see.  Maybe it’s full out reviews of some of your products, maybe there are questions about the industry that you’re in that you need to dispel, or maybe you want to get your customer’s opinions about certain ideas.  These are all valid things to blog about.

With chocolateboardgames.com, I wanted to take my blog in a direction where I’m posting videos of people enjoying the product along with talking about rule variations on the games that I’m selling to make them even more fun.  To take it a step farther, I might have even asked customers to send their own videos.

Remember, your blog is subject to your own creativity.  Use your creativity to think up what your customers would like to see and at the same time, what matches your store image.  If you can do that well, you will be a blogging guru.