Have you ever wondered how other leading ecommerce stores manage customer support, especially when they are using Gorgias? We love identifying these trends and wanted to see what integrations have been the most useful in our customers' ecommerce tech stacks so far.

In order to help you bring all your customer data in one place and offer truly exceptional, personalized support, here are the top 10 integrations being used by Gorgias customers:

1. Email, specifically Gmail
2. Gorgias Chat
3. Facebook and Instagram
4. SMS apps
5. Klaviyo
6. Recharge
7. Phone, either our native solution or Aircall
8. Yotpo
9. Smile
10. ChannelReply

1. Email, specifically Gmail

If you've been worried that email is becoming obsolete in the age of chat boxes and SMS support, don't be. Email is the leading support channel on Gorgias, used by 67% of customers.

This make sense. While faster, more instantaneous methods of communications are becoming common, email is still the primary channel to answer complicated support questions and send transactional messages like shipping updates, return logistics, and order/cancellation confirmations.

Of email integrations, Gmail is the leading provider with 59% of Gorgias customers having it active.

To learn more about our Gmail integration, click here.

2. Gorgias chat

Chat support is the second most common channel we see our merchants using, in order to offer real-time communication in addition to traditional emails or tickets. And thanks to our native chat integrations, it's easier than ever to launch a chat widget on your website.

57% of Gorgias merchants use our native chat integrations to offer real-time support.

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This allows your shoppers to talk to an agent faster, but also presents a great opportunity to implement self-service options so they can help themselves. (Our Self-Service Chat Portal can help with that!)

3. Facebook and Instagram

Managing inquiries on social media and gaining insights into the conversations happening in those communities is te next priority for our merchants.

Over 50% of Gorgias brands are integrated with Facebook and/or Instagram.

Our Facebook integrations (which also includes Instagram) allows you to manage messages, comments, ad comments, and mentions as tickets in Gorgias. This gives your agents visibility into every conversation no matter where it happens, and empowers them to reply directly to shoppers without having to log into separate platforms or coordinate with your brand's social media team.

"The Gorgias-Facebook-Shopify integration is amazing. We've stopped hunting and matching Facebook users to customer accounts on Shopify. The information we need is surfaced so we can respond better and faster. Gorgias allows us to operate both ecommerce and social commerce business seamlessly." - Guita Gopalan, Chief Revenue Officer at Ellana

Read their story here.

Nervous about the quantity of tickets that would be created from integrating social channels with Gorgias? Don't be. You can use Rules to filter out comments your team doesn't need to worry about (like comments that only consist of emojis), or even auto-assign tickets to specify agents/teams so no one has to triage the requests.

4. SMS apps

Text message marketing has become an incredible revenue generator for ecommerce brands, but it also opens another new communication channel with your customers: SMS.

In order to make the most of SMS as a marketing tool, you also need to be ready to support it when customers reply back with questions. That's where Gorgias comes in; we integrate with SMS apps to help you connect your agents with shoppers sooner and collect all customer conversations in one place.

Over 23% of Gorgias customers are integrated with an SMS tool.

The top SMS apps connected to Gorgias are:

• Attentive, used by 10% of merchants
• Postscript, used by 8% of merchants
• SMS Bump, used by 5% of merchants

"Working with Postscript and Gorgias gave us the leverage to keep customers close to deliver the best possible customer experience. It is super helpful to have a full view of the customer, all in one-spot." -Eli Weiss, Director of CX at OLIPOP

Read their full story here.

5. Klaviyo

The next app on our list will help you collaborate with your marketing team to create a best-in-class shopper experience, whether they are interacting with the support team or receiving the latest promotion.

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing app for businesses that sell online. Our integration connects the two platforms, allowing you to use the data to create better campaigns.

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17% of Gorgias merchants are integrated with Klaviyo.

With this integration, you can push Gorgias events into Klaviyo for advances and customer-centric email segmenting.

For example, here are some of the ways we've seen customers use the two tools together:

• Promoting sales or new products to customers who had positive support experiences to drive upsell and revenue generation from support.
• Excluding customers with open support tickets from promotional messaging campaigns.
• Sending target coupons or discounts to win back customers who reported poor support experiences.

You can learn more about our Klaviyo integration or activate it here.

6. Recharge

The most common integration will help with subscription management, which is probably no surprise: Even with a great payment platform, subscription questions and transactions tend to result in a lot of support requests.

Recharge us a subscription and recurring payment platform for ecommerce sites, and helps you turn transactions into relationships.

15% of Gorgias merchants are integrated with Recharge.

Connect Gorgias and ReCharge for a simple way to manage customer subscriptions and customer service from one convenient location.

When you integrate Gorgias and Recharge, you can:

• Display ReCharge subscriptions next to support tickets in Gorgias, to gather full customer context before replying to questions.
• Cancel subscriptions, re-activate subscriptions, or refund a charge (either partially or totally) right from the Gorgias helpdesk.
• Embed ReCharge data in your Macro replies to automate the most common support questions.

Click here to learn more about our Recharge integration.

7. Phone, either our native solution or Aircall

It's clear that digital support is the first priority for most of our merchants, as seen by email, chat, and social media being the top three integrations on our list.

Sometimes it's nice to have a real conversation with your customers, however, which is why phone integrations are next.

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12% of merchants offer phone support.

Many use our Aircall integration, which is great if you need the advanced feature a dedicated tool like Aircall provides. If you're just adding phones for the first time, we released a native phone integration this year that's helping merchants begin to offer voice support.

8. Yotpo

Beyond answering customer questions, your support team may want to engage with reviews from shoppers in order to address issues, win back unhappy customers, and interact with your biggest fans!

Yotpo, a platform for ecommerce marketing and reviews, is great for this.

Over 8% of Gorgias merchants have activated our Yotpo integration.

The integration allows you to:

• Display customer's Yotpo data un Gorgias customer Activity Sidebar such as loyalty points, provided ratings, latest reviews, etc.
• Manage customer loyalty plans (change point balance, assign VIP tier, honor redemptions, and send rewards) from the Gorgias sidebar.
• Respond to a question with an answer either publicly or privately as new tickets.
• Moderate customer reviews (product and site) and questions from within Gorgias as new tickets.
• Request reviews from a customer.

Click here to learn more about our Yotpo integration and activate it.

9. Smile

No one knows your shoppers quite like your support team, which makes an integration with a loyalty app a natural fit! Smile.io is a favorite of Gorgias merchants, which helps you manage a reward program and build strong relationships with your newest and most loyal customers.

6% of Gorgias merchants integrate with Smile.io.

With this integration, you'll be able to see customer loyalty information right next to tickets in Gorgias, so every agent knows when they are talking to a new customer or one of your VIPs! You can also use this information to help triage tickets or separate ticket views by loyalty status (which is great for managing different levels of support SLAs).

To learn more about our integration with Smile.io and activate it for your account, click here.

10. ChannelReply

If your shop sells on public marketplaces beyond your own Shopify store, the final app on our list is a must. ChannelReply helps you manage messages from Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.

With our integration, you can then manage all those messages right from your helpdesk, eliminating the need for your agents to open different browser tabs for each platform.

Over 5% of Gorgias merchants use the ChannelReply integrations.

To learn more about ChannelReply and activate the integration for your account, click here.

And there you have it: The top 10 integrations with Gorgias in 2021! We hope this helps inspire you how you can use your helpdesk to offer exceptional, conceptual support and how to streamline the tools your store uses everyday to grow your business.

To get more ecommerce tool suggestions, check out our list of 150+ great tools. And to view all integrations with our platform, visit the Gorgias App Store.

Gorgias connects to over 65 leading ecommerce applications, giving you the power to centralize customer data in your helpdesk, perform support actions from a single place, and streamline your store’s toolkit. 

This month, we launched 12 new integrations: 

1. SMS Live
2. Checkout Champ
3. CallHippo
4. Konnektive
5. TXTFi
6. Shopney
7. ReturnLogic
8. Stateset
9. Gatsby
10. Trustpilot
11. ShipBob
12. AfterShip

Read on to learn how you can use these tools to help manage your store, and visit the Gorgias App Store to activate them today!

1. SMS Live

SMS Live is an SMS texting app for Shopify and Shopify Plus. When you add this integration, you’ll see customer information from SMS Live in the Gorgias sidebar, so your agents don’t have to switch between the two applications. You’ll also be able to respond to SMS messages within the Gorgias helpdesk or switch those conversations to a different channel, such as email or phone. 

2. Checkout Champ

Checkout Champ simplifies the checkout process and makes it easy to charge for subscription services or one-click upsells. With the Gorgias integration, you can manage all of your customer interactions to include refunds, fulfillment tracking, purchase alterations, and all messaging and tickets.

3. Konnektive

Konnektive is a cloud-based CRM and order management solution that helps optimize, centralize, and automate ecommerce business processes. With this integration, you can display order information right next to tickets in Gorgias and update customer information between the two platforms. It automatically comes with 10 pre-built Macros, to help you get started right away!

4. TXTFi

TXTFi allows brands to leverage purchasing through SMS and ensures side-by-side customer support to communicate with customers in real time. With this integration, you can manage SMS conversations from TXTFi as tickets in Gorgias in order to quickly connect your shoppers with a live agent. 

5. Shopney

Shopney is a mobile app builder for Shopify and Shopify Plus that lets you build an app for your store in just one day. With this integration, the conversations that happen through Shopney’s in-app live chat can be managed in the Gorgias helpdesk for a streamlined experience for your agents. 

6. ReturnLogic

ReturnLogic helps D2C brands give their customers an easy returns process while automating workflows for their customer service and warehouse teams. With the Gorgias integration, you can embed the Gorgias Chat Box right on the ReturnLogic portal, giving shoppers another opportunity to make their return, exchange, or warranty process as smooth as possible. You can also manage these chat conversations in Gorgias and populate ReturnLogic data into Gorgias tickets. 

7. Stateset

Stateset is your single source of truth for managing your online business and automating your commerce operations. The Stateset AI Responder app uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to quickly and accurately build data-driven responses ready for your customer service team to approve. When you connect the Gorgias integration, you can start generating intelligent and dynamic responses directly from Gorgias or from within Shopify. 

8. Gatsby

See Instagram insights when responding to tickets, track Instagram mentions and engagement for your brand, and automate valuable influencer workflows all in Gorgias. 

With the Gorgias and Gatsby integration, you can now identify when influential customers are reaching out for support and take that into account when prioritizing tickets, asking them to share positive support experiences and more.

9. Trustpilot Reviews

Trustpilot Reviews is a customer review platform. With the Gorgias integration, you can streamline review responses with machine learning and AI. Trustpilot Review data is displayed in the Gorgias Customer Sidebar, ready to be leveraged by agents to reward happy customers and help recover customers at risk of churn.

10. ShipBob

ShipBob is an ecommerce fulfillment solution for online brands. With the Gorgias integration, you can sync customer and order information associated with a specific ShipBob account into the corresponding Gorgias account. You can also display data from ShipBob in the Customer Sidebar, and use that data in Gorgias Macros to automate responses to common claims. 

11. AfterShip

AfterShip is an automated shipment tracking platform for e-commerce businesses. With the Gorgias integration, you can sync and display all customer shipment tracking data in the Customer Sidebar, allowing your agents to quickly answer questions without switching applications. 

To add these integrations and discover more, go to the Gorgias App Store.

Instagram is really the perfect social channel for Ecommerce brands. You can show off your products, share user-generated content, and engage with your community to build brand loyalty. 

All that engagement is great, except it adds a task to your plate that quickly multiplies as your brand grows: You have to interact back. Or at least you should, if you want to capitalize on all that engagement!

Sometimes your marketing team or social media manager will handle Instagram replies, but sooner or later you’ll start to get the “Where is my order?” (or “WISMO”) question from shoppers, regardless of the content being shared. This can result in an inefficient workflow between social and support teams to communicate the question, track down an order status, and get a reply back to the customer. 

That’s why Gorgias integrates directly with Instagram (and other social media platforms), to streamline the management and interaction with top-level comments, ad comments, private messages, and replies. Instead of going back and forth between your Ecommerce platform, the social team, and the support team, you can empower your agents to reply quickly and accurately to any question that comes in, thanks to over 50+ integrations with the leading Ecommerce apps. (So all the context they need will be in one single browser tab!) 

You could even have your marketing team or social media manager help create Macros, so your support agents can use templated (and on brand) messages that speed up their replies. Getting everything centralized in a single place is the first step to providing excellent social support for your store. The next is to start automating replies to common engagements, so you can free up your agents to focus on more important conversations instead of saying “Thanks for the mention!” for the hundredth time. ‍

To help your store start managing Instagram support more efficiently, I’ve collected a list of Rules that Gorgias customers are using to engage with their shoppers, resolve questions faster, and keep their agents focused on the most important conversations. 

Here are 10 Rule ideas for more efficient Instagram support: 

1. Auto-close tickets from giveaway posts 
2. Auto-close all Instagram tickets
3. Auto-tag all Instagram interactions 
4. Auto-tag likely buyers & create a specialized view 
5. Auto-tag interactions from influencers for VIP support
6. Auto-tag public comments vs private messages
7. Auto-tag Instagram tickets with questions
8. Auto-close Instagram tickets the don’t mention support or order status
9. Auto-tag negative comments 
10. Auto-assign Instagram tickets to an agent or team

1. Auto-close tickets from giveaway posts

Giveaway posts are great for brand awareness, but can also result in a large increase in tickets in your help desk. To stop this from ever becoming a problem, you can set up a Rule to auto-close tickets generated from giveaway posts, based on the message content. 

In this example, we’re auto-closing tickets without the words “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how,” in order to avoid accidentally closing an actual question that your team might want to respond to. You could also customize this to close tickets that include a specific word or phrase, based on the criteria of the giveaway. I recommend working closely with your social media manager whenever a new promotion starts, to make sure your helpdesk is set up to triage tickets accordingly. 

2. Auto-close all Instagram tickets

If you want to see Instagram engagements in a contact’s message history, but not necessarily respond to them from Gorgias yet, you can auto-close any ticket generated from Instagram, that way it doesn’t fill up the open queue. 

By doing this, your agents will have the full cross-channel message history when interacting with a shopper, so they can customize the conversation and know exactly what they’ve asked in the past. 

3. Auto-tag all Instagram interactions

Tagging tickets in Gorgias is a great way to measure channel statistics and create customized Views. While your agents will always have the option to manually add tags, you can create a Rule to do the tagging automatically, that way it’s one less step in their workflow. 

Then when you go to Statistics > Tags, you’ll be able to see how many tickets are generated from Instagram during a given period, and what percentage that is of all the tickets you receive. 

Pro-tip: If you haven’t started managing Instagram tickets in Gorgias yet because you’re not sure what exactly the ticket volume would be, you can Auto-tag and Auto-close tickets in order to see the stats without conversations counting toward your plan’s ticket count yet. 

4. Auto-tag potential shoppers & create a specialized view

Prioritize the messages and comments from those most likely to purchase. By detecting message sentiment and filtering by common phrases, you can automatically tag tickets with a high purchase intent, allowing your agents to answer questions quickly or send along a discount code to speed up the purchase. 

Once you’ve set up the Rule, you can create a View to filter tickets that only contain this tag, that way your agents can easily see right in the left-hand sidebar whenever there’s a ticket from Instagram from a likely lead!

5. Auto-tag interactions from influencers for VIP support

If you work with influencers, it’s critical to reply to them right away to maximize the impact of their community. To make sure your team never misses an opportunity, you can auto-tag tickets created from the partners you’re working with based on their email address. 

Once the Rule is auto-tagging these tickets, you can also create a view to segment these messages from the others. Depending on how many partners and influencers your brand manages at a time, it may be helpful to set up one View per influencer (in which case you’d want to use separate tags), or group them all together in an “Influencers” section. 

6. Auto-tag public comments vs private messages

Whenever you reply to a ticket in Gorgias, you’ll see a small icon next to the customer’s name that signals what channel you’re replying on. If you want some extra assurance that your reps are only replying with personal details in private channels however (such as Instagram messages) you can automatically add tags to designate “public” vs “private,” so everyone can see right at the top of the ticket which type of communication it is. 

7. Auto-tag Instagram tickets with questions

Prioritize interactions that are asking your brand something, instead of just commenting with emojis. If your brand receives a lot of engagement, this can help you filter out what needs to be addressed and what can likely just be closed out (or handled by the social team). 

8. Auto-close Instagram tickets the don’t mention support or order status

If your support team is only interested in responding to the Instagram tickets that specifically mention customer service, you can auto-close everything else (and assume the brand team will take care of it). To do this, create a rule that closes tickets that do not include phrases like “order” “status” “support” or “customer service.” 

9. Auto-tag negative interactions

Escalate the tickets that have negative intent to get them a response faster. You can add keywords (or emojis) and use our sentiment detection to auto-tag negative comments, so your agents see right away what kind of ticket they’re opening. 

10. Auto-assign Instagram tickets to an agent or team

If you have a specific person who handles social media, whether that’s an agent or the social media manager, you can automatically assign tickets created via that channel to them, so those tickets never get routed to the rest of your team. 

I hope these 10 Rules help you engage with your shoppers, resolve questions faster, and keep your agents focused on the most important conversations. If you haven’t connected your Gorgias account to Instagram yet, follow this guide to get started.

Alternatively, keep reading about social media for customer service, or check out our list of the best social media integrations for your Shopify store.

If your store leverages Instagram to drive sales, you know it’s important to engage with every member of your community whether they’re commenting on your posts, engaging with your Story, or sending you a message. 

Over 4,000 teams on Gorgias have been using our Instagram integration to respond to (or automate responses to) mentions, comments, and ad comments. Earlier this summer, some customers were able to also start receiving and responding to Instagram messages (but it was limited to accounts with between 1,000-100,000 followers). 

Today, we’re excited to share that there’s no longer a follower requirement to use Instagram messaging! ‍

Every Gorgias customer (with a non-legacy plan) can manage Instagram messages (including Story mentions) directly from your helpdesk, allowing you to engage with your shoppers quickly and efficiently so you never miss a conversation. ‍

Plus you’ll also be able to reply to comments with a message, giving your team the option to turn a public conversation into a 1-1 chat. 

Customers who were able to start using this feature early have already replied to over 300,000 messages and Story mentions. In fact, about 2% of tickets in Gorgias are Instagram messages! 

It’s clear our customers love using Instagram to engage with their communities and drive sales, which is why we’re so excited to open this channel up for all of our merchants regardless of their follower count.

Related: Our list of the best social media apps for Shopify. ‍

To get started, you’ll need to make sure you have the "Allow Access to Messages" setting active in Instagram.

You can do this In Instagram Business Messenger by going to Settings → Privacy → Messages and setting the toggle to active. 

Once that’s done, go to the Integrations tab in your Gorgias helpdesk and select “Facebook, Messenger & Instagram.” 

Click the green “Reconnect” button to refresh your settings, and then you’ll be able to enable “Instagram Direct Messages” in the checkboxes. 

This will connect Messages and Story mentions to Gorgias, allowing you to reply directly from the helpdesk and see previous conversation history (so your agents have all the information they need right in one place). 

The following video will show you how to get started, along with some common troubleshooting tips. 

If you’re managing a lot of customer support conversations on Instagram, it may be helpful to set up views for each type of interaction. For example, you could have a view for Instagram comments, another for Instagram Messages, and a third for Instagram ad comments. 

You can also use Rules and Macros in Gorgias to reply even faster (or automate conversations entirely!) in order to free up your agents to focus on more important conversations. 

Here are a few ideas to get you started!‍

1. Create a Macro sending a message to say “Thanks for the mention!” ‍

If you have customers that love to tag your brand or products in their own posts, an easy way to continue building brand loyalty is to send a quick “thank you.” To save your agents time, you can create a Macro they can re-use anytime you get a Message that you’ve been mentioned in someone’s story or post. 

2. Adding tags to track Instagram Story mentions‍

If you want to track how often your brand is mentioned in Instagram Stories, you can tag tickets that come in from the Messages channel with “Mentioned you” in the message body. 

By creating a Rule to do this, you can automate this process so it doesn’t add any extra time or steps into your agents workflow, but gives you powerful insights. 

3. Creating a Rule to auto-reply to Instagram messages outside of business hours 

If you don’t want to reply to messages 24/7, it may be helpful to create an auto-response to set some expectations outside of your business hours. 

You can easily do this with a Rule, and even encourage your followers to go somewhere else in the meantime, such as your website, a specific landing page, or even a partner account!

Hopefully this gives you some inspiration on how you can start using Gorgias to engage with your Instagram community without increasing the workload on your support agents. And if you're interested in messaging customers directly, check out our social media and SMS features. With social media for customer service, you can interact with customers on platforms like Instagram or Facebook. And with SMS for customer service, you can enable texting for your most on-the-go customers.

Related: Lean how Gorgias customer Berkey Filters launched SMS and drove incredible customer adoption to this new, faster channel.

To start simplifying management of your messages, comments, and mentions, get started with Gorgias and add the Instagram integration today!

When you use Gorgias, we know that you’re putting your trust in us. That’s why we hold our commitment to your security as our highest priority and safeguard your data with full transparency. Our security policy contains penetration testing, incident response plan, data lifecycle, comprehensive system status live report, and more.

We're thrilled to share that Gorgias is Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 compliant for Type 2. This achievement follows our numerous investments in platform security over the years as part of our goals to secure customer data. 

An independent auditor conducted a thorough audit of our servers, systems, and products over six months. They verified that our information security practices, policies, procedures, and operations meet the thorough SOC 2 standards for security.

2022 update: We're happy to share that we renewed our SOC 2 Type 2 certification to continue protecting our customer data.

This industry-wide recognition serves as our reassurance that your data is managed in a controlled and audited environment. 

What is SOC 2 Type II Compliance?

Developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), SOC 2 defines criteria for evaluating how well a company manages customer data and ensuring a set of security controls are in place. A SOC 2 report is unique to each organization because it’s in line with specific business practices. 

There are two types of SOC 2 reports: Type I and Type II. Type I checks if a system can handle issues like data breaches. Meanwhile, Type II examines how the system works and how effective it is to protect data against security threats.

What Does Our SOC 2 Type 2 Compliance Mean for You?

Our completion of the SOC 2 Type II audit is our testament to the fact that we always prioritize your data security and privacy. We appreciate your trust in us and strive to strengthen this trust in the long term. 

You can be sure that:

• The data you share with Gorgias meets the AICPA standards for security. That goes for your personal information, ticket inquiries, customer data, and the like. 
• Your data is protected with procedures and controls to assess, minimize, and eliminate risks and vulnerabilities. 
• We always conduct ongoing monitoring of features and processes across our platform to maintain security. 

What’s Next?

We hope our successful SOC 2 Type 2 helps you rest easy knowing that your data in Gorgias is secure. But this update is only the latest milestone in delivering our commitment. We’re continuing to improve our security control and data privacy practices for all merchants. To learn more about our security policies, visit our security page or contact us at support@gorgias.com.

With visibility into product reviews right in the Yotpo widget in Gorgias, your support agents will know right away if they're talking to someone who didn't love their last product, or someone who is a big fan of your brand. This knowledge will help you customize the conversation for the best experience possible.

"At OLIPOP, we’re always looking to have a holistic view of the customer to be able to offer the best possible experience. Having the ability to see their most recent reviews within the Gorgias platform is a total game-changer. " - OLIPOP, Director of Customer Experience, Eli Weiss

How to make the most of this integration

You can use Gorgias macros to quickly respond to customers that leave 5-star reviews to build brand loyalty. You can also create macros for customers who leave negative reviews to ensure their concerns are properly addressed, and send them a discount code to help rebuild trust!

By looking at the shopper's review history, your support agents can also quickly shift from just offering customer service to acting as members of the sales team. They can recommend products that are either similar to something the customer previously loved, or different than something they had a bad experience with.

"Gorgias clearly understands the needs of customer service agents, and with this new feature is working towards making all the day-to-day tools accessible from one tab, making work even more agile and with less distractions. We're particularly excited about the ability to understand customer sentiment from the get go, and how we can better approach our users based on the feelings they have shared about their past TUSHY purchases. If we see they are a super fan, we can go heavy on the butt puns, but if they've had a less than stellar experience we will aim to make up for it in our subsequent conversations, and even address things they don't directly mention! We're excited to see how this feature will help us deepen our genuine human connections. " - TUSHY, Director of Customer Experience, Ren Fuller-Wasserman

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So, how can you write the perfect answer to social media comments?

An answer that addresses the customer’s issue while upholding your brand?

Ecommerce companies are tasked with maintaining this balance every day. (Particularly companies that spend a lot on social media ads.) These brands are inundated with comments on their promoted content from happy customers, unhappy customers, prospective customers, and social media trolls. 

In this post, we explore the depths of using social media for customer service. 

Read on for tips and plenty of examples. 

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Spending a lot on Facebook ads? (You need great social media customer service)

If you spend a lot of money on Facebook and Instagram ads, you’ll undoubtedly get dozens of comments per day. You can’t afford to ignore them. 

Why your responses to comments matter

Responding to social media comments on your ecommerce posts and ads is critical. 

74% of consumers rely on social media to help them make purchasing decisions. 71% are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media referral. 

While the design and copy of your posts and ads are important, the comment section has equal swaying power. 

Potential customers scope out the comments in an ad from an ecommerce company. They’ll read the positive comments, the negative comments, and how your company replies to both. 

An amazing customer endorsement can fall flat if your brand didn’t comment with a grateful reply and simply ignored your raving fan. 

Meanwhile, a customer complaint can have a less disastrous impact on a shopper’s purchasing decision if you reply and seek resolution with the customer.

How to excel at social commerce

Social commerce is a booming trend. TikTok is building out Shopify shopping capabilities in the app. Meanwhile, Facebook is also adding a Shopify pay button, and the social media platform already allows small ecommerce businesses to run a shop directly from their business page.

These social commerce developments are designed to keep consumers in the social media app, to the benefit of both parties (the social platform and the ecommerce business). 

Consumers can be converted to paying customers without having to leave the app. This reduces the required steps to making a purchase, and increases conversions. 

By responding to social media comments like a pro, your ecommerce company can also capture this social commerce trend. You’ll reduce the need for customers to go and read reviews elsewhere. They can get answers to their questions right in the social media channel. They can read the answers that your team has already written to other commenters. 

By reducing the review-hunting step, you can increase conversions. Customers that have read comment threads can feel comfortable making a purchase immediately. 

Related: Our list of the best social media integrations for Shopify.

Top ways that customers engage with your posts and ads

31% of consumers say that they use social media like Twitter and Instagram primarily to browse products. Consumers are accustomed to being shown products through organic posts and paid media. 

They feel comfortable giving their opinion and speaking directly with a brand. 

The top ways that customers engage with posts and ads are product endorsements, negative reviews, customer support complaints, and product questions.

Here’s an example of a customer commenting on a social media ad with a favorable opinion of the product:

These sorts of comments can have a huge impact on your conversions. While it’s hard to measure the exact impact, you might find that ads with a lot of positive comments perform better than new ads or ads with fewer comments.

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Why customers reach out through social media platforms

Today, social media is one of the most important customer service channels.  

But some ecommerce companies are hesitant to spend too much time providing social media customer service. The management of the company might feel frustrated by the expectation to respond there, rather than through their customer support software. 

If someone at your company is advocating against allocating support time to social media comments, ask them to consider customers’ needs.

Ultimately, the most successful ecommerce businesses get as close to their customers as possible. They listen to feedback and open up lines of communication on customers’ terms.

Customers leave important comments on your social media posts and ads because:

• It fits with their user flow - Consumers don’t want to have to leave their favorite social media app to find where else to communicate with you. 
• They have come to expect a response - Because so many ecommerce brands excel at social media customer service, consumers expect all brands to respond to their comments.
• They want to feel like they have direct access to your brand - This goes beyond just getting a response. Customers want to feel heard and seen by your brand. They want to know that you offer true customer care, not just basic service.
  

If after empathizing with customers, someone at your company still doesn’t see the need to invest in customer service on social media channels, the following statistic might help...

A whopping 83% of global consumers expect a response time of 24 hours or sooner.

That stat alone could be the ammunition you need to get your company on board with allocating time towards social media responses.

Related: Our guide to offering great customer service via Facebook Messenger.

Social media customer service strategy

What’s the strategy behind social media customer service?

It comes down to two key things:

1. Increasing customer satisfaction 
2. Converting new customers
   

Let’s take a look at how to excel at both:

How to increase customer satisfaction

The comments section of your social media posts and ads offers an amazing opportunity to strengthen customer retention. 

You might be able to discover:

• Ways to improve your products
• Ways to bundle your products, update your pricing model, offer subscriptions, etc.
• Potential brand ambassadors
• Potential user generated content creators
• Widespread product issues warranting refunds or recalls
• Copy or design ideas to attract more customers with new ads
• Product testimonials to include in ads or landing pages
• Ways to increase clarity in your website pages regarding what’s included with a product, where to locate information, etc.
  

There are so many incredibly valuable things you can get out of reading and responding to your social media comments, so don’t think of this as just a burden.

For example, in this comment thread, a customer points out the difficulty of finding information for an art subscription box. The social media manager politely accepts the feedback and promises to talk to the team about fixing the issue. 

The company not only assists the customer hunting for the information, but also proactively fixes the issue so that other customers don’t experience the same confusion. 

You can also drive brand loyalty by engaging with your biggest fans. For example, if a customer often posts positive review comments on your ads, you might thank them with a free gift. 

Use social media to drive deeper relationships with your existing customers. Listen to them, heed their guidance, and find ways to thank those who go out of their way to support your business.

How to drive new customers

Use social media comments to convert new customers? Yes, it really is possible.

Here are the key ways to grow your customer base through social media comments:

• Respond to customer issues helpfully - It’s important that you reply politely and helpfully to your current customers. Prospective customers will be paying attention to how you resolve issues. If you don’t respond or respond in a rude or unhelpful way, prospective customers might not purchase from you.
  

• Respond to prospective customers’ questions - You also need to quickly respond to prospective customers questions. They might ask for help with purchasing the right product or they might have questions about what’s included with the product. 
  

• Uplift positive comments - You should also respond to very positive comments about your products or company. This shows potential customers that you care about your current customers and that you appreciate the time and effort they put into saying something kind about your brand. For example, you might write something like “Thanks so much for letting us know. We’re so happy you love it.”

Here’s an example of a smart way to convert commenters into customers. The commenter is asking for help choosing the right foundation color, and the social media manager responds with the link to take their quiz. 

The company has wisely signed up for Bitly’s paid plan to offer easy-to-remember short links in their responses on social networks. 

The comment got 31 likes. So, not only did the original commenter get access to the link, but many others saw the response as well. You can use social media customer support to drive traffic to your important website pages.

The Bitly link redirects to a quiz. After submitting all of the quiz answers, the user needs to offer up their email address to get their results.

IL Makiage is wisely using social media comments as a way to grow their email list and offer exact product recommendations.  

The most common social comments (with example answers from ecommerce companies)

How should your team members respond to social media comments?  Across all of your social profiles, and especially where you run ads, you might run into the following types of comments.

Read on for example comments and effective customer service responses.

Shopper concerns and questions

One of the most common types of social media customer care required is simply answering questions and concerns. Potential customers will ask questions in social media comments about products of yours that they haven’t tried yet.

In this example, a customer asks about whether a foundation will be so heavy that it will cover her characteristic freckles. The social media manager offers an excellent response by sharing that the coverage is buildable. 

In this example, a social media manager assures the potential customer that the product won’t exacerbate acne. 

Note that the response quells concerns by sharing specific product details (oil-free and water-based). 

Similarly, the customer service team member or social media manager handles a question with the opposite concern. One commenter worries about how the product will affect dry skin. The response features specific product details to address the issue (hyaluronic acid and vitamin E).

Details are the best way to address customer concerns. Just take a look at this example with features a very thorough response about the number guards included in a beard trimmer.

Customer questions

Your paying customers might ask questions as well. This is your chance to drum up excitement with current customers, engage with them on an emotional level, and show that you’re here to provide excellent customer service, even on social media.

In this example, a customer asks about whether or not the ad is featuring the next month’s art subscription box. 

By answering with an upbeat tone, the social media manager gets the customer and other people reading the comment excited to receive the subscription box.

Customer endorsements

You’ll also receive customer endorsements and positive reviews in the comments section of your social media ads. 

If you get an enthusiastic comment, don’t let it go unnoticed. You should reply to all of the detailed comment reviews you receive from customers. 

Check out this example. The social media manager makes it clear that they are ready to offer excellent customer service if needed. 

When reading this response, prospective customers can see that the company cares about their results and is available to happy to provide customer service solutions. 

This can increase potential customers’ likelihood of purchasing from you. 

Customer complaints

Of course, you’re likely to receive customer complaints as well. 

You might get negative reviews about the delivery date, the cost of returns, or even the product itself.

Check out this example response, which deftly handles a negative review.

When customer support shouldn’t respond

Social media monitoring is critical. But that doesn’t mean you have to respond to every comment written across your entire social media presence.

If you respond to certain comments, it could come off as creepy. 

For example, social media users will often tag each other in the comments sections of ads they find intriguing or humorous. They might recommend one of your products to a friend.

In this case, they are not expecting the social media manager or customer support team to respond to them. They are expecting a response from their friend.

If someone from your company responds and says something like “You should buy them!” or “You would love them!” it will appear too pushy and salesy. Worse, the social media users might feel like you are infringing on their private conversation. Although these comments are public, to the users they are more like private messages.

If customers tag other users, not you, don’t respond unless there are serious service issues, such as product malfunctions or delivery delays mentioned in the comments. 

You also don’t need to respond to very short positive comments like “love this!” You can simply like the comment if it’s something positive but lacks depth and detail.

Crafting the perfect social media customer service response

Customer service agents and social media managers can’t prepare for everything. Sometimes, comments will catch you off guard. 

To offer amazing social media customer service, follow these steps every time.

1. Take time to fully understand the context

While responding quickly is important, you don’t want to respond too quickly. If you rush your response, you might miss out an important element. 

For example, if someone asks about the nutritional value of a product, you might quickly offer a canned response. But if you consider the context of the ad, which talks about weight loss rather than speed of cooking like your other ads, this might help you highlight more relevant product details.

2. Craft your response, following these guidelines

When you’re sure you’ve got all the contextual information required to respond, you can go ahead and craft your response. 

Make sure you hit these important points:

Product questions:

• Answer the question clearly
• Backup your answer with real, specific product details and information
  

Positive reviews:

• Thank the customer in a way that matches your brand voice
• If it fits your product, ask them to keep you posted of further results
• Let them know you’re here for them if they have any questions
  

Negative reviews:

• Empathize with the customer
• Accept their feedback in a mature way (as opposed to disagreeing with them or attempting to silence them)
• Share the potential resolution 
• Divert the customer towards your helpdesk, knowledge base, or customer service team (as appropriate)
  

In all interactions, the customer service experience should match your brand’s personality. 

3. For contentious issues, get approval before responding

Companies can get themselves in hot water when they’re too quick to respond to controversial comments. You might need to run your answer by your PR or communications team, especially if the topic is about sustainability, equity, diversity and inclusion, or the founders’ political beliefs or actions.

Here’s an example response to a question about plastic use reduction:

Sometimes, you might need to get a second opinion from the head of customer support for simple questions. Contentious responses don’t always have to be about political hot-button issues.

Here’s a great example response to a customer being shocked that there isn’t a customer support hotline.

You don’t need to get every response reviewed. But when in doubt, play it safe and get a second opinion from the head of social media management or communications.

4. Respond to the comment, and create a ticket if needed

When you’ve got the right response, go ahead and comment. Don’t forget to tag the person you’re responding to.

If the social media commenter brought up an important customer support issue, you should create a ticket for the comment thread in your customer service software.

This way, you can track the resolution. 

5. Make sure customer support sees the issue through to resolution

With a ticket open in your helpdesk, you won’t have to worry about remembering to check if the person wrote back. Instead, you’ll be able to see that open ticket, and you can then click through to the post or ad with the comment thread. 

If it’s an important issue (the customer wants a return or hasn’t received their product in the mail), you should do one follow up comment and tag them to make sure they saw your response. 

Follow these guidelines to social media customer service, and you’ll gain new fans while deepening your connection with your current customers. 

Gorgias helps ecommerce companies grow through exceptional customer service. Learn more about Gorgias' social media features.

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Did you know that back in 2019 ecommerce sales worldwide were $3.5 trillion?

We don’t have the data for 2020 yet, but worldwide sales last year were projected to reach $4.2 trillion, though they have almost certainly exceeded that due to the pandemic.

And the ecommerce market is likely to continue growing in the foreseeable future, with the projected worldwide sales for 2022 being $6.54 trillion.

To ensure that your company continues to get a piece of the ever-expanding ecommerce pie, you must research, think strategically and plan your objectives annually by creating a roadmap.

In this post, we are going to discuss exactly how to create an ecommerce roadmap. It will display where your ecommerce store is going and the steps it will take to get there.

We will cover:

• Setting goals
• Creating a budget
• Building a team
• Managing that team
• Project planning
  

…and more.

Let’s dive in.

Analyze Your 2020 Performance

Okay, so before we start discussing the 2021 roadmap, it’s important to look back at the previous year. 

Seasonal Trends and Peak Periods From the Previous Year

Every ecommerce business is subject to seasonality.

Some are seasonal in nature, such as those that sell winter sports gear.

But the vast majority of them see spikes in sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and winter holidays.

You need to analyze the performance of the entire previous year if you want to properly prepare for 2021.

• Which month was the busiest?
• Which month was the least busy?
• Which products brought in the most sales during specific seasons?
  

Understanding this will help you create a more robust budget that won’t be thrown off by the seasonal ebb and flow of sales.

Moreover, once you know which periods resulted in the biggest increase in sales, you will be able to allocate your marketing spend more effectively. Tim Katz, Co-Founder of DYODE explains why this is important:

“Ensure that you have your merchandise, marketing communications, and project calendar planned out for the year; while this may seem like a trivial task it is a helpful habit to ensure cross-functional partners are aligned and in sync to support your growth. Look to refresh your remarketing efforts with relevant creative and messages and exclusive content and offers in order to ensure you are maximizing your most loyal audience.”

He continues:

“As online competition increases so does the cost of acquisition. Because of this, you should focus on nurturing your biggest fans with exclusive content, product, and communication. This is a new world that we live in and you should continue to evaluate your branding and product mix in order to stay relevant.”

Which of Your Channels Were Strongest/Weakest and Why?

Look at the campaigns you ran in the previous year and what marketing channels they utilized. 

You need to figure out which of these marketing channels are the right ones to get your store the most ROI. Marketing channels can range from search engine optimization, PPC, social media, referrals, email and more.

Ask yourself:

• Which marketing channels brought the most sales?
  

• Which marketing channels brought the least sales?
  

You may want to apply the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, which states that:

For many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.

The odds are that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your marketing channels while only 20% of your sales come from the remaining 80% of marketing channels.

Once you have identified the 20% of the marketing channels that generate 80% of your sales, consider allocating a significant amount of your marketing budget there.

Note: the exact ratio may be different, but a few marketing channels are likely producing disproportionate results. You want to double down on them.

Set Long Term and Short Term Goals for Your Ecommerce Store

Now that you have analyzed the previous year’s performance, it’s time to set goals for 2021.

Make Sure That Your Goals Are SMART

Arguably the most common mistake that people make when setting goals is being too vague.

That’s why it’s so important to set SMART goals.

SMART is an acronym that stands for:

• Specific. What exactly are you trying to achieve?
• Measurable. How will you measure whether you have achieved?
• Achievable. Is it realistic?
• Relevant. How does it fit into the big picture?
• Time-bound. By when do you intend to achieve it?

For example:

Instead of saying that you want to “make more money”, you can set a goal to “increase the annual profit by 25%”.

Why You Need Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Which metrics should you use to measure your progress towards your goals?

That’s where the Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs, come in. 

Here’s the KPI definition:

A KPI is a business metric that is directly relevant to a specific business goal.

For example:

Let’s say that your goal is to increase the annual profit by 25%. 

Obviously, the main KPI here is the annual profit, but what other metrics are relevant?

• Revenue
• Profit margin
• Number of sales
• Average order value
• Cost per customer acquisition
  

They are directly relevant to the goal because improving them would lead to an increase in annual profit.

You want to pick 3-5 KPIs to focus on.

Now let’s take a quick look at the important ecommerce metrics that you want to pay attention to in more detail:

Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of customers who put items in their carts but do not finalize the purchase.

For example:

Let’s say that 100 people put an item in their carts.

Out of those 100 people, 88 of them left without buying.

That means that your cart abandonment rate is 88%.

And if that number seems crazy high to you, note that the average cart abandonment rate worldwide in March 2020 was 88.05%.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a metric that shows how much it costs you to acquire a new customer.

Its basic formula is this:

Marketing Expenses + Sales Expenses / The Number of New Customers Acquired = CAC

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that shows how much an average customer spends throughout their “lifetime” as a customer.

It’s a more complicated metric, but here’s the main equation:

Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency x Estimated Customer Lifespan = CLV

Average Order Value

Average Order Value (AOV) is a metric that shows the average value of a sale.

It’s a simple metric to calculate:

Revenue / The Number of Orders = Average Order Value

Note that all these metrics have a direct impact on the bottom line which is why it makes sense to consider using them as KPIs.

Create a Budget

Cash is the lifeblood of any business.

Once you run out of it, that’s it, you’re done.

That is why it’s so important to be financially responsible, manage cashflow well, and establish an emergency fund.

In psychology, there’s a phenomenon called the planning fallacy:

“The tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions.”

Basically, everything will probably take longer, cost more, involve more risk, and yield fewer benefits than you think.

It’s crucial to keep the planning fallacy in mind when creating the budget for the upcoming year for your ecommerce store.

Make sure to:

• Be realistic. Look at the historic cashflow data. What can you reasonably expect?
  

• Add slack. Once again, everything will likely cost more than you think, so don’t make your budget so tight that every cent is allocated before it is even earned. Leave some slack in your budget.
  

Your top priority should be the growth of your ecommerce store.

Build Your Team

Ecommerce growth requires constant human resources and infrastructure. 

This is why it’s crucial that you recognize there’s only so much that your current team can do to successfully scale your store. In fact, the chances are that in order to achieve your goals you may need to hire more employees throughout the year. 

Begin this process by accurately determining your staffing needs.

Who Should Hire And When Should You Hire?

Company leadership should be working on the business, and not in the business. However if you are currently without an HR department, you may need to dedicate some time to finding the right hires and training them.

That’s why it makes sense to start hiring as soon as you map out what departments need additional roles.

Hiring Full-Time Vs. Hiring a Freelancer

When it comes to expanding an ecommerce team, you have two options for most positions:

Full-time employees and freelancers.

Full-time employees can be expensive. It’s not only their salary that you need to think about. There’s also sick leave, vacation days, health insurance, etc. 

However, when you hire a full-time employee, you can expect them to give your business their undivided attention. Moreover, a full-time employee is likely to feel invested in the success of your company. Why? Simple. They don’t want to suddenly find themselves out of a job!

You only hire freelancers when you need them, you only pay for the work they do, you don’t need to provide any employee benefits. 

However, they are likely juggling a bunch of clients, projects, and deadlines, which means that they won’t be as focused on your business.

It’s up to you to decide what is more suited to your ecommerce store.

Where To Find Top Performers?

Hiring a full-time employee?

Then your best bet is probably DynamiteJobs job board, assuming that you are hiring for a location independent position.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for a freelancer, then UpWork is a good place to start.

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You may also want to post your job ad on skill-specific job boards.

Problogger job board is the most popular writing job board, so if you need written content, you can probably find a writer there.

Manage Your Team

Building a great team is not enough.

You also need to manage it well if you want your team members to do their best work.

Create a Job Description for Each Role

You want to have a specific job description for each role that explains exactly what that role entails.

That way you’ll avoid confusion, resentment, and shifting of responsibility (e.g. “I thought John was supposed to do that!”).

Assign Key Performance Indicators to Each Role

You should also assign KPIs to each role so that each team member would know what they should focus on. Dan LeBlanc, Founder of CEO Daasity explains:

“For the Merchants we worked with that saw triple-digit-growth in the past year they heavily invested in aligning their teams around the essential metrics to prioritize key initiatives. They ruthlessly tracked performance across their teams to make quick decisions on where to invest and where to reallocate budget.”

This also makes it easy to evaluate their performance. 

Create a Timeline and Set Milestones

You also need to manage each project correctly if you want it to be done on time and at the expected cost. 

Mapping out milestones and timelines in detail will do exactly that, by helping your team members know exactly what they need to do to get their tasks completed.

Step 1: Write a Project Scope Statement That Outlines the Deliverables

Every project should start with outlining the deliverables and what needs to be accomplished for it to be a success.

These deliverables should be specific. 

For example:

If you want to build a blog this year, then one of the deliverables could be to publish one article per week for the entire year (52 articles in total).

Note that this is a deliverable that the person who owns this project can control.

Articulate the steps it will take to achieve your objectives.

Step 2: Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

Once you have defined the deliverables for the project, you need to create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). What’s that?

Here’s one definition:

“Deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables.

Here’s an example:

Step 3: Create a To-Do List for Each Work Package and Assign It to the Right Team Member or Department

Once you have created your Work Breakdown Structure, it’s time to assign each work package to the team member who will own it.

You also want to create a to-do list for each work package so that the person would know exactly what is expected of them. To-do lists are essentially checklists that list the actions one needs to take to perform a specific task. They reduce the number of mistakes team members make. 

Step 4: Determine Total Time for Each Task and Therefore for Each Deliverable

Now that everyone has their work packages and to-do lists, you should estimate the total time required to complete each task.

Once you have these estimates, use them to determine the time required for each deliverable. This will speed up the process because the person working on a task doesn’t need to waste cognitive energy thinking about how long they should set aside.

Just remember the previously mentioned planning fallacy. Everything will probably take longer than you thought it would. Make sure to account for that.

Organize Quarterly Reviews

It’s crucial to regularly evaluate your progress if you want your team to stay on track throughout the year. 

You can do that by organizing quarterly reviews where you:

• Evaluate the progress of each team member
• Evaluate the progress of the entire team
• Determine how you can help people to get back on schedule if they have fallen behind
• Evaluate each marketing campaign
• Evaluate analytics closely
• Decide on the next steps to take

Now let’s take a look at the marketing strategies of your roadmap.

Q1: SEO Planning and Content Creation

Want to get more organic traffic from Google?

Then you need to step up your SEO game. First, you must:

Conduct a website audit

You should start with auditing your ecommerce website. Site preformance is particularly important, as Ben Crudo, CEO of Diff agency explains:

“Don’t let your store slow down. Customer experience, sales, the Google ranking of your website, and mobile performance are all impacted by site performance. Making a habit of regularly auditing your site for speed, and taking steps to optimize it will ensure that your store keeps up with customer’s expectations for performance.”

Here’s what you want to know:

• Is your website mobile-friendly?
  

• Are there any outdated pages, broken links, etc. that need to be updated?
  

• Which content gets the most organic traffic?
  

• How is product organization?
  

• How are usability and speed?
  

• How is the customer experience?
  

You also want to critically evaluate your content. How can you make it better?

Choose keywords

Next, you want to identify keywords that you could rank for.

Here’s an overview of the keyword research process:

Find Keyword Ideas

You can use your knowledge of your niche to find keyword ideas. What are your potential customers interested in? Brainstorm these seed keywords.

You may also want to go where your customers hang out online and observe the conversations happening there. 

Finally, be sure to check out what your competitors are doing, especially what content ranks well on Google.

Create a Keyword List 

Once you have identified enough promising keywords, you should compile them into a keyword list.

Do Keyword Analysis

Once you have your keyword ideas, use a tool like Ahrefs to analyze the relevant keywords. 

Which ones seem promising? Look at metrics like keyword difficulty, search volume, clicks and traffic potential.

Note that you want to focus on keywords that you can realistically rank for.

Develop a content strategy

Now that you have a keyword list, it’s time to develop a content strategy.

Go through your keyword list and turn each of these keywords into an article topic.

Then create a content calendar so that you would know when each article should be published.

Content creation

Once you have a content calendar, it’s time to start writing.

You can write the articles yourself or you can hire a writer to do it for you. 

You may want to post a job ad on the previously mentioned ProBlogger job board if you choose the latter option.

Plan link building opportunities

It’s important to understand that creating great content is not enough. You also need other people to link to that content. Why?

Google uses backlinks as one of the top ranking factors to determine how valuable the page is to the visitors and where it should be placed in the search results pages for that keyword.

But not all links are made equal. The higher the domain authority of a website, the more valuable the link. 

You can use the Moz free Website Domain SEO Analysis Tool to see the domain authority of a specific website. 

Your aim should be to get as many backlinks as you can from authoritative websites so that your content will rank and in return, your ecommerce store will gain organic traffic.

Tackle the technical SEO basics

You also need to have your technical SEO on point if you want your content to rank on Google.

Here are a few basics of you need to optimize:

• Site structure
• Site speed
• Indexing issues
  

Q2: Focus on your website

Okay, so now you are on track to increasing your organic traffic, but how can you make the most of it? By optimizing your website.

That’s what you should focus on in the second quarter of the year.

Customer Journey Analysis

You want to start by analyzing the customer journey. 

Look at your data.

What steps do the customers take to get from that first interaction with your company to completing a purchase? 

You want to map this out so that you can then improve this process by finding the answer to questions like:

• Why did that customer not find what they searched for?
  

• Did this person not complete their order?
  

• What changes do I need to make to the layout of my ecommerce site to increase conversions?
  

Create a customer support powerhouse

There is often a lack of personal interaction between consumers and companies. This has led to a growth in customers feeling frustrated, since they often run into issues and can't easily find a customer support agent to talk to. 

Even worse, some companies make their customers wait a long time for a response or don’t get back to them at all.

And since 95% of consumers say that customer service is important for brand loyalty, your ecommerce store needs to implement a fast and proactive customer support strategy that guides visitors through the customer journey.

The following tactics will delight your customers and keep them coming back for more.

Reduce your first response time

First response time (FRT) is the time elapsed between a customer submitting a query and how long it takes a customer service agent to get back to them. 

Today, customers expect a fast response. In fact, data shows that 88% of customers expect a response to their email within 60 minutes and 30% expect a response within 15 minutes or less.

Fortunately, a helpdesk like Gorgias now offers the ability to create macros. 

Macros are canned responses that agents can use for dealing with specific topics. This makes it much easier and faster to answer your customer’s queries. You can also add other pieces of information to your macro, such as Shopify data, like a customer’s order number. 

Reduce your resolution time

Resolution time is the average amount of time it takes your customer service agents to close a ticket after it has been opened. 

To reduce your resolution time, all of your customer’s tickets must be managed from one centralized hub in a multichannel helpdesk. This means your customer support team will have a full view of all your customer’s messages, no matter what channel they reach out from. 

Keep in mind that your customers reach out through various channels, (i.e. social, chat, email, phone).

The number of your one-touch closed tickets will also increase, which is important. After all, 33% of all consumers consider the most important aspect of good customer service experiences to be being able to get their problem solved in one single interaction. 

High customer satisfaction (CSAT) score

One way ecommerce stores measure their success is with the key performance indicator Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). It is a survey that determines a customer’s level of satisfaction at key interaction times, such as a support ticket exchange.

The types of questions you would ask in your survey would be variations of “How would you rate the support you received?”.

Then, respondents answer by using the following 1 to 5 scale:

1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied
   

I recommend that you present a CSAT survey after a ticket resolution, since this would be the perfect time to gather customer sentiment. 

Then, take onboard their feedback and see how you can make your other customers happier by improving your customer support strategy.

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