A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “In E-Commerce, More is More”, provides valuable insight into what customers are looking for from vendors. Two professors, one from London’s Imperial College Business School and the other from Munich’s School of Management, conducted research into two critical items:

• What increases the likelihood of customers revisiting a site and,
• What causes customers to feel engaged with that company’s products

Engagement in this context means things like that customers are more “involved” and “connected” with, and feel a stronger “overall attraction” to the company’s core offerings.

At Crimson, we have spoken before about Engagement (see #2, Rethink the Basics) as a critical component in marketing. The HBR article talks about what causes customers to be engaged with a vendor. While research was conducted on e-commerce sites, I believe the lessons are applicable to all sites, for all types of customers.

The professors looked at five major factors that impact the likelihood of revisiting the site and the sense of engagement they had with the company’s offerings. These factors are ranked from low to high:

1. Order tracking
2. Clear categorization
3. Personalized shopping
4. In-depth information on product or service

… and the winner, by a substantial margin is …

5. Information on related products and services.

What does “information on related products and services” mean? Some examples:

• Ralph Lauren provides content on fashion, art, sports, healthy diets and business.
• Online auto shoppers show great interest in travel, sports, apparel and finance and an exceptional auto shopping site would provide that content.
• Another example is what Cisco does for its SMB customers via BizWize TV. This broadcast medium provides a variety of valuable information for small businesses (not just Cisco information), giving them a lot of reasons to continue revisiting the site and creating a stronger “overall attraction” to the Cisco’s core offerings. (Full disclosure, Cisco is a Crimson client.)

My takeaway: Companies of all kinds can maximize the likelihood of people revisiting their site, and of feeling engaged with that vendor if the company will invest in content that’s of interest to customers – content that extends beyond discussions of products and services. One great way to do that is to establish a community on the site that enables visitors to vote and comment on the things they want to see on the site. The community approach (not covered in the HBR study) will strengthen the tie a company is attempting to make with its customers even further.

What best practices have you encountered in getting customers more engaged with your company?