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In 2023, ecommerce stores face a bundle of challenges in the form of rising ad costs, mounting customer expectations, and ever-shifting spending habits. But challenges for the entire industry open a window of opportunity for savvy businesses. 

To navigate this rapidly evolving market and position themselves for success, it is essential for today's online stores to rethink their ecommerce strategy — specifically, to match investments in customer acquisition with investments in customer conversion and retention.

One way to think of this new strategic approach is by rethinking the traditional sales and marketing funnel. Rather than working down the funnel toward one sale, brands have to think about moving customers through an experience — from awareness to conversion and retention — to maximize the lifetime value of each customer (LTV).

Below, we’ll highlight 12 important components of a successful ecommerce strategy. While no blog post could ever tell you how to run your business, you’ll learn some high-level mindsets and actionable tactics to incorporate into your 2023 ecommerce strategy.

What does an ecommerce strategy look like in 2023?

As you put together an ecommerce strategy, consider three fundamental questions:

• How do I bring people to my website?
• How do I get them to place an order once they’re there?
• How do I maximize the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer?

Let’s break those down: First, getting people to your website. Ecommerce businesses still need to focus on growing their online presence and boosting brand awareness with marketing campaigns like paid ads, social media marketing, content marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

However, a lot is changing for ecommerce stores in 2023. This is where the second and third questions come in. Due to increased competition and higher marketing and advertising costs, customer conversion and retention are the new battlegrounds for ecommerce. 

This starts by prioritizing the customer experience. Customers have increasingly come to value a smooth, engaging, and personalized customer experience throughout the entire customer journey, just as much as the quality of the product or service they are purchasing. 

42% of customers say they're willing to pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience, and 65% say that a positive experience with a brand is more influential than great advertising.

Finally, the last question: Focusing on customer retention has now become just as important for ecommerce stores as customer acquisition. This is due in no small part to rising customer acquisition costs that have made attracting new customers increasingly expensive. 

Repeat customers are also much, much more valuable than first-time shoppers. 300% more valuable, thanks to behaviors like:

• Placing repeat orders
• Placing orders with higher average values (AOV)
• Referring friends and family to your store
• Posting about your products on social media
• Writing product reviews for your website

With that in mind, let's take a look at 12 key components of a successful ecommerce strategy that are sure to help you form more positive, revenue-generating relationships with your customers.

12 Key components of a successful ecommerce strategy

1. Develop your buyer personas with existing customer data
2. Plot your buyer's journey through the four key stages
3. Be bold with your ecommerce marketing strategy
4. Personalize the customer experience to drive revenue and repeat business
5. Make customer service one of your ecommerce superpowers
6. Run constant tests to optimize your conversion rate
7. Find ways to boost average order value (AOV) like subscriptions and upselling
8. Collect and display social proof like reviews and user-generated content
9. Use high-quality images and superb descriptions for your products
10. Expand your social media strategy for social commerce
11. Support social media login features
12. Continuously collect data and iterate on your ecommerce strategy

1) Develop your buyer personas with existing customer data

One great way to make sure that everyone in your company understands your brand's target audience and how to market to them effectively is to use your existing customer data to develop buyer personas. 

These buyer personas can serve as a helpful resource for guiding other elements of your ecommerce strategy. Whereas buyer personas of yore focused solely on artificial demographic information (like fake names and fake children), great buyer personas should focus more on elements of the target market that influence purchases:

• Motivations
• Pain points
• Ideal outcomes
• Alternatives
• Buying considerations

2) Plot your buyer's journey through the four key stages

Ecommerce stores need to understand the journey customers go through before purchasing a product and carefully design each phase of that journey. This ensures that you can create an optimized sales funnel for your ecommerce site and is one of the most important keys to ecommerce success.

Again, the experience you provide customers is key here. While a traditional buyer’s journey indexes entirely on marketing channels — a customer will see an influencer marketing post, click through to a landing page, sign up for email campaigns to learn about new products and special offers, and eventually make a purchase — the reality is much more complicated.

Customers expect smooth, fast, and informative experiences at each stage of the journey. The good news? By providing great customer experiences, you can do much more than close one sale — you can boost order volume, promote repeat purchases, and drive much more value out of each customer.

The four key stages of an online shopping customer journey that you will need to plot out and optimize include:

Awareness stage

This stage of the customer journey is when customers first discover your brand and its products. Most customers will be looking to learn more about your brand during this phase and will be browsing your blog posts, product descriptions, FAQ pages, and other educational resources.

Consideration stage

During the consideration stage of the customer journey, customers have identified a product they would like to purchase and are mulling over their decision. They may research the specific product they're considering further in this stage or compare it to offerings from other brands. Throughout the consideration stage, it's important to utilize strategies such as email marketing and retargeting to keep your brand and products at the forefront of the customer's mind.

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Decision stage

The decision stage is when customers decide whether to purchase the product they are considering. Given that online shopping cart abandonment rates sit at around 70%, this is also the stage of the customer journey where many would-be customers turn back. 

At this point of the journey, it's all about getting customers to cross the finish line via strategies such as abandoned cart recovery tactics, retargeting campaigns, and proactive customer support.

Retention stage

Once you've attracted a new customer and guided them through the three previous stages, you should shift your focus to retaining them and maximizing their lifetime value. 

This starts by continuing to offer an excellent experience to your existing customers. You can also leverage cross-selling and upselling to extract more value from your existing customer base, soliciting feedback and reviews, and more.

“Consumers are being more picky with their purchases as cash simply isn’t stretching as far, so brands will have to work harder to prove their value. Businesses themselves are also having to navigate smaller budgets, so with customer acquisition prices soaring, it makes sense to switch the focus towards existing customers.”

— Georgie Walsh, Content Marketing Manager at LoyaltyLion

3) Be bold with your ecommerce marketing strategy

If you want your ecommerce store to stand out from its competitors, you need to make a lasting impression. And no one has ever made a lasting impression by repeating the same, tired messaging as everyone else. 

Don't be afraid to be a little bold with your ecommerce marketing strategy, and try to develop campaigns that are creative and unique. To learn more about executing a bold and creative marketing strategy, check out our blog post on 13 unique ecommerce marketing strategies.

Retention has been the talk 2022 but I only see it becoming more important in 2023, with brands seeking out ways to truly differentiate their retention experience. It's not enough to have just a post-purchase flow, what are you really doing to personalize the customer experience from order #1 all the way through the course of their life with your brand.

— Brandon Amoroso, Founder and President of Electriq Marketing

4) Personalize the customer experience to drive revenue and repeat business

In 2023, creating personalized customer experiences is one of the most impactful ways to convert potential customers into paying customers. It's also key to creating experiences that drive customer loyalty and retention. One study finds that 70% of marketers using advanced personalization see an ROI of 200% or more for their efforts.

There are a lot of different ways that you can go about creating personalized customer experiences. Using customer data to create personalized marketing messages, offering customers proactive and personalized customer support via live chat support, and sprinkling specifics in your customer messages are just a few ways that ecommerce stores are able to leverage personalization. 

Check out our article on the ultimate guide to personalized customer service to learn more about how to create an impactful, personalized customer experience.

5) Make customer service one of your ecommerce superpowers

One crucial element of a great customer experience is excellent customer service. Given that 54% of customers will leave a brand after just one bad experience, great customer service is vital for promoting customer retention.

So what is it that defines great customer service? At Gorgias, we have identified the five elements as being the most important characteristics of excellent customer service:

• Speed: You don't want to keep customers waiting, making it essential to offer fast first-response and resolution times
• Convenience: Focus on creating low-effort customer experiences by making it as easy and convenient as possible for customers to find the answers they need
• Helpfulness: Above all else, your customer support agents and resources must be able to address the questions and issues that customers have
• Friendliness: Your customer support agents directly represent your brand, and you need them to be friendly and non-confrontational at all times
• Feedback-focused: Customer feedback is an invaluable resource for further improving the quality of your brand's customer support

By providing a plethora of cutting-edge customer support tools and capabilities, Gorgias' industry-leading customer support platform enables brands to improve all four of these key customer service considerations. 

📚 Recommended reading: For a more in-depth analysis of what defines excellent customer service (and how Gorgias helps brands make customer service one of their ecommerce superpowers), check out this article on 20 customer service best practices.

Along with focusing on these four key elements of great customer service, it's also important to design a customer service process that includes omnichannel support options, self-service options, and personalized customer service:

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Offer omnichannel customer service

Omnichannel customer service entails offering support via multiple channels such as email, SMS, live chat, and social media. 

By providing multiple ways for customers to contact your support team, you can make your support services more convenient and accessible. While omnichannel typically indicates digital channels like email, SMS, and social media, it can also apply in store, too:

“As brick-and-mortar storefronts open up again, a unified customer service across all channels will be important. The unification of systems, operations, experience, and service with composable architectures will set a brand up for success in the next decade to come.”

— Steve Krueger, CEO and Founder at JIBE

Provide customer self-service

Customer self-service options such as FAQ pages, chatbots, automation, and knowledge bases enable customers to find the information they need without contacting your support team.

Self-service cuts the amount of effort customers have to expend way, way down. These solutions also help reduce your support team's workload by eliminating many would-be support tickets, freeing your agents up to focus on more complex and pressing tickets.

Insist on personalized customer service

Personalizing your customer support services at every opportunity by leveraging customer data to create personalized messaging will improve customer satisfaction and boost your retention rates.

6) Run constant tests to optimize your conversion rate

When optimizing your store's conversion rate, nothing is more important than continual A/B testing. A/B testing entails comparing the results of two different marketing approaches or messaging (for example, two different versions of the same ad or marketing email) and using the data you gather to constantly optimize your ecommerce site. 

“Conversion rate is arguably the single most important metric in ecommerce: Without a high conversion rate, all your web traffic, brand awareness, and marketing dollars never turn into revenue.”

— Catherine Lambert, Marketing and Partnerships at Swanky

You can use this strategy to optimize everything from product descriptions to email marketing messages to PPC ads, and it's one of the most impactful keys to ecommerce success.

Read more about how to improve conversion rate with A/B testing. 

7) Find ways to boost average order value (AOV) like subscriptions and upselling

We've already discussed how rising customer acquisition costs have made it increasingly important for brands to extract as much revenue as possible from their existing customer base. Along with promoting customer loyalty, one effective way to generate more revenue from your existing customers is to boost AOV via subscriptions, upselling, and cross-selling strategies.

Consider a "subscribe and save" option

Amazon is one example of an ecommerce company that utilizes the "subscribe and save" model to generate more revenue from its customers. 

By allowing customers to subscribe to your products or services and receive a discount, you can generate a more reliable, recurring cash flow from your company's repeat customers.

Take a look at how OLIPOP offers a 15% discount for customers who opt for a subscription:

Lean on upselling and cross-selling

Upselling is defined as convincing customers to purchase a more expensive, upgraded, or premium version of the product they've chosen. Meanwhile, cross-selling entails recommending customers products related to the product they've already purchased. 

Upselling and cross-selling are both effective ways for ecommerce brands to increase their AOV and can be employed by providing customers with personalized product recommendations based on their past purchases.

Take a look at how ecommerce brand Uqora uses pop-ups to encourage customers to add additional items to their shopping cart:

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Uqora uses Recharge and Gorgias to delight subscribers, the majority of their customer base.

8) Collect and display social proof like reviews and user-generated content

Social proof (like user reviews) provides customers with peace of mind and can go a long way toward eliminating any hesitations about purchasing from your brand. 

Product reviews and testimonials, social media posts from customers, and customer messages are all examples of user-generated content that you should strive to collect and display across your website, product pages, and marketing materials. 

We love how Loop Earplugs leverages customer testimonials on their website to boost online sales with the power of social proof:

Politely requesting reviews in your post-purchase emails, incentivizing customer reviews with discounts or freebies, and simplifying the review process are a few effective ways to collect more of these valuable social proof resources.

9) Use high-quality images and superb descriptions for your products

Your product pages are the endpoint of the most crucial stage in the customer journey — the decision stage, when customers decide whether to purchase your product. This makes optimizing your product pages with compelling descriptions and high-quality images essential. 

Along with boosting your conversion rate, providing quality images and descriptions of your products also improves customer satisfaction and reduces support tickets by ensuring customers know exactly what it is they are purchasing.

10) Expand your social media strategy for social commerce

Social media marketing is something that every brand should take advantage of. 

Along with leveraging social media platforms for digital marketing tactics like content or influencer marketing, you can also leverage them as platforms for both sales and customer support. 

Selling on social media

Social commerce, which turns your social media accounts into ecommerce sales channels, makes it even more convenient for customers to place a purchase.

Social commerce is all the rage right now, so platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are offering more and more tools for ecommerce brands to set up and manage shops directly on their social media pages. 

These social commerce stores present an excellent opportunity to engage and sell to customers at the places where they are already spending the majority of their time online. And that kind of convenience is always great for user experience and, in turn, conversion.

Providing customer service via social media

The biggest tenet of providing customer support via social media is giving customers the option to contact you via social media messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger. 

Gorgias helps make social media customer service convenient for your support agents by enabling them to respond to customer messages across multiple channels from a single dashboard. 

You can also utilize social listening tools to provide proactive customer support to customers who mention your brand in posts or comments.

11) Support social media login features

Social media login is a feature that enables customers to create an account on an ecommerce website/log in to an existing account using their social media login. If you've ever been prompted to create an account with a website using your Facebook or Google log in, then you've already seen this feature in action. 

Social media login features eliminate the hassle of creating a new account and can thus eliminate a significant barrier that might otherwise prevent customers from converting. As for how to add this feature to your ecommerce website, the exact process will depend on the specific ecommerce platform you're using. Search for “social login [ecommerce platform]” to find apps that will enable this functionality for website visitors.

For example, One Click Social Login is a Shopify app that enables social login. 

12) Continuously collect data and iterate on your ecommerce strategy

The data you collect from your customers is your company's most valuable asset and should serve as the North Star for your ecommerce strategy in 2023 and beyond. 

Throughout your marketing, sales, and customer support processes, you should prioritize collecting customer data and feedback and use it to optimize those same processes. This starts by utilizing tools that provide robust data and analytics. 

For example, Gorgias' data and analytics features enable brands to automatically capture a wide range of data and provide powerful insights like customer support metrics and the support team’s impact on the company's revenue. 

Likewise, Gorgias integrates with a wide range of ecommerce tools to pull customer data — like past orders, order shipment , loyalty data, and more — into the helpdesk. This way, your agents don’t have to switch tabs to get important context and information to personalize the conversation.

Never sacrifice customer experience and loyalty for short-term revenue

The importance of the customer experience is by far the biggest takeaway of our guide to a successful ecommerce strategy, and it's something you should never sacrifice for short-term revenue. 

Going the extra mile to keep your customers happy (such as replacing a lost package) may cost a little in the short term — but might also pay off tenfold in the long run through repeat purchases and referrals.

If you want to start creating an optimized experience for your customers that will drive customer loyalty and grow your store's sales, Gorgias can help. 

To get started leveraging all of the powerful customer support tools and features that our industry-leading customer support platform offers, be sure to sign up for Gorgias today!

If you’re in the ecommerce industry, you’ve been on a major roller-coaster ride over the last three years:

• The unexpected drop, then spike, in online shopping in 2020 and 2021, followed by some stabilization in 2022
• Understocking from supply chain issues, and then by oversupply once lockdowns started to lift
• Record ecommerce profits followed by tightening wallets in the face of a looming recession

The loopy ride is far from over. As you already know, this year will bring its own highs, lows, twists, and turns. To help you understand how the industry is evolving, we spoke with ecommerce experts to forecast the top 11 ecommerce trends for 2023:

• Leaders from companies that build tools that power ecommerce, including Klaviyo, Yotpo, Loop, ShipBob, and LoyaltyLion
• Ecommerce agency leaders who are on the frontlines helping top merchants deliver exceptional support and optimize their conversion rates
• Our in-house team of ecommerce experts at Gorgias, who help merchants like you deliver revenue-boosting customer experiences

During our talks, it became clear that in 2023, the pendulum will continue swinging from acquisition to retention (for real this time), and brands will pivot away from rapid growth and toward sustainable profitability. Watch the video highlighting two top trends, or scroll down for the complete list:

1) Online stores will (finally) figure out retention

2023 is the year retention becomes a true priority for online stores. 

You’ve probably heard this story before. Retention has been a trendy term for years. But for many merchants, creating a retention strategy is like going to the dentist twice a year — everyone knows it’s important but not enough people actually do it.

You can see this lack of true commitment in Yotpo’s recent survey on the state of ecommerce retention. The survey showed that over 40% of online stores didn’t make any changes to improve retention in 2022 (despite 52% saying they were more focused on retention than they were in 2021).

But this year, the combination of rising customer acquisition costs (CAC), uncertain economic times, and tightening budgets will force brands to prioritize retention on the same level as acquisition.

George Walsh, Content Marketing Manager at LoyaltyLion, agrees that brands can no longer treat retention as a theoretical in 2023:

“Next year, we’re going to see more ecommerce businesses move away from acquisition and work harder to retain their existing customers during these economically trying times. Consumers are being pickier with their purchases as cash simply isn’t stretching as far, so brands will have to work harder to prove their value. Businesses themselves are also having to navigate smaller budgets, so with customer acquisition prices soaring, it makes sense to switch the focus towards existing customers.”

— George Walsh, Content Marketing Manager at LoyaltyLion

In other words, it’s time to start flossing — online merchants won’t be able to avoid the dentist in 2023. 

📚Recommended reading: Our CX-Driven Growth Playbook has lots of insights on the importance of retention, as well as specific tactics for turning one-time buyers into repeat shoppers.

2) Profitability > Growth

The same dynamics that push brands to take retention seriously — rising CAC, recession fears, and tightening wallets — will lead to closer focus on profitability (instead of growth at all costs).

Prepare for some major edits to the classic direct-to-consumer (DTC) playbook popularized by the likes of Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, and Allbirds. These brands grew incredibly fast by pouring tons of money into performance marketing, generating hype, and offering lucrative deals for online shoppers. 

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Then, customer acquisition was the North Star, even if it meant operating at a loss for years. Today, very few brands have that luxury.

The precarious global economy means the end of cheap capital to sustain unprofitable business models. Couple that with a constant rise in digital advertising costs, and many ecommerce stores will find that profitability is the sole path to survival as a business.

That’s why Jeremy Horowitz, Senior Partner Marketing Manager at Gorgias, believes merchants should get serious about their profitability goals in 2023:

“Start setting Net Profit goals yesterday. 2023 will be marked by survival, not top-line YoY % growth. Know your Sales, COGs, Marketing costs, and how much you need to make to pay your team and yourself. Get honest about the ad spend you can actually afford. And get creative about how you’ll earn enough sales to turn a profit.”

— Jeremy Horowitz, Senior Partner Marketing Manager at Gorgias

3) Subscriptions eclipse one-off sales

As the search for profitability takes center stage, more brands will start testing subscriptions as a new, consistent revenue source.

Subscriptions can be the most direct path toward profitability because they help online stores:

• Boost metrics like average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (LTV) without increasing CAC. For example, Uqora — an ecommerce brand for health supplements — found that subscribers buy their products more than 8 times throughout their lifetime. In addition to the increases in LTV and AOV, brands only have to acquire subscribers once, instead of constantly retargeting them with performance ads. 
• Make their brand a part of customers’ lives. The 2022 Subscription Commerce Report showed that most of the buyers who first purchased a subscription in 2020 exhibited lasting behavioral changes in 2021. In other words, subscriptions aren’t just a new trend, but a part of people’s lives. This gives merchants a unique opportunity to change consumer behavior and embed their brands into buyers’ routines.
• Delight shoppers and turn them into brand advocates. Subscriptions give you more chances to make buyers happy — think birthday discount codes, free shipping, loyalty points, and so on. Brands that create a great experience for their subscribers have a great chance of turning them into brand ambassadors who help grow the business organically.

To cut to the bottom line, Recharge’s 2022 Subscription Commerce Report shows that 42% of subscribed customers stick with a company for at least a year after the initial purchase, compared to only 1% of non-subscription customers:

Ryan Kodzik, Founder & Chief Creative Officer at Future Holidays, also believes that subscriptions will be a big weapon for online stores in 2023:

“The traditional ecommerce business model relies heavily on one-time customers. But research suggests that this is about to change. Subscriptions were one of our trends to follow for 2022, and they’ve only become more significant since.”

— Ryan Kodzik, Founder & Chief Creative Officer at Future Holidays

4) Brands leverage live chat as a conversion tool

When done right, live chat and chatbots provide great on-site conversion opportunities. They recreate the immediate sales interactions of in-person shopping, delight buyers with immediate support, and gather first-party data. That’s why we believe a lot more brands will start using live chat as a key owned marketing channel in 2023.

Now, it’s worth noting that most merchants still think of live chat as a way to provide customer support in real-time. This is an important use case, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Bri Christiano, Director of Support at Gorgias, knows that live chat can also be a great way to recreate some of the best elements of in-store shopping:

“A chat widget can be a great tool to unblock the sales process, both through proactive outreach and self-service functionality. When it comes to proactive outreach, you can set up automated chat campaigns to reach out to shoppers on your ecommerce site. You can:

- Offer a product quiz
- Ask if shoppers have questions
- Share a limited-time discount
- Direct them to best-selling collections
- Make new product recommendations
- Remind them about your free shipping policy
- Explain which payment methods you accept, like credit card, cash on delivery, Apple Pay, PayPal, etc.”

— Bri Christiano, Director of Support at Gorgias‍

Traditional marketing channels like social media or search engines focus on getting people to your site. But if those visitors don’t make a purchase, you’re earning nothing on your marketing investment. 

It’s like spending all your money on a beautiful storefront, but not staffing anyone in the physical store to help the shopper. When they can’t find help, they’ll quickly heel-turn and walk back out the door.

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That’s why live chat’s ability to increase conversion rates is so valuable.

Allen Burt, Founder and CEO at Blue Stout brilliantly sums up the importance of conversions over traffic:

“Most brands don't realize how increasing conversion rates affect profitability. To compare, if you increase your traffic through paid ads by 10%, your profit margin actually goes down on each sale (because ads are increasingly more expensive as you scale). Conversely, if you increase revenue 10% via a conversion rate increase of 10%, profitability goes up far more than 10%, since those sales didn't require any additional ad spend.”

— Allen Burt, Founder and CEO at Blue Stout

Live chat ensures you’re actually taking care of your traffic and potential customers by answering their questions, giving them useful self-serve resources (e.g., FAQs about shipping or payment options), and finding new ways to nudge them toward a sale.

For example, Jaxxon saw a 6% increase in conversions and a 46% revenue boost by creating engaging live chat campaigns, including one to offer VIP-level support to people browsing premium products:

Just imagine how much more sales you can also drive with a simple automated message to all visitors like “Spend $50 for free worldwide shipping!” or “All orders over $100 get a 10% discount!”.

Put simply, live chat can help you make the most out of our website traffic.

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Jaxxon boosted revenue by 46% with Gorgias live chat and self-service. 

5) Live commerce travels west and goes mainstream

Live commerce, the shopping format pioneered back in the 1970s (throwback to QVC!), has made a big comeback thanks to the livestreaming functionality of modern social media apps. While its popularity has been mostly limited to China, 2023 could be the year where live shopping takes over the Western Hemisphere.

Klarna’s latest Shopping Pulse report shows that 1 in 4 Gen’Zers from the UK, US, France, and other western countries have already participated in a live shopping event. 

Plus, Coresight Research estimates that livestream ecommerce penetration in the US will more than 5x between 2020 and 2026.

Our partners at Coalition Technologies also believe live commerce will be one of the biggest stories of 2023:

“A billion-dollar industry in China and growing in popularity worldwide, live commerce is forecasted to reach $35 billion in sales by 2024 in the U.S. And this is not solely through social media — ecommerce giants like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart are taking advantage of this “social buying” phenomenon by adding livestream shopping to their platforms.”

— Our partners at Coalition Technologies

6) Social commerce gains ground on social advertising

In 2023, we’ll continue to see the rise of social commerce, which allows shoppers to buy directly on social media apps. Brands will pivot away from social ads and toward social commerce to avoid rising ad costs and find new ways to differentiate themselves.

Besides being cheaper, social commerce also simplifies the buyer experience. It allows product discovery, research, and checkout to all take place on a social media platform (usually Instagram or TikTok), reducing the friction in the customer journey, especially for people on mobile devices.

This is in stark contrast to social advertising, which relies on people clicking on ads, leaving their social media app, and going to an external ecommerce website.

Like live commerce, social commerce also started in China, but the US is quickly catching on. 

McKinsey predicts that social sales will form 4.7% of all US retail ecommerce sales in 2023, with that figure projected to go up to 5.2% in 2025. Globally, the social commerce market is also expected to grow to more than $2 trillion by 2025.

7) Cross-border ecommerce sales reach new heights (or… distances)

The boom in online sales during the COVID-19 pandemic created lots of competition for established merchants. As a result, many brands started selling globally and this trend will only accelerate in 2023.

Juniper Research showed that the value of cross-border ecommerce will exceed $2.1 trillion in 2023, from $1.9 trillion in 2022. Additionally, ShipBob’s 2022 State of Fulfillment Report found that nearly 32% of brands plan to fulfill orders in a new country.

Kristina Lopienski, Director of Content Marketing at ShipBob, also confirmed that more and more merchants are looking to sell abroad:

“With high competition and potentially reduced consumer spending in local markets, many brands are looking across borders for customers who are interested in their products. ShipBob’s 2022 State of Fulfillment Report found that 56% of brands planned to expand cross-border offerings this year (of which, 32% planned to start physically fulfilling orders in new countries in 2022).”

— Kristina Lopienski, Director of Content Marketing at ShipBob

8) Personalization moves toward owned data

This year, personalization will go from a nice-to-have to a must for online stores. 

You’ve heard this one before, too. But in 2023, merchants will have a much bigger incentive to double down on personalization. 

The more personalized an experience, the higher the chance of converting visitors into buyers. The higher your conversion rates, the more you get out of your marketing spend. This leads to better profit margins, which, alongside retention, is the mother of all goals in 2023.

Plus, there’s ample data to show that customers value personalized experiences, while online stores don’t do a great job of delivering them.

According to Segment’s 2022 State of Personalization Report, 49% of all customers say they’ll likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience. Yet, only 35% of companies feel they’re successfully achieving omnichannel personalization.

Arjun Jolly, COO at adQuadrant, also explains that personalization is now an expectation rather than a bonus in the eyes of customers:

“71% of consumers expect personalization and 76% are disappointed when they don’t receive it, so it’s becoming incumbent upon brands to deliver from awareness through to conversion and loyalty.”

— Arjun Jolly, COO at adQuadrant

However, today’s brands can’t rely on yesterday’s main personalization weapon — third-party customer data. The value of third-party data has decayed due to:

• Strict regulations
• Updates from Google and Apple
• More privacy-conscious consumers

That’s why the foundation for successful personalization in 2023 will be zero- and first-party data gathered directly from visitors and buyers and stored in a CRM-like tool. 

Brands will need to focus on the old-fashioned way of uncovering what their customers want — talking to them (via surveys or live chat, for example).

Like Alex McPeak, Content Marketing Manager at Klaviyo, says:

“As brands throw out the old DTC playbook, and instead come to recognize the importance of really knowing and understanding what drives their customers, there’s going to be a renewed focus on talking to customers, gathering data and insights, and applying that knowledge to brands’ marketing strategies moving forward.”

— Alex McPeak, Content Marketing Manager at Klaviyo

9) Augmented reality (AR) reshapes the shopping experience

This year, we may finally see AR become a staple in online shopping. Of course, technologies like virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence also deserve a mention here, but 2023 feels like the year of AR, especially as virtual try-ons gain popularity.

Here’s why:

According to Statista, 110 million users in the US will use AR at least once per month in 2023, up from 83.7 million in 2020. This is a big increase, especially compared to VR, which hasn’t fared nearly as well.

This increase in usage coincides with a year in which brands must be laser-focused on delivering a great user experience. 

Additionally, popular ecommerce platforms and marketplaces are already using AR. For example, Amazon uses AR to improve the mobile shopping experience by letting visitors see how furniture would look in their room — a big advantage over shopping in a brick-and-mortar store.

Arjun Jolly, COO at adQuadrant, also believes 2023 is the year AR goes viral:

“AR has been trending for some time, but it’s yet to really hit the mainstream. We think 2023 is the year it finally happens. 

While entry into the VR world will set a user back at least $1,500 (for the headpiece/goggles), most adults in the U.S. are already prepared to use AR via their smartphones. 

We’re already seeing mass adoption from marketers in the make-up and furniture spaces with a sprinkling of auto and retailers for good measure. And, while the metaverse is busy trying to get off the ground, AR offers users the ability to truly blend, and benefit from, real and digital worlds.”

— Arjun Jolly, COO at adQuadrant

10) Sustainability becomes an even larger purchasing factor

It’s no secret that sustainability already plays a big role in forming shopping habits, especially among millennial and Gen Z consumers. While this is a well-established trend, we decided to include it as it will continue to grow in 2023.

Talkwalker and Khoros’s Social Media Trends Report shows that 2023 will see brands focused on sustainability take a larger share of the market. At the same time, shoppers continue to emphasize the importance of sustainability, with 82% wanting companies to put people and the planet before profit.

According to Ryan Kodzik, Founder & Chief Creative Officer at Future Holidays, the biggest sustainability initiatives this year will be focused on packing waste and shipping options:

“Remember when “eco-friendly” was just a marketing buzzword? Today, it’s become an opportunity to build a unique value proposition for your online store. Sustainable ecommerce makes good business sense. From more sustainable products to reducing packaging waste and better shipping options, steps taken now can reap significant rewards in 2023 and beyond.”

— Ryan Kodzik, Founder & Chief Creative Officer at Future Holidays

McKinsey even calls packing sustainability a “megatrend” prompted by consumer sentiment and tighter regulations across the world. 

11) Fear not — ecommerce is still going strong all over the world

All this talk of recessions, smaller budgets, and consumer uncertainty can paint a pretty grim picture of 2023.

Fortunately, we also have some great news — the growth trajectory will pick back up after the stabilization of 2022 and we’ll see an increase in global ecommerce revenue and growth rates.

Statista’s research estimates that online retailers will grow their sales to $6.3 trillion in 2023, compared to $5.7 trillion in 2022. This figure is projected to go as high as $8.1 trillion in 2026, which would mark a 56% increase from 2021.

Source: Statista

Statista also predicts this growth will vary across the globe. China, the current ecommerce leader, is projected to grow its ecommerce sales by only 15% between 2022 and 2025. The US and Europe are poised for up to 50% growth over the same period.

Additionally, Nicole Walker, Partner Marketing Manager at Loop, believes the share of all retail revenue that comes from ecommerce will continue to rise:

“Year-over-year growth may look similar to 2022, which is a far cry from the boom years of 2020 and 2021. But, the proportion of retail revenue that comes from ecommerce will continue to grow, thanks to the continued popularity of online shopping. And that’s great news for Shopify merchants – the opportunity to grow and expand is still very real.” 

— Nicole Walker, Partner Marketing Manager at Loop

2023 will be about getting back to basics

Despite the new challenges and opportunities for online merchants, the most important trends of 2023 won’t be exactly novel.

Yes, we know it’s more fun to talk about the impact of machine learning and other cutting-edge ecommerce solutions. These technologies will surely play a role, but on the whole 2023 will be marked by a renewed focus on the most fundamental concepts in the world of online commerce: retention, profitability, and customer experience.

Here are three things you can start doing today to stay ahead of the game:

1. Create a solid retention strategy. Retaining your current customers is a smarter (and cheaper) way to grow your business as opposed to relying primarily on acquisition. Check out our guide to ecommerce retention rate for seven proven ways to improve your retention.
2. Prioritize profitability over growth. Spending exorbitant amounts on digital ads and influencer marketing is no longer a central tenet of the DTC playbook. Profitability is now the primary goal and reaching it will require you to increase conversion rates, reduce cart abandonments, and abandon the unsustainable growth practices of the last 10 years.
3. Talk to your visitors and buyers. Zero- and first-party data gathered with users’ consent is the new foundation for creating exceptional shopping experiences. That’s why finding new ways to talk to buyers (like live chat) is paramount in 2023. Klaviyo’s guide on collecting customer-first data is a great starter resource on this topic.

Looking for help in 2023? Our Partnerships team has a wide network of agencies and tech tools ready to help ecommerce brands like yours achieve your growth goals. Answer a few questions (3-5 minutes) for hand-picked suggestions from our team:

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I come from the world of physical retail where building a bond was more straightforward. We often celebrated wins with breakfast and champagne (yes, I’m French!) or by simply clapping our hands and making noise of joy.

We would also have lunch together every day, engaging in many informal discussions.

Of course, it bonded us! I knew my colleagues’ dog names and their plumber problems, and I felt really close to many of them.

Employee engagement is one of the primary drivers of productivity, work quality, and talent retention. When I joined Gorgias, where we have a globally distributed team, I wondered how you create the sense of belonging that drives that engagement

The ingredients for employee engagement

Like many companies now, our workforce is distributed. But at Gorgias, it’s a truly global affair: Our team lives in 17 countries, four continents, and many different time zones, which can be challenging.

And yet, I believe Gorgias culture is truly amazing and even better than the one I used to know.

I realize that we achieved that by relying on the critical ingredients of a strong relationship

• Strong moments - Simply sharing coffee won’t take you very far in getting to know your colleagues. But creating some great moments together will bring you one step further.

• Repetition - If you don’t nourish the relationship consistently, it may unravel with time. You won’t feel as connected as before.

By repeating these strong moments, you can make the connection between people stronger as well. The stronger the connection, the stronger the engagement.

 Speaking of a strong engagement, Gorgias’ eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) is 50. How is this possible? Well, what’s always quoted as one of our main strengths is the company culture, and how it connects our employees.

Let’s take it further by exploring five actionable steps we have taken to make that happen.

Organize virtual summits (quarterly) 

While some would push back against events like these falling under the purview of the People team, they are important for building strong culture, team cohesion, and employee happiness — all areas that are definitely part of our directive.

Here’s what you need to know to bring these summits to your organization.

What is the virtual summit?

As the name states, it’s a virtual event where the whole company connects.

It’s not mandatory, but it is highly recommended to attend because it’s fun and you learn many things.

It’s a mix of company updates, fun moments, and inspiring sessions. Each session is short, to let everyone the opportunity to breathe.

Typically we have three kinds of sessions:

• Company updates range from intro sessions with the CEO and team lead presentations, to founder Q&As. During these sessions we have a short retro on the quarter to share strategic vision, which also provides an opportunity for the whole team to challenge the company leadership.
• Fun moments include activities like scavenger hunts, quizzes, online escape games, and online musical activities.
• Inspiring sessions covered topics including the benefits of a morning routine, and recruiting tips . These sessions help us to learn and grow, a top priority for our teammates.

Due to timezones, some sessions don’t include every country.

What are the key elements to make it work?

• Teamwork: Pretty obvious, right? But a great team is key to making the virtual summit a success. Identify who can be the owner of this whole event. In our case, it was someone from the People team, our Office and Happiness manager.
  
  
• Delegation: Get help from other teams to build the summit content. Having your team building that all alone would be overwhelming. Delegate! The customer success team can help you build the quiz: “How well do you know our customers?” for instance. The recruiting team can share how to be a good recruiter. And external vendors can help with specific games — we used virtual event contractors for the ones that would’ve been too cumbersome to build.
  
  
• Tools: Look for a solid platform to rely on. We used to rely on Google Meet, but since we have a growing number of employees, we use Bevy to cater to our virtual event needs.
  
  
• Content: A nice video at the beginning of the session as an ice breaker is always a good idea, and plus, it sets up the mood. The same goes for engaging slides. Even though we rarely use slide decks, dynamic slides are more effective than boring written docs for engaging 200 people for half-hour blocks. We share slides to present the company updates and the learning sessions.
  
  
• Anticipation: I think we can all agree that last-minute organization doesn’t work. The more you anticipate, the less stressful it will be. And the bigger your company is, the more things you need to anticipate.

How much does it cost?

Our last virtual summit cost us roughly $13,000, which means $65 per head. Here’s the breakdown:

• Content: $4,000
• Speakers for learning sessions: $2,000
• Games/animations: $5,000
• Food: $2,000

What are the challenges?

The first thing you might already have in mind is: It takes time! And you’re right.

The more we grow, the more challenging it becomes to organize these events.

I believe we’ll eventually need to have a dedicated event manager for all of our physical and virtual events. I want to have them within my team, and I 100% believe it’s worth it.

Another challenge can be technical difficulties with your event software choice, so make sure that you find a reliable platform that suits your needs.

Allow in person gathering at the nearest hub (quarterly) 

Our team is a mix of hybrid and full-remote workers.

Since we don’t want the full-remote people to become disconnected, we highly encourage them to join the nearest hub once a quarter.

And when they do, we organize some happy hours, games or movie nights. Those face-to-face activities help create bonds between employees. It’s simple and doesn’t require a lot of organization, but it creates an incredible moment every time the remote teams join. We call them Gorgias Weeks.

Organize a company offsite (annually) Of course with the pandemic, that’s not an easy one.

We were fortunate to be able to organize our company offsite and gather a massive part of the crew together in October 2021. 

The pandemic created doubt and additional points of stress, but looking back I’m so glad we were able to create an opportunity for everyone to meet in person.

We asked everyone to bring a health pass — full vaccination or PCR test — and we picked a location that allowed for a lot of outdoor activities.

We made sure the agenda for the two days was not too busy. As with our virtual summit, it was a balance of company alignment, learning, and fun. We made sure people had enough free time to relax, talk to each other, play games, or play sports.

This company offsite is surely an essential and strong moment for us and it helps create strong bonds and great memories.

Encourage team offsites (annually)

We encourage every team to organize their own offsite for team-building purposes. Since people don’t meet a lot physically, having these once a year is great!

We let each team lead own it. They pick up the location and the agenda. Then, we provide guidelines with the budget.

Needless to say, it helps build stronger bonds and great memories.

Have informal fun moments (weekly) 

In my experience, it was quite tough to create those moments internally with the team. That’s why we decided to start our team meeting with a fun activity of 10-15 minutes, where we are able to share more than just work. 

Every week, there is a different meeting owner who has to come up with new fun activities and games. Starting the meeting with this kind of ice-breaking activity brings powerful energy, and people are more engaged and effective in the sessions. I would recommend it to everyone, especially to those who think, “We already have so many things to review in those weekly meetings, we don’t have time for that.” Try it once, you’ll see how the energy and productivity are different afterward. 

On top of that, I also believe tools that encourage colleagues to randomly meet together are great. On our side we use Donut. It gives a weekly reminder that encourages employees to make it to their meeting with a colleague.

Team cohesion and employee happiness are worthwhile investments

Overall, we’ve organized six virtual summits, four company retreats, three Gorgias weeks, and hundreds of virtual coffee and fun meetings. 

At the beginning there were only 30 people in the company — now there are 200 of them. As I mentioned, it’s becoming more and more challenging to organize these meetups, but it’s also the most exciting part: making sure the next summit is better than the previous one! 

Of course, I’m aware that employee fulfillment and connection  are not the only ingredients for retention. But they are key ingredients and shouldn’t be forgotten, especially as we all become more remote. 

It’s a worthy investment to organize these events and allocate resources to them, because it makes everyone at Gorgias feel included and connected. And I have no doubt, now, that it’s part of our responsibilities in People Ops.

For every dollar that companies spend on email marketing, they earn an average of $36 in return. The high ROI of email marketing makes it one of the most lucrative marketing channels to leverage, and ecommerce stores should take advantage of the opportunity to promote their products and brand in every email they send to customers.

But marketing emails aren’t the only kinds of emails you can use for marketing purposes. Email signature marketing is a subtle tactic to make all kinds of emails work harder for your brand. When you send customer support emails, for example, you can use the signature to recommend products, announce new products and promotions, and more — assuming you provide great customer service above the signature.

Continue reading to learn why email signature marketing campaigns are such a powerful addition to customer service emails, plus tips and examples to help you develop email signature marketing designs that drive more website visits and purchases.

What is email signature marketing?

Email signature marketing is the strategy of placing marketing messages at the bottom of your customer emails in the signature section. These are not marketing emails: They are usually customer service emails that only use the signature for marketing recommendations.

Common examples of email signature marketing include:

• Your company's phone number, social media icons, or other contact information 
• Clickable product recommendations
• Announcements of new products and sales

Thanks to the various marketing opportunities they provide, 82% of email marketers use email signatures to boost brand awareness, get more web traffic, and boost on-site conversion rate. So, while email signature marketing may seem overly salesy, customers are accustomed to marketing messages at the bottom of emails. As long as your email provides adequate value to the email recipient, capping it off with tasteful marketing does more good than harm. 

What are the benefits of email signature marketing?

From lead generation to raising brand awareness and social media followers, you can expect a wide range of benefits from email signature marketing. Here are a few of the main advantages:

Provides important contact information

The law of least effort is an important part of great customer support. Once you send an email to a customer, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to contact you back. One simple way to ensure that customers can easily contact you back is to provide your contact information in the email signature. Once the customer is done reading your message, they'll have all the info they need to get in touch right in front of them.

Give customers a clear call to action (CTA)

When a customer support team resolves an issue, that doesn’t have to be the end of the conversation. You can use email signature marketing to give customers a clear path to re-engage with your brand and get excited about shopping on your site with a clear call to action (CTA).

Examples of CTAs in email signature marketing could include:

• Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated
• Check out our newest drop
• Shop 30% off sitewide this Black Friday
• Follow our new TikTok account for daily giggles
• Sign up to attend our upcoming webinar before the pricing increase — registrations end soon

To maximize the click-through rate (CTR) of your CTA, try and keep them short, active, and value-focused.

Build trust with social proof

The bottom of a customer support email could also be a great place to share positive feedback you’ve gotten from others. You could include a screenshot of a glowing review of your brand, a feature in a publication, a link to a case study, or a shoutout from an influencer in your industry to catch the attention of your email’s recipient and get them even more excited about your brand.

Announce new products and promotions

Sending emails to announce new products, sales, and other events directly is highly recommended as an ecommerce growth tactic — chances are, you already do this kind of email marketing. But even the emails that aren't specifically discussing these things can still be used to promote them. 

Again, since customers have come to expect marketing material in the signature section of a business email, they probably won't mind if you get a little off-topic in this section. By designing eye-catching email signature banners to promote sales and new products, you can turn every email your company sends into a marketing effort.

Steer customers toward purchases

Announcing new products and sales is one way to drive conversions with email signature marketing, but it's just one of several marketing strategies. Creating a call to action (CTA) for customers to book a demo or free trial is another option for ecommerce companies selling products that can be demoed. 

Using promotional banners to promote product recommendations is another highly effective option. By analyzing customer data, you can even make personalized product recommendations for an even better click-through rate. Lastly, offering discount codes can be an effective way to generate sales from email signature marketing, too.

For more strategies on how customer support reps can steer customers toward purchases in support communications for CX-driven growth, check out our CX-Driven Growth Playbook.

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Boosts email response rates

Business emails that include an eye-catching, professional email signature receive 32% more replies than those that do not. Including contact information makes it more convenient for customers to respond. The fact that many email signatures feature CTAs encouraging the customer to contact them back also helps. Whatever the reason, customer replies are always a positive thing — and the fact that email signature marketing can boost them substantially is a compelling reason to consider it.

What can you include in your email signature marketing?

There are a wide variety of elements that you can include in your email signature. While you probably don't want to include them all in the same email, you can pick and choose different elements depending on your email signature marketing goals.

Here are some marketing and branding elements to consider including in your email signature:

• Individual information about the agent/email writer
• Branded assets (such as your company logo)
• Links to the company website/landing pages
• Additional contact methods (phone number, social media icons)
• Customer service announcements (like new support channels)
• Company announcements (like a rebrand)
• Discount code and promotion announcements
• Product recommendations
• Content (blogs, webinars, and more)
• Clear calls to action (CTAs)

When used correctly, each email signature element presents an opportunity to promote brand awareness, generate sales and other positive customer actions, and make contacting you more convenient for the customer.

Step-by-step guide for creating an email signature marketing campaign

Like every marketing campaign, email signature marketing campaigns need to be given careful thought and consideration. It's important to define your campaigns' objectives and then design them step-by-step to reach those objectives.

To create email signature marketing campaigns that actually generate sales and other positive customer actions, here are the steps that you should follow:

1) Choose a design and location for your email signature

Before you decide on the specific branding and marketing elements that you want to include in your email signature, it's first important to choose a design and location for the signature. Starting with location, you'll obviously want to put your email signature at the bottom of the email. However, you've got many options regarding the size, format, and exact positioning of your signature.

You can get as creative as you want with your signature's design, too. The colors you choose, the fonts you use, and any other design elements you include are all key parts of your email's branding — choose wisely.

If you want more instructions on how to create email signatures, check out:

• How to create email signatures with HTML
• How to create email signatures in Microsoft Outlook or Gmail
• MySignature.io: An easy-to-use email signature marketing software

2) Discuss the goals of the email signature marketing campaign with your team

All email marketing campaigns need to have clear and measurable goals, which is also true for email signature marketing campaigns. From driving visitors to a landing page or homepage to promoting sales, you can design email signature marketing campaigns to accomplish many different objectives. Pinpoint the goals you want your campaigns to accomplish and discuss them with your team before you start to email clients with new signatures. This way, everyone on the team can build a signature that aligns with those goals.

The most common metric for successful campaigns is click-through rate (CTR), or the rate at which people click the link included in your signature. Check out this article to learn how to measure CTR in Google Analytics.

3) Craft your email signature (keep branding in mind)

Once you choose a basic design for your email signature and determine the goals for your email signature marketing campaigns, it's time to craft your email signature. You can hire a designer to create your signature for you, or you can do it yourself. Choose your email signature elements based on your campaign goals and design around these elements. For example, if your goal is to increase sales on a certain product line, make one of your signature elements a product recommendation from the line. Of course, it's essential to keep branding in mind throughout the design process and ensure that your email signature is consistent with your company's overall branding.

If you need help designing a professional and eye-catching email signature, then email signature templates, email signature generators, and other types of email signature software can all be excellent tools. 

Check out this article to see 16 useful customer service email templates.

4) Roll out an email signature marketing campaign

Now that you've chosen your email signature design and goals for your email signature marketing campaign, it's time to put that campaign into action. You can choose to have every support agent use the same email signature in their messages, or you can design multiple signature designs/campaigns and deploy them both at the same time. Using multiple email signatures will allow you to A/B test which ones deliver the best results, but many companies prefer to utilize a single signature design for brand consistency.

Whether it's multiple signature designs or a single one, rolling out your email signature marketing campaign is as simple as attaching your signature design to the customer support emails you are already sending.

Related reading: 8 plug-and-play email marketing automation sequences to try today. 

5) Monitor your campaign's success with KPIs and metrics

Email signature marketing might be a relatively passive marketing strategy, but it is still essential to closely monitor the results of your campaign. KPIs such as click-through rate, response rate, and conversion rate will all tell you how effectively your campaign is performing so that you can fine-tune it for better results and greater ROI.

The exact KPIs you want to track will depend on your specific campaign goals. If you are trying to drive sales via product recommendations, KPIs such as click-through rate and conversion rate is especially important. If you just want to raise brand awareness and aren't directing your customers to a product page, the response rate might be a more telling KPI.

6) Adjust, improve, and test the campaign

The primary reason for monitoring the success of your campaign is so that you can adjust and improve your email signature design as needed. If your campaign isn't delivering the results you hoped for, fine-tuning the design of your email signature or the marketing elements it includes may yield better results.

A/B testing is one great way to test and improve your email signature marketing campaigns. By using multiple signature designs and measuring their performance, you can determine which ones are most effective for different marketing goals and use those exclusively going forward.

Email signature marketing campaign statistics

A great email signature can be a powerful marketing tool, and plenty of statistics can back it up. Here are a few interesting stats that highly the effectiveness of email signature marketing:

• Eighty-two percent of email marketers use email signature marketing to boost brand awareness
• Emails that include a professional email signature yield 22% more clicks, 32% more replies, 10% growth in social media reach, and 15% more leads
• Forty-five percent of marketers use email signatures for marketing/brand awareness purposes on a regular basis
• Improving brand awareness is the most common goal of email signature marketing, with 41% of marketers stating that brand awareness is the main objective of their email signature

Amazing email marketing signature examples

Given how popular email signature marketing has become, there are plenty of great examples of it being put into practice. Here is a customer support email from Dr. Squatch that includes an excellent email signature:

Note that the email signature includes the agent's full name, the company logo, a link to the home page, and a product link. It's a simple design yet one that includes both brand awareness elements as well as marketing elements. The goal of this signature could be to drive conversions via the product recommendation link or simply raise brand awareness via the logo and home page link.

Here's another example of an attractive email signature from Swordfish Communications. Here the agent gives the recipient the information they need to contact them directly as well as multiple methods for contacting the company, and corporate social media profiles for a nice touch of social proof.

Lastly, here are a couple of examples of email signatures featuring banners that are clearly designed to promote sales:

This email signature features an animated banner, a sale announcement, and a clickable CTA and is a great example of some of the unique and eye-catching things that you can do with email signature banners.

Here's another great example of an email signature banner designed to make the signature timely and promote a seasonal sale:

Along with an eye-catching banner that promotes a seasonal CTA, this email signature also features other attractive seasonal design elements such as pumpkin social media icons and a stylish "happy holidays" sign-off.

How to create PS Macros in Gorgias to drive more sales

In Gorgias, you can (and should) create a permanent signature with your name and contact information. But we believe overly-gaudy messages in the signature get in the way of providing excellent customer service. Below, we’ll share how you can create and include a wide variety of subtler marketing messages at the end of your emails.

In Gorgias, you can create a library of templated Macros for all sorts of purposes. The most common templates are answers to frequently asked questions like “Where is my order?” or “Do you ship internationally?” But you can also create Macros for marketing purposes at the end of your email — we call them PS Macros. 

Here’s an example of a PS Macro getting added to a Gorgias user’s library of Macros:

Once this Macro is saved, the user can search for the Macro to include in any message to a customer — regardless of channel (email, live chat, social media, and so on).

Here’s what the complete message, including the support information and the PS Macro, could look like:

You can create a library of these Macros for a variety of purposes:

• Link to a new or best-selling item: “PS - Check out our new collaboration with Rihanna HERE - you don’t want to miss this.”
• Offer a promotion: “PS - Use my code 4UFALL for 15% off your next order. Click HERE to shop now.”
• Create a limited-time offer: “DON’T MISS OUT! Use code HOLIDAY to save 20% on everything in the store this Black Friday.”
• Give customers the VIP treatment: “PS - Use my code VIP15 to get 15% off our new Fall scarves. This herringbone knit is my personal fav.”

Keep customers coming back with Gorgias

Crafting a professional and eye-catching email signature or PS Macro is an excellent way to turn every email your company sends into an opportunity to promote your products and brand. 

With Gorgias, you can design multiple PS Macros and automatically attach those signatures to your customer support emails. Gorgias’s Macros provide a better email signature management solution, letting agents choose among email signature templates for different times of the year, customers, and marketing objectives without requiring your agents to change their signatures manually.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of how Gorgias can turn your customer service operation into a revenue-generating machine. Book your demo to learn how Gorgias can help your brand grow.

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Last thursday, we organized our first event at Gorgias. It was the perfect opportunity to celebrate our new round of funding and recent moving to a new office in SOMA, while discussing brand culture and customer experience.

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Special thanks to our speakers Renee L. Halvorsen from Marine Layer, Alicia Levine from Sunski, Dorian Greenow from Keto-Mojo and Anthony Benedettini from Dry Farm Wines.

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Here are the key takeaways you should remember:

• As an e-commerce brand, you cannot compete on price with Amazon and powerful dropshippers. That’s why brand experience is your key differentiation factor.

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• Building a strong brand experience requires to be present on each distribution channel. Don’t let your resellers do the job for you! Sunski for example prepares “environment kits” for their resellers and marketplaces. This way, customers can experience Sunski’s spirit beyond its website.

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• When building brand experience, your community is your key success factor. Create a pool of ambassadors who will promote your brand, and reward them with presents, promo codes, and dedicated attention.

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• Bet on your own team! Building a great mindset within your team will help you create a strong and consistent brand image. At Keto-Mojo, each member of the team does customer service, so that everyone focus on what customers really need. Besides, the founder should inspire a culture of passion and dedication to the product.

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You missed our event? Don’t worry, it was the very first of many!

Curious about how Gorgias can optimize customer service? Create an account here and get started in a few minutes!

A frequently asked questions (FAQ) page is a simple resource with a big impact. 

It proactively answers common customer questions, clears up any confusion that might get in the way of a purchase, and limits the number of repetitive tickets your customer support team receives so they can focus on higher-impact conversations. 

Plus, an FAQ page sets the foundation for a larger knowledge base or content marketing effort — such as a help center or a blog.

Prepare for a deep dive on FAQ pages: We’ll share FAQ page examples ranging from household brands to smaller ecommerce retailers, simple tips for building your page, and a template generator to get you started. 

We’ll also discuss when it’s time to upgrade your FAQ page into a more thorough help center to provide an even better, more proactive, customer experience. (It’s earlier than you think.)

What is an FAQ page?

An FAQ page is a page on your website that answers your customers’ most frequently asked questions. The questions included on an FAQ page tend to cover key information that’s relevant to most (if not all) visitors: questions about operating hours, product availability, pricing, return policy, basic troubleshooting, and more.

By providing these answers, your customers can get the information they want immediately, without contacting your support team.

FAQ pages are fairly low-tech, but they’re highly strategic. You can spin up an FAQ page in just a few hours and start seeing the benefits immediately, whereas more advanced customer service strategies like customer service automation and omnichannel customer support require a bit more investment.

7 FAQ page examples to emulate and learn from

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits and tips to create the best FAQ pages, let’s study what works (and doesn’t work) on the screen. Check out these seven visual examples of FAQ pages from brands of all sizes and industries.

1) Twitter/X: A great example for large companies

Twitter’s new-user FAQ places all FAQs onto a running, searchable page. You’ll see plenty of internal links, and notice the navigation bar on the left. Clicking any of those lines will jump users to the relevant section of the FAQ.

On the business side, Twitter has other FAQs that are harder to navigate and much more detailed. But there, the company assumes the user has a higher level of tech familiarity and more specific needs.

For such a behemoth company, multiple FAQ pages make sense. If your company sells many complex products or services, follow Twitter’s lead and consider multiple FAQ pages. But for most companies, the simplicity of one FAQ page is preferable.

2) McDonald’s: Poor organization, good searchability

It’s hard to miss the gigantic search bar on McDonald’s primary FAQ page. Just in case you do miss it, they include a helpful (if gigantic) prompt telling you to search for a question.

For such a sprawling FAQ page, a search bar is a good choice for organization’s sake. The top three questions pictured above don’t seem connected to one another, nor do they seem likely to be the three most popular questions McDonald’s support receives.

Still, for its excellent search and filtering options, McDonald’s is doing good FAQ work.

3) Microsoft: An organized way to provide FAQs for a complex product

Microsoft’s previous central FAQ page was centralized to the extreme, but the company has recently given every service its own FAQ page. Again, for companies with many complex products, this is a good decision. Here’s the page for Microsoft 365, which uses a navigation bar at the top with numerous questions in each section.

The “top questions” section is a smart move, pulling out the most-asked questions from each category and placing them at the top of the page.

Unfortunately, the page isn’t fully searchable: Each answer is hidden from the main page search until you expand the dropdown sections.

4) Nintendo Switch: Great visuals and categories

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The FAQ page for the Nintendo Switch does many things very well. All the questions are on one page, but Nintendo goes above and beyond by providing six visual buttons that jump users to the relevant section on the page. The questions are listed clearly and organized logically, and some questions match search queries closely (“How long will my Nintendo Switch battery last?” and “Can I watch movies on Nintendo Switch?”).

One drawback is that, like Microsoft, Nintendo is using collapsed answers, meaning on-page answers aren’t easily searchable. Worse, there’s no button to expand all answers at once.

5) Wikipedia: Searchable, succinct questions and answers

Wikipedia’s main FAQ page is well-built. It conforms to the overall site design (at first glance, it looks like any other wiki page), which is always a good choice. It’s fully searchable, both on-page and using browser search. You can quickly and easily see a list of the 11 questions on the page, and each question is linked to its answer lower down on the page. The answers themselves are succinct and chock full of internal links (as Wikipedia pages tend to be).

Wikipedia also has a FAQ index page, which lists out the 20+ different FAQs on the site. This page is well designed, too: While it doesn’t (and can’t) list out all the questions for every FAQ, it does include strategic keywords that can quickly guide the user to the right FAQ for any use case.

6) Zappos: Great categorization for a complex service

What the Zappos FAQ page lacks in attractiveness, it makes up for in utility. Every question is listed in the navigation section at the top, neatly organized into categories. Each one is linked, too. Scroll down, and you’ll see complete questions and answers without collapsable menus, which is great for on-page searching.

You’ll also see a ton of keyword-rich answers and internal links to other Zappos web pages, increasing the SEO value of this FAQ page.

7) Parade: Good navigation and showcase of company values

Parade, a DTC underwear brand, has an FAQ page with great navigation thanks to the buttons in the left column. And while the dropdown menu might be an opportunity for improvement, Parade is very wise to include a section on sustainability.

Parade markets itself as a sustainable underwear company and attracts customers because of it. Calling yourself sustainable is one thing, but detailing your sustainability efforts in a public, visible place could help convince skeptics that you practice what you preach.

If your brand rests on unique values like Parade, consider including a section in your FAQ page to highlight and explain those values in more detail.

Key benefits of an FAQ page

We identified the FAQ page as one of our top customer service trends because more and more brands have realized just how much time their customer support teams can save by implementing effective self-service resources.

FAQ pages aren’t just great for agents, they’re great for customer experience. A Microsoft study shows that 66% of all customers consult self-service resources before contacting an agent. Think of all the tickets that would save your team.

Ticket deflection is one of four key benefits of an FAQ page, which include:

‎‎Deflects repetitive, low-impact tickets from your customer support teams’ queue

FAQ pages free up time for customer support team members by deflecting all the simple frequently asked questions that would otherwise find new life as tedious tickets. Your agents don’t need to spend hours of their day answering questions about your return policy, your shipping rates, or your customer’s order status. These tickets aren’t conversation-starters or relationship-builders — in other words, you’re not missing out on an opportunity to “surprise and delight” your customers by making this kind of administrative information easier for them to access.

Reducing repetitive tickets improves your customer service response time and frees up agents to work on sensitive, urgent, or higher-value support tickets that would otherwise get buried in your helpdesk.

By the way, creating an FAQ page to answer common customer questions is one of our top tips in our CX-Driven Growth Playbook. The playbook shares 18 actionable tactics to boost revenue by 44% by improving CX, which our team put together based on data from 10,000+ merchants who use Gorgias and in-depth interviews with 25 top ecommerce brands using the platform.

Saves customers valuable time

Customers who visit your FAQ page will immediately find answers to your most commonly asked questions in one easily searchable page. They can learn about your product, shipping costs, return and refund policies, and much more — without having to contact or wait for an agent. 

For simple inquiries like these, 68% of people would rather use self-service resources like an FAQ page than contact an agent (and wait for their response). They may click a help button on your website, search on Google — more on that below — or even click a link to your FAQ in post-purchase email. Regardless, you want to make information easily accessible, no matter how a customers tries to find it.

Of course, some customers prefer human support, and many questions are too complex for an FAQ page. So, offer a healthy combination of self-service and human support to cover the entire range of customers and questions.

Adds value to search engine optimization (SEO) efforts 

FAQ pages also contribute value to your company’s SEO efforts. FAQ pages, and especially more in-depth help center articles, are a great place to include keywords relevant to your business. If properly search-optimized, your FAQ page can be another entrance point into your website from a search engine results page.

Here’s an example: Someone who wears scrubs at work might Google whether they can wash their scrubs in hot water. A help center article from FIGS, a DTC scrubs brand, appears on the first page of Google’s search results for the question:‍

The person who searched the question might click on this link, find their answer, explore FIGS’ website, remember the brand, and eventually return to make a purchase. 

Featured snippets are another SEO consideration. These are the boxes that pop up on search engine results and provide an answer to the query directly at the top of the page. You likely won’t capture featured snippets with a short FAQ page, but an in-depth help center or blog could help you capture that valuable real estate.

If you’re interested in getting your FAQ page to rank on Google, check out this resource on creating SEO-friendly FAQ pages. It walks you through SEO tactics like internal linking and keyword placement to help you appear in more search results.

Also, if you’re just interested in appearing in more Google search results (even if it’s not for your FAQ page), check out our guides on ecommerce SEO and creating ecommerce blog content that ranks on Google.

Encourages trust with your website visitors (which may turn them into customers)

Shoppers — especially potential customers visiting your site for the first time — tend to be a bit distrustful. This is even more true in the world of ecommerce. Everyone has been burned by long shipping times, lost packages, or poor product quality from online shopping.

Earning shopper trust is key to growing your store, and a good FAQ page goes a long way toward that goal. It shows your site visitors that you have clear policies for essential buying considerations like shipping and returns and care about providing a helpful, low-effort customer experience.

Serves as great material for a larger help center or templated responses

An FAQ is helpful on its own, but it can also serve as the bones for additional resources. Specifically, you can use the answers in your FAQ as a templated response — we call them Macros at Gorgias — to quickly answer repetitive questions even if they do submit a ticket.

Likewise, your FAQ can be the beginning of a larger help center or knowledge base. These resources are more robust, organized, and searchable databases of help content that customers can also access on their own, no agent needed. Gorgias takes these self-service help centers a step further by giving customers access to real-time information (like the status of their order) or even modify orders, no agent needed.

Learn more about these advanced self-service tools that make up Gorgias’ Automate.

What should your FAQ page cover?

Your primary FAQ page should answer questions related to your brand’s:

• Order tracking and management: Explain how and when customers can locate, edit, and cancel their order
• Shipping policy: Explain the cost and estimated time it takes to ship a product (including internationally, if applicable)
• Payment and tax FAQs: Explain how and when sales tax applies to purchases in your store 
• Location and hours: Explain when your staff is available on support channels and (if applicable) your physical location
• Returns policy: Explain how and when customers are eligible to return a product
• Refund, return, and exchange policies: Explain when and how a customer can return a product for an exchange, cash refund, or store credit
• Product FAQs: Answer common questions about your products, including sizing, compatibility, and troubleshooting
• Company FAQs: Summarize your company’s backstory, mission, and any important brand values
• Contact options: Explain how customers can reach your support team, including the estimated response times of each channel
• Safety and security: Explain the precautions you take to protect sensitive customer information

Try to provide succinct, accurate answers to questions in these categories, plus any other common queries your website visitors ask your support team. If you try to cover too many questions on your FAQ page (or answer questions with too much detail), you risk information overload and burying key information.

That said, your FAQ page should not be the entirety of your website’s self-service information. Consider adding more specific, contextual information throughout your website, like product-centric FAQ sections on product pages, or an in-depth, searchable knowledge base with much more information.

A step-by-step guide to creating an FAQ page

If you’re building your first FAQ page from scratch — or revamping an existing one — follow this step-by-step guide.

1) Gather the questions your customers actually frequently ask

The first step is to compile your brand’s most frequently asked questions into a single document. While every brand should cover some essential information — like the categories in the checklist above — you should also compile a list of questions customers have actually asked to make your FAQ page strategic and complete.

If you’re using customer support software, review all your tickets from the past one, two, or six months (depending on the volume of tickets you receive). Sort those tickets into categories like “shipping,” “product,” and “order status” to give you a sense of the areas your FAQ page should cover.  

If you use Gorgias, our customer intent detection can automatically give you this information:

2) Create concise answers to every question

A great FAQ page will provide concise, no-frills answers to specific questions. Keep it brand-friendly, even fun — but keep it concise. 

If your FAQ page starts to look more like Wikipedia than a clean, friendly web page, you might need to scale back your FAQ page and build a more organized knowledge base.

3) Provide a navigation system to keep your page clean

Ideally, you’ll continue adding new questions to your FAQ over time. But as your FAQ page grows, the customer experience could suffer without a clear navigation system. Here are a few navigation ideas you might implement:

• Consider organizing your questions into topic areas with their own headers
• Add a navigation bar to the web page’s sidebar that jumps to topic headers on the page
• Add a search function or search bar (don’t assume all users know how to ctrl + F / command + F their way through your page)

Some of these FAQ page design elements will require some extra coding, but your customers will appreciate this level of page enhancement.

If you use Shopify, you can also search the Shopify App Store for pre-built FAQ page apps with some of these advanced elements.

4) Make the FAQ accessible

When building your FAQ page, aim to make information findable for every customer, no matter how they might phrase a question or try and find the answer. A recent Feefo survey finds that 53% of consumers rank not being able to find the answers to their questions as their top online shopping frustration, so we recommend prioritizing clarity, searchability, and user experience over other aesthetic factors.

When it comes to phrasing, consider all the ways someone might find an answer for the most user-friendly search experience. In your section on refunds, for example, also use phrases like “money back” and “return.” This way, if someone uses Ctrl + F or a search bar, they’re more likely to find the information quickly.

On the topic of Ctrl + F, consider the limiting factor of design elements like dropdowns, or accordions. FAQ pages with dropdown answer sections that collapse and expand may make your FAQ page a little less searchable because collapsed sections don’t always appear with a Ctrl + F search. 

Also, make sure your FAQ page is accessible and highly visible within your website. If the page is buried it won’t serve a purpose. Link to your FAQ from key pages on the website, like the homepage, the checkout page, and product pages. 

5) Make timely updates and refreshes when necessary

An FAQ page is only useful if its information is trustworthy, relevant, and up to date. As a part of your content strategy, make sure you schedule reviews and refreshes of your FAQ page at least once every few months. This way, it will never become outdated or inaccurate.

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Expanding your FAQ page into a full knowledge base or help center 

While an FAQ is a great starting point, a comprehensive knowledge base (also called a help center) is much more effective in preventing unnecessary support questions. Help centers require a bit more front-end work than basic FAQ pages, but their depth and flexibility make them one of the most powerful customer self-service tools.

Your customer support platform should help you create a help center. Gorgias’s native Help Center integration makes it easy to spin up an in-depth help center to ease the burden on your customer service team and improve customer experience. You can include screenshots, videos, and GIFs to give your customers more user-friendly resources for learning about your products and services.

FAQ page vs. help center

The main difference between an FAQ page and a help center is that FAQ pages are simpler, more concise, and occupy a single page on your website. Help centers are more comprehensive, including multiple categories with several pages or articles in each one.

‎A help center can be as simple as having multiple FAQ pages by category, or it can be a robust resource for customers that includes tutorials with videos and images, articles for common questions, and even technical documentation. 

Even if you build a help center, keep a separate page for FAQs. This way, you can answer the most common questions on the FAQ page without crowding them with other, more specialized help center articles.

When to start building a more robust help center

Several signals indicate your ecommerce store needs to expand beyond a simple FAQ page. You might need a more robust help center if:

• Your website analytics show heavy traffic to your FAQ page
• You see fewer support tickets after launching your FAQ page, but still get several tickets asking repeat questions (that aren’t addressed on the FAQ page)
• You need categorization and organization as you build out your FAQ page to capture the full breadth and depth of your services

Considerations for building a help center that’s actually helpful

Help centers are valuable resources for ecommerce customers and ecommerce support teams — but only if they’re done right. Keep some of the following tips in mind when planning your help center to ensure that it’s as helpful as possible.

• Use clear category headings and subheadings to help people find the information faster
• Include a search bar to make it easier to find specific articles
• Link to articles that answer related questions to improve searchability and navigation within your help center
• Put your help center in a prominent place in your website’s navigation bar so it’s easy to find, and link to help center articles in relevant content you publish

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How Gorgias makes it easy to launch a full help center

Building a help center from scratch can seem intimidating, but Gorgias has you covered. You can easily customize your Gorgias Help Center and spend more time crafting effective answers with your internal expertise.

The Gorgias Help Center is clear and easy to navigate, so your customers can always find what they need. And because Gorgias’ Help Center integrates with the rest of the customer service platform, it’s easy to incorporate help articles into customer communications. This is a seamless way to give customers more support resources, contributing to a better customer experience.

If you have Gorgias Automate, you can also let customers track and manage their orders from within the Help Center — no need to contact an agent.

Once a customer clicks “Track” and identifies themselves, they’ll receive detailed order information without talking to an agent (or having to wait):

5 help center examples

Take a look at how these four companies keep their help centers organized, easy to search, and comprehensive. 

1) Yoto: Great organization and contact form

Yoto’s help center is an excellent example of an effective, well-organized, and searchable customer resource. This Gorgias-run help center is divided into FAQ blocks under several categories: deliveries and returns, general troubleshooting, using the product, FAQ, and other popular questions.

On top of great organization, Yoto’s help center offers a contact form where shoppers can send a detailed message to the customer care team at Yotpo. The contact form features customizable topics, which get automatically tagged in Gorgias. 

2) Dropbox: Prominent, auto-fill search bar

The Dropbox Help Center (not built on Gorgias) straddles the line between FAQ page and knowledge base, but it does so very intelligently. You’ll find top articles with tons of internal linking, plus links to significant service areas.

But the best part by far is the search bar. It’s quite responsive, proactively suggesting full article titles even as you begin typing a portion of a keyword.

3) Bank of America: Detailed organization and trending topics

Banking can get complex in a hurry, which is why Bank of America’s Help Center (also not built on Gorgias) impresses. After choosing your state of residence (which customizes certain rate information), you’ll land on a rich page with six service areas, each with five or more sub-areas. You’ll also find trending topics across the top, a powerful search bar, and a button that breaks out several additional topics.

4) Branch: Helpful self-service order tracking

Branch’s help center is another prime example of a well-executed self-service strategy. It includes a search bar, self-service order tracker, issue reporter, and a host of support articles under nine different categories. This is all possible because the help center brings in the full power of Gorgias’ self-service features.

And if the customer can’t find what they’re looking for within the articles, Branch provides contact information at the bottom of the main help center page with two simple options: chat or email.

5) Bully Max: Integration into the core website

Bully Max’s help center, which runs on Gorgias, features the same great search bar, automated order tracking, and clear categorization of Branch’s help center. The major difference is that (with the help of some additional coding), Bully Max embedded the help center in their core site. 

This way, customers can still see the store’s regular header and footer, and will still get notifications, pop-ups that offer discounts, and any other features that would get left out of a standalone help center.

Ready to build an FAQ page? Use Gorgias’ template generator to get started 

Ready to add an FAQ page to your website? Use our free FAQ page template generator to create a page with general categories like payments, shipping, and returns. Use this template as a starting point — most brands will need to add sections:

• A section on product FAQs: This is where you can answer questions that tend to occur around your product, like sizing for clothes or compatibility for electronics
• A section on brand values: This is where you can show off any differentiators you want to show off, like sustainability or locally sourced materials

Combine self-service with agent support for the ultimate customer experience

Your new FAQ is just the beginning of your investment in customer experience. As your brand grows, improve your customer experience with other self-service tools like auto-responses and self-service flows in your live chat widget. And your helpdesk can still send customers who need human support to live agents — who will actually have time to answer.

Gorgias is the ecommerce helpdesk solution that powers exceptional customer service on every channel, including email, live chat, social media, text, voice, and more.

By combining Gorgias’ self-service features with empowered agent support, you can create a customer experience that reduces effort shoppers, lets your customer support agents focus on high-value tickets, and ultimately drives revenue.

Ready to see what Gorgias can do for you? Sign up for free today.

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The best way to make customer service as convenient as possible is for ecommerce stores to meet customers where they already are. 

With that in mind, responding to customer interactions on a messaging platform can be an excellent way to provide better customer service — especially on one as popular as Facebook Messenger. 

According to research by Statista, Messenger has 106 million active daily users in America. And if a customer comes across one of your Facebook pages, your Facebook ad, or a Facebook comment that mentions you, the Facebook messaging app might be the first place they’ll go to ask you a question.

Below, learn how to use Messenger for business as an optimized customer service channel. 

Why teams use Facebook Messenger for customer service

According to data from Review42, 1.3 billion people around the globe use Facebook Messenger each month. This makes Facebook Messenger the second most popular mobile app for messaging in the world, behind WhatsApp (and, if you count it, SMS). 

Providing customer care via a channel customers already spend a lot of their time creates an easier, more comfortable experience for them overall. Here are some other benefits of implementing customer support on Facebook Messenger. 

Provide an omnichannel experience 

Asking customers to report a problem via your company's website or its customer support phone number may not seem like a big ask. However, allowing them to contact your company via the social media messaging apps that they are already most comfortable with increases the chances that they will reach out. If contacting support is too cumbersome or unfamiliar, they may simply take their business elsewhere without giving you the opportunity to make it right.

Answering customer queries seamlessly across channels is called omnichannel customer service, and it’s become a critical way for brands to offer better customer experiences. Research shows that getting support on the channels they love even influences purchase decisions.   

📚Recommended reading: How to usse social media for customer service. ‍

Make customer engagement more personal 

Messenger is one of the more personal communication channels to choose from, especially since many people use Facebook Messenger to communicate with friends and family. 

Because of this, managing customer relationships via Facebook Messenger is a more relaxed, natural, and personal way for customers to engage with your brand. 

📚Recommended reading: How to offer personalized customer service at scale.

Make public conversions private 

If a customer is upset, they might leave an angry comment on one of your Facebook posts. Bringing that conversation into a direct message takes that public conversation private, allowing you to offer more personalized support without the eyes of your entire follower base (or prospective customers) on you. 

• For curious or excited customers, you can have more personalized conversations, send over a small discount, and have a longer conversation that isn’t possible in public comment
• For escalated or upset customers, you can remove the heated conversation from a public forum and resolve the issues with minimal damage to your brand

Just be sure to ask them to message you first to comply with privacy standards. 

📚Recommended reading: How to deal with angry and escalated customers.

Integrate with a helpdesk and centralize communication 

When you open the floodgates to social media customer support, you or your team will likely be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of comments, questions, or posts that include your brand. While not all of these mentions will require support, the more you can stay on top of them, the better your brand perception will be. 

Facebook Messenger can integrate with a CRM or helpdesk that can centralize conversations from all of your other support channels (like email, live chat, SMS, voice, and social media) under one user-friendly dashboard. This makes it much easier to organize conversations so that reps can respond to things in real time or automate responses to common questions.

For example, Gorgias lets you create templated responses to common questions which saves your support reps time. It also lets you set business hours and automate responses to set customer expectations and let them know when you’ll respond. 

Learn more about how Gorgias integrates with Facebook Messenger. 

Messenger saves each customer's chat history and makes it easy to re-engage at any time

Even without any integrations, Facebook Messenger still automatically saves customers’ chat history. This makes it easy to re-engage with customers anytime you wish, which simplifies the customer service process and can potentially save your support team (and customers) a lot of time and hassle.

📚Recommended reading: Should You Delegate Social Media to Customer Support?

Use chatbots and automation to provide quick responses 

Chatbots offer near-immediate response and resolution times to simple customer inquiries. By addressing common issues without the need for a live support agent, chatbots can also reduce your support ticket volume and free your support team up to focus on more complex and pressing issues.

However, practice caution here. Most chatbots provide sub-optimal customer service. That’s why we prefer automation features that offer the same convenience (without deceiving your customers). While it’s not currently available on Facebook Messenger, take a look at how we build automation features into live chat to offer a better experience than chatbots:

https://gorgias.wistia.com/medias/gb277k8th0 

📚Recommended reading: 2022 Customer Service Automation Guide [+Benefits and Best Practices]

7 Facebook Messenger best practices for customer support teams

If you’d like to get as much value as possible from Facebook Messenger, here are seven best practices for using Facebook Messenger as a customer service channel.

1) Mind Facebook Messenger’s privacy policy 

Keep in mind that, as stated in Messenger’s privacy policy, you can only send messages to people who message you first. 

When moving from a public channel (like a Facebook comment) to a private channel, ask customers to make the move rather than messaging them. One way to maneuver this conversation is to ask the customer to message you something specific, privately, to resolve the issue. For example:

“No worries, {{Customer name}}! Your order hasn’t shipped so we can still change the mailing address. Please send us the new shipping address in a private message and we’ll make the change.”

2) Respond quickly, whether via a live chat experience or a chatbot

According to data from SuperOffice, 46% of customers expect a response time for customer service inquiries of four hours or less. Further, 12% of customers expect companies to provide a quick response in 15 minutes or less. 

‍Using Messenger chatbots can be a great way to ensure speedy responses to common customer questions. However, responding quickly is still important if you’re offering customers a live chat experience via Facebook Messenger rather than directing them to a chatbot. Even if you do use live chat, you can still set up chatbots to send an auto-response that thanks them for their inquiry and lets them know that an agent will assist them soon. 

Here’s how to set up that kind of automatic response Rule within Gorgias:

In all cases, it’s essential to make every effort to respond to customer inquiries as quickly as possible.

📚Recommended reading: Check out our case study of Berkey Filters, who achieved low response rates and high channel adoption rates after launching a new customer service messaging channel.

3) Automate simple questions that come through Facebook Messenger

In addition to lowering the average first response time of your customer support team, using bots to automate simple questions that come through Facebook Messenger can also free up a lot of time in your team's schedule. 

According to data from Tidio, 62% of customers would rather use a chatbot than wait for a customer service representative to take their call, making Facebook Messenger chatbots an excellent way to ensure that your customer service process is as speedy and convenient as possible. If you use a helpdesk, a plugin like ShopMessage can create this type of automation for you.  

If you use Gorgias, set up autoresponse rules to make each day’s workflow easier for your team. For example, set business hours and an autoresponse rule that fires if a customer does or doesn’t reach you during that time. 

For shoppers who message outside of business hours, automate text to let them know when you’ll be back online. For those who message during business hours, automate a message that approximates wait times: 

 4) Use content, FAQs, and knowledge base material to get customers to solutions faster

Resources like blog posts, FAQs, and knowledge base material can all serve as excellent customer service tools to supplement the support you offer via Facebook Messenger. 

Link your help center prominently on Facebook, send over links to your help articles for additional details or step-by-step walkthroughs once you answer their questions, or share blog posts that provide additional helpful information directly via chat.

Providing helpful self-service tools like these as part of your Facebook Messenger support strategy can go a long way toward making Facebook a more effective customer service channel.

5) Create short, Facebook-appropriate templates for FAQs

To save yourself or your team time, create templated responses for the most common questions that come through Facebook Messenger. 

Like a Facebook message would be, keep these responses short and sweet. Prioritize the messages that tend to come through Facebook. For example, shoppers will likely send in a message about an ad they saw or a product they’re interested in rather than asking for an update on their order status. 

📚Recommended reading: 10 Best Practices for Providing Exceptional Customer Service on Twitter

6) Seek out context to help customers with support requests

While it can certainly be beneficial for support agents to direct customers to resources such as knowledge base material, the reverse is true as well. Resources customers send in while seeking assistance can offer a lot of value. 

Facebook Messenger makes it easy for people to send photos, videos, and documents. These resources can provide helpful additional information about an issue support reps are attempting to resolve. For example, an agent might need to take a closer look at a crack in a defective product or see the color of an item they need to send a replacement for. 

Seeking context starts with having your agents ask customers the right questions. For example, asking customers how they are using the product that they purchased can provide agents with a lot more context regarding the issue that the customer is facing. Asking customers if there is anything else that you can help them with after the initial problem has been resolved is another question that can ensure that no issues go unaddressed. 

By making an effort to seek out as much context as possible, your customer support agents can ensure that they provide relevant information that fully resolves each issue. 

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7) Respond to every customer who sends you a message

It isn't always easy, but responding to every customer who sends you a message through Facebook Messenger is essential if you want to optimize customer satisfaction and reduce churn. This is especially evident when you consider the fact that Facebook Messenger shows users when their message has been seen. 

In other words, if you choose to ignore a customer's message, they’ll know about it. Thankfully, tools such as autoresponders and dashboards for centralizing customer conversations can make replying to each and every customer message a much more feasible goal. For example, if you use Gorgias, all open tickets will appear prominently until you close them.  

Respond to Facebook messages in your helpdesk to provide omnichannel service

Centralizing all of your customer conversations across channels under one easy-to-use dashboard makes managing Facebook Messenger conversations much more efficient for your support team. It lessens the possibility that high-priority messages will get lost, and allows teams to assign different conversations to the right agent who is best suited to support. 

This is where customer service platforms like Gorgias come in. Those that offer integrations will also show a customer's entire history with your business like their purchase history, past support conversations, and even social comments on different platforms. This allows your support agents to provide more helpful and personalized assistance. 

Omnichannel experiences help meet customers where they are, ensure a smooth, hassle-free experience, and let them message you from the app where they’re most comfortable. This increases the likelihood they will actually reach out to you, rather than deciding not to shop with you again instead. 

How to set up a Facebook customer service channel with Gorgias

With Gorgias, ecommerce stores can centralize customer conversations across multiple channels under one user-friendly dashboard, employ customer experience automation features complete with AI-powered customer intent and sentiment detection, create automated customer service workflows for Facebook Messenger, and much more. You can also expand your support messaging capabilities with our SMS feature.

Setting up the Gorgias and Facebook integration is quick and easy. Just visit Settings -> Integrations -> Facebook, Messenger & Instagram on your Gorgias dashboard. Make sure you’re logged into the correct Facebook account, authorize Gorgias on Facebook, select the page you want to add and your import settings, and then add the page! 

To see for yourself how Gorgias can streamline your customer service process by integrating with Facebook to create a unified customer service workspace, check out our social media features or sign up for a free trial today. 

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‍Gorgias’ partnership with Attentive improves customer experiences and drives even more revenue for retail and e-commerce brands by allowing customer support teams to answer customers’ questions via text message. 

With this integration, retail and e-commerce brands on Shopify can ensure their customers are getting the best support experience possible, as customer support teams can now directly answer customers’ requests sent via text message. 

“We are thrilled to partner with Gorgias to empower our clients to directly and instantly resolve customer needs, resulting in more revenue,” said Jordan Sucher, Product Manager at Attentive. 

“We’ve found that Attentive clients who quickly respond to shoppers’ inquiries received via text messaging are driving 31% more spend from customers who receive replies vs. those who do not.”

How it works:

Brands can choose between automatically forwarding all messages to their customer support team, or having shoppers confirm they would like assistance.

• Message forwarding: All text messages received from a customer are automatically forwarded to Gorgias so they can quickly assist the customer with their request.
• Support confirmation: Help shoppers when they need it most: After a customer responds with a text message, they will be prompted to confirm they want a customer service representative for assistance.

More best practices and examples from Attentive here.

“Our team at Gorgias is excited to expand our partnership with Attentive. Through this integration, we’re strengthening the relationship between brands and their consumers and empowering them to communicate more easily, quickly, and effectively, creating a more seamless mobile shopping experience”

• Philippe Roireau, Head of Business Development & Partnerships at Gorgias.

Want to learn how to personalized mobile messaging can help your brand?

Request a demo with Attentive →  

Want to learn how to create your helpdesk in minutes to start offering support in SMS, social media, email, WhatsApp, and beyond? Request a demo with Gorgias →