Daveed bag on a couch
Row 7 vegetables on a white table
Wet For Her vibrator
Dormie golf clubs
Boy in Faire Child coat stands by vegetable
Living room full of Saris furniture
InsideOut patio chair on a deck
Two women kissing in shower
Sunpan furtniture in living room

Tailor-made for emerging to mid-market brands

person reading a magazine about design

Driving Engagement Through Design

Your ecommerce website is so much more than a transactional channel. It’s where you differentiate your brand, create emotional connection with customers and spark deeper engagement.

Shopify, the commerce platform powering millions of storefronts, is the leader here – offering everything you need to grow your business and drive customer engagement.

From user-generated content to interactive lookbooks, 3D visualization tools, AI-powered chatbots, and personalized shopping, Shopify lets ambitious brands create captivating digital experiences.

But you can’t add every possible element or feature to your ecommerce site. Nor should you.

Intentional UX/UI design prioritizes the highest impact features, while staying true to brand, creating seamless user journeys, and throwing in a little delight when it matters most.

Let’s dig into why engagement is so valuable (beyond the obvious), how UX/UI design in Shopify is built for influencing engagement, and the most common mistakes to avoid. 👇

Why Engagement Matters Beyond Conversion Rates in Ecommerce Website Design

Measuring website success strictly based on conversions is shortsighted.

Whether it’s creating excitement with contests or FOMO with user-generated content (UGC), improving customer engagement is an infinite loop for future interactions, advocacy, and (ideally) more revenue.

Brands investing in – and committing to – customer engagement strategies often see returns. Twilio’s 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report found that brands that invested in customer engagement strategy saw an average revenue increase of 123% and higher customer retention rates.

Engagement and revenue go hand-in-hand. If you’re a luxury skincare brand, engagement might look like a customer spending 10 minutes watching user-generated tutorial videos. The brand connection is deeper than the transaction; it’s building trust, interest, and a reason to return to the website in the future. This drives average customer lifetime value higher.

How Can You Design Your Shopify Store for Collecting Emails, Driving Engagement, & Building Long-Term Relationships With Your Customers?

Intentional design helps customers satisfy near-term needs, while teeing up future interactions, like joining loyalty programs.

Here are a few (of many) ways to deepen customer engagement and build long-term loyalty.

1. Clear and Compelling Incentives

Engagement is a value exchange, where customers weigh the benefits of an action (like entering a contest) against the effort required (providing contact information).

Incentives must be enticing and clear. Rewards can be financial (like a coupon or discount) or informational (like receiving your expert insider newsletter), but the value must be obvious before asking for personal information.

Experiment with different types of incentives and offers to learn what motivates your customers to engage with your brand. (And as a reminder: you probably want to run contest plans through your legal department.)

2. High Quality Media

High-quality media and content give shoppers an immersive look at your products, helping them not just learn, but connect to your brand emotionally too.

This is particularly true in the fashion and beauty spaces, where customers rely on mixed media to visualize themselves wearing an item or using a product in real-life scenarios.

For Laura Mercier, we built a virtual try-on experience that gives shoppers a chance to test products before purchasing. We also baked in live chat to answer common questions and built a custom portal to elevate website personalization.

Brands should consider employing diverse media types, like auto-looping videos, user-generated tutorials, lifestyle imagery, 360-degree product views, and variant-specific photography, to grab and keep attention. Upsell complementary items as well on product description pages (PDPs) to increase average order value in a non-intrusive way. Example: scarves on a gloves PDP.

3. Community Engagement

Within your Shopify presence, think about creating intentional spaces for community engagement. Make it easy for customers to share reviews, post photos, or rate products. This turns customers into advocates and encourages new visitors to try your products.

In practice, users shopping for shoes or clothing will typically lean on reviews to figure out true sizing, width, comfort, and materials. UGC in that context can help drive conversion. In fact, some users trust UGC more than polished product galleries, since the images show a realistic view of the product on everyday people.

We doubled down on user reviews for r.e.m. beauty, allowing customers to view aggregated star ratings or filter to “has media” reviews to see how the popular makeup looks on everyday users. Polished product photography and branded video helped create a cohesive experience.

4. Email Sign-Up Forms

Use email sign-ups and other webforms to generate leads and grow your audience.

Place forms strategically (like in the homepage footer or blog sidebar) to collect emails without disrupting the shopping experience. Give customers a few seconds to browse a page, before triggering an email popup, and make sure the popup or modal is easy to close, particularly in the mobile experience.

We design forms to be simple and non-intrusive, with a clear incentive. We also implement progressive disclosure; collecting information about a customer slowly, over time (i.e., require enrollment with an email address first, and then a mobile phone number further down the road).

5. Gamification and Contests

Interactive digital experiences, like quizzes, giveaways, and interactive challenges, create fun and memorable brand moments that can also be informative and conversion-oriented.

Any gamification needs to align with your customer interests, brand tone, and channel preferences to create rewarding and valuable experiences. Customers must want to participate or be incentivized.

Similarly, weave in user-generated content (like encouraging customers to upload apparel photos for the chance to win a free item) to gain valuable media to repurpose later.

6. Rewards and Loyalty Programs

Rewards and loyalty programs incentivize shoppers to become devoted, repeat customers. Thoughtful design around engagement can drive them.

Loyalty programs combine data-driven personalization, interactive features, and gamification to reward customers for their repeat business, frequently offering a future discount or incentive.

For example, we launched an omnichannel customer loyalty program using Yotpo for Frank And Oak, allowing customers to accumulate points that unlock exclusive offers such as pre-sale events, promotions, and gifts with purchase. After migrating the brand’s ecommerce store to Shopify and implementing this program, Frank And Oak increased their average order value by 10% and conversions by 58%.

What UX/UI Errors Can Kill Engagement?

Just as intentional design choices can boost engagement, plenty of others can do the opposite.

1. Overcomplicated Interfaces

Cluttered user interfaces (UI) overwhelm customers. Streamline your Shopify UI to facilitate intuitive navigation, product discovery, and action.

It’s important to understand where buyers are in their journey to serve relevant engagement opportunities. There is a time and place for everything. For example, a newsletter popup with an incentive is appropriate on the blog, where users are seeking out interesting content. But on product detail pages, we’d prioritize an upsell or product-focused engagement, to motivate users to add the item to their cart.

Focus each page on your customers’ needs and remove unnecessary distractions.

2. Weak Engagement CTAs (calls-to-action)

Clear engagement CTAs guide customers to take action, like leaving reviews or sharing on social media.

CTAs must be clear, clickable, and descriptive. Pair them with compelling copy that explains the value to the customer: Why should they click; what’s in it for them?

Use a singular, strong CTA to optimize the customer journey. Then, experiment with different CTA copy, colors, sizes, and placement to see what works best to boost engagement.

3. Intrusive Popups

Poorly timed pop-ups or banners disrupt the user experience.

Wait 10 to 30 seconds before displaying a popup, so users have a moment to understand your content before the interruption. Or, try scroll-based pop-ups that trigger when users reach a specific part of the page for more natural timing.

4. Overlapping Elements

Overlapping elements break the user experience. Customers can’t easily click, view, or interact, when content items reposition themselves on top of each other.

For example, if an email capture and chat widget overlap in mobile, users will have difficulty opening or closing or the other. Everyone knows this frustrating feeling.

When we design for engagement within Shopify, we take complete control over when elements appear, where they appear, and how they behave across screen sizes. This creates a smooth and expected user experience.

5. Poor Mobile Optimization

Over 75% of U.S. online shopping traffic happens on mobile devices. Optimizing your ecommerce experience for mobile devices is non-negotiable.

Users scrolling through your site on their phones creates an opportunity to encourage non-transactional engagement. (Think watching videos, reading how-to guides, or entering contests.) These moments strengthen the brand-customer relationship.

We take a mobile-first approach to every design project. With limited real estate to work with, we ensure every webpage tells a strong and logical brand story and user flows are focused and streamlined. We test that site elements and content fit naturally on every device and that popups, forms, and calls-to-action work effectively.

Responsive, mobile-first design prioritizes every pixel, forgoing “nice to have” interactions for the most important, relevant, and compelling digital experiences.

Customer Engagement is Core to a Thriving Ecommerce Brand

Designing for engagement while also designing and building for conversions within Shopify is part art, part science. It is not simple. And it is never set-it-and-forget-it. It is a constant work in progress.

We’ve launched over 300 Shopify sites for some of the world’s most recognizable brands. We pull inspiration from that experience while diving deep into each project, interviewing and testing with customers, interpreting qualitative and quantitative data, and building an approach to engagement that is rooted in strategy.

With a thoughtful approach to how you design for it, you can build a movement that translates into scaling revenue. And there’s no better platform to do that on than Shopify.

Ready to drive deeper brand engagement through your ecommerce presence? Let’s chat.

Authors

Hagar Vander Headshot
User Experience
Hagar Vander

UX Director

Meet Hagar, UX Director at Domaine. Hagar has 10+ years of UX experience with a focus on ecommerce. At Domaine, she helps brands communicate their value and differentiators while advocating for an intuitive experience for their customers. She has previously worked at Born, Red Antler, Huge, MRM Commerce and Salesforce.