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Marketing: why you absolutely need a Live Chat tool

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Live Chat is a tool for instant communication between a brand and its customers. Moreover, it’s a business feature that will make your company convert more visitors and offer better service.

Whether you’re involved with big retailers or small brands, a Live Chat will help you connect to your consumers in the best possible way. Real-time answers are one of the reasons customers love to make deals with companies that offer this tool.

But there’s so much more you need to know about Live Chat, especially since one of the following year’s marketing trends focuses on providing a greater customer experience.

Since we’re on the subject, both things are highly related to each other — but I’ll get into more details later on. Here, I’m also going to tell you everything to understand how to use this feature and create a positive brand perception for your business, plus how to choose the best live chat software.

Just one more thing before you learn all about acquiring a Live Chat as a marketing tool for 2021: it will only take you as far as you’re willing to put your efforts. What does this mean? It’s worth nothing to work with this type of chat if you don’t create a strategy and work to see the most beneficial results it can offer.

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The growth of Live Chat

First, let’s start with some background on this tool. As I said, it is a communication tool, and its purpose is to connect brands with their customers. The concept has been around for many years, but only recently, companies started developing modern software that actually focuses on the customer experience.

Most customers prefer to make deals with companies that offer Live Chat. It’s more practical and convenient for them to talk, ask for help or support from the brand’s attendants.

Because of its many benefits, both for the brand and the customers, this feature has grown exponentially over the last few years. Even though companies still aren’t living the tool to its full potential, the process of adaptation has started.

In fact, many companies know this feature is important, they have a solution for their brand, but they also know they aren’t using it as they should to see the impact Live Chat can have.

Statistics that prove you need a Live Chat

Since it has gained much attention, companies wanted to learn some statistics and understand how important Live Chat really is. After all, numbers and facts are big helpers to make more intelligent and assertive decisions.

After gathering data from several business and customers, these are some examples of statistics that show how Live Chat is growing and making itself a must-have solution:

  • It’s expected to grow as much as 87% in the next months
  • 46% of consumers prefer Live Chat over other communication channels
  • B2B companies saw a 20% increase in conversions after they started using Live Chat
  • This tool is 50% cheaper than phone customer support
  • 79% prefer this channel because they get faster responses

Once again, I’ll repeat that: these numbers are only true if you work to make them that way. For example, customers prefer this chat because conversations are instant and faster than other means, right? So, if your customers are to think that way, you need to make sure attendants will be available to make real-time answers happen.

Do you see what I’m saying? It’s quite simple, really. Use it right, get the results. Leave it to chance, and you’ll be losing money.

How Live Chat and Customer Experience go together

If you haven’t made the connection so far, I will make it clearer for you: Live Chat IS customer experience.

What encompasses customer experience? Mostly, it is about the entire exposure and participation a person will have with your brand. From the first contact to closing a deal, every single moment is considered inside this experience.

And how important is CX? Well, I’ll recur to the statistics here one more time and there are two thing I want to show you:

  1. 96% of consumers say they consider this to be a deciding factor to encourage them into being loyal to a brand
  2. Businesses that focus on customer experience see a revenue up to 8% higher than their competition

CX is about increasing the customer lifetime value as well. The better the experience, the more long-lasting the relationship will be. This means that customers will either buy more frequently or make bigger purchases at once. Whichever happens, each customer will be worth a lot.

You probably know this already, but maintaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring new ones. So make sure to have a proposition to create loyal consumers.

Create a positive brand perception with Live Chat

As you may have noticed, offering good service is also related to how your company is seen through the eyes of the consumers. Are they giving you compliments or complaints? Are they recommending you? Are they coming back or making unique purchases?

Additionally, tracking consumer behavior is vital to understand their connection with the brand. If you know who looked at a product page, who added to the cart and gave up, and so on, you will know what kind of strategy to use as a follow up.

As you gather data, your whole team can analyze the information and have some insights on how to improve marketing, sales, and the customer experience itself.

Why do you need a positive brand perception?

I know this is probably a somewhat foolish question, but it needs to be answered. That’s because you must understand the benefits of having a good word of mouth.

Most decisions nowadays are made based on how your company is known in the market. If people give you good reviews, you’ll have higher chances of getting new customers. However, if your reviews are bad and full of complaints, people won’t think twice before turning to your competitors.

It’s all about increasing customer retention, attraction, and loyalty.

How is this related to Live Chat?

You’ve seen above how Live Chat and CX are part of the same thing. Which means, when you give customers a good service through this feature, it will pay off in customer satisfaction.

Once you get clients to be happy with what you give them throughout interactions, they will be more likely to talk you up. In reality, 89% of consumers say they would recommend a brand after a positive experience.

Hence, your brand will start getting recognition and be more attractive to make deals with.

What to do with your Live Chat to enhance CX and brand perception?

Simply put: you need to humanize your service. Create a real connection, asking and answering questions without sound like a pre programmed machine — one of the reasons why Live Chat is surpassing chatbots too.

Of course, you can use chatbots when your agents are so busy the response time will be longer. In these cases, your can program the bot to say “hi, an agent will be available in 3 minutes, would you like to wait or can I help you in the meantime?”.

Besides, you should always ask for feedback from your conversations. When problems are resolved, ask the customer if they can help you by answering a few quick questions about the service they just got.

This is good to see what worked, what needs to improve, and to get to know your consumer better as well.

Summing up: why you need a Live Chat for 2021

Now, I just wanted to make a short list that will give you all the reasons to acquire a Live Chat for your marketing plans for 2021. That is:

  • increase customer retention
  • enhance customer engagement
  • improve your marketing strategies with proactive service
  • increase your revenue by using Live Chat for sales strategies
  • give the best customer experience
  • improve your brand image
  • increase lead conversions

How to choose the best Live Chat software

“What do I need to consider to choose a Live Chat?” is a question that may have crossed your mind. And I will tell you what you need to know.

Features

What are the features the software has? Does it offer proactive chat? Does it have visitor monitoring options? Will your customers be able to use it through mobile? This is all important to ponder when you’re choosing a Live Chat solution for your business.

You shouldn’t go with the software that has more features. It’s necessary to check their quality and make your decision based on real facts.

Security

Will your information be safe inside this software? What about data from your customers? The last thing you want is a data leakage incident.

Make sure to be hiring a trustable Live Chat system.

Support

Since this tool is likely to suffer updates and renewals along time, you might encounter some difficulties to use it. Will there be a support team to answer your questions when that happens?

It’s very important to receive support. If they keep you waiting, it means you’ll be keeping your own customers waiting. And we don’t want that, do we?

Pricing

I wouldn’t say the price itself is the most important factor, but the cost benefit your chosen system has. Is it worth its price? How long will it take for the tool to “pay itself”? What’s the ROI for the software?

Have these questions answered, even if through projection, and put it to weight on your decision.

Customization

Not everyone takes this into consideration, but I find it crucial. Will you be able to put your own twist on the looks of the chat? Personalize colors? Use logo and create agent profiles?

Remember to learn more about this element before making your final decision. Keeping your brand’s image and visual identity on the chat is a matter of consistency.

Reports

Is the software you have your eye on checking all of these items? Here’s one more you need to rock off: team productivity reports.

To understand how your service is going, what needs to be done and who needs more training can be read in monthly reports the Live Chat system can offer you.

That is, considering the software you chose actually offers this feature.

How about you give a chance to Arena Live Chat?

At Arena, we can offer you everything that has been talked about and even more. To learn more about our solutions, simply go to our products page.

However, if you are already interested and ready to start reaping our Live Chat’s benefits, go ahead and start your free trial period. You’ll have up to 14 days to learn all about our tool, how to use it, and see how fundamental it is to your business.

Customer Service Strategies to amaze your customers

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52% of consumers say they have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience. You know Customer Service Strategies are essential, but do you know what makes them remarkable?

That’s what I want to tell you here. First of all, a good customer service strategy implies having a satisfied client base. For that, you need to create a good relationship.

And what defines these relationships? It can be how you communicate, the information you make available on your pages, the means of payment, you offer, and more. Every interaction you have with a customer classifies as part of the customer service you offer.

It’s clear that there’s a big connection with customer experience, right? Moreover, I’ll still talk in more detail about:

  • what is customer service
  • what defines good customer service
  • how offering good customer service will make your business thrive
  • what does it take to create a good customer service strategy

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Here’s the definition of Customer Service

When we talk about customer service, we’re talking about the relationship between a brand and its consumers. Generally, people consider mostly communication as the most important factor, but services include much more.

That is, including the buying experience, how easy is it to go from the product page to the checkout cart, how fast the shipping is, the variety of payment options, etc.

The title “customer service” is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s still good to make it as clear as possible in order to create a better customer service strategy for your company.

After all, when you provide good customer service, you provide a good experience, thus you create a happy customer. That’s the ultimate goal for any business!

These are the characteristics that will establish good Customer Service Strategies

Provide easy communication channels

Overall, email and telephone were, and still are, two very popular ways for the customer to reach the company. But, recently, Live Chat is becoming the new favorite channel of consumers. That’s because it’s easy to use and it’s fast service, a combination everyone loves.

Companies that offer a Live Chat service are more likely to have comeback customers, so what are you waiting for? Go and install this feature on your eCommerce now!

Give fast responses

On the same note, and one of the reasons for the Live Chat success is that customers want to have their problems dealt with in real-time. I’ll paint a picture for you because the similarity is big:

You go in-store to ask an attendant about a discount that wasn’t consummated on your purchase and when you get there there’s a huge line! Are you happy to have to face that? Most likely not, right? Nobody is thrilled when that happens, people don’t want to wait to have their problems solved. They want to arrive, ask, get answers, and go home.

So, when customers go online, it’s the same feeling. If people don’t like to wait in person, why would they like it online? It just makes sense that you provide instant communication for your customers.

Offer high-quality service that actually solves a problem

Still on that matter, and adding in some praiseworthy information: it’s worth nothing to give fast responses and not resolve the customer’s problems. Did you know most people would rather wait a couple of minutes to have their questions answered than to have quick, shallow answers?

It’s okay if you say “just a minute, I’ll check that information” and take that minute to actually do something that will help the customer. Way better than giving a 7-second response saying that you can’t do anything about that problem, or giving a robotic answer followed by a “was that helpful?” question.

That being said, our next topic is highly related to this subject:

Work on personalization

There are a few things that make customers angry. For example: being thrown from agent to agent trying to solve a problem, taking too long to solve a problem, and being treated like just another person.

The truth is people want to feel close to the brand they buy from. So, if you put an effort into making communication (and the entire experience) more personalized, results will pay off. Of course, there must be a protocol or model answers to be followed, but giving that personal touch when sending these messages to the customers is crucial.

Know about the product

There are three main teams inside a company that are directly related to the customer: support, sales, and marketing. For that reason, all of them should know every little thing about the company’s product.

Let me explain each one a little bit better:

  • The support team needs to be able to answers questions about problems happening with the product, as well as show benefits and use cases when required
  • The marketing team needs to know the product to show the audience appealingly what they will be acquiring
  • And the sales team needs to know the product to sell it and close more deals.

Do you see the importance of everyone knowing the company’s product or service in detail? Great! Let’s go to the next topic:

Stay positive & use creativity

In general, customers respond to the attendant’s tone of voice and feeling surpassed in the conversation. So if you keep a positive attitude even when a person starts a conversation angry or upset, it’s likely that things will turn out okay in the end.

Besides, attitude is highly related to the use of creativity. It’s not only the marketing sector that needs to use this trait to improve their work, but this is also a skill required for support and sales too.

This way, when you go out of your way to solve a problem for your consumer, they will reward you with loyalty and commitment.

Allow self-solving problems

What does “self-solving problems“mean? Well, many customers prefer and try to look for the answer to their problems on their own before contacting an agent. Because of this, you should make it easy for customers to do that whenever possible.

FAQs, most asked questions, mini-tutorials, and so on, all of these will help your customer to deal with their issues. So, allow them to find information within a few clicks and they will be more satisfied with your service.

Listen to the consumer

When you pay attention to what the customer is saying you will be able to know them thoroughly and start to anticipate their needs. It’s quite common that a person comes with a specific question, but they really want to know something entirely different.

So it’s essential to listen to the consumer and find the best way to be proactively helpful. That means, to help them before they even know they need help. Whether that is by sending a newsletter, a discount, or a small gift.

Deliver as promised

This is definitely of the top 3 most important rules of customer service strategy: deliver as promised. The bottom line is you can’t say you do or have something and then let down your public because that wasn’t true.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant, saw the perfect plate on the menu, and when you asked for it the waiter said they ran out of an ingredient and weren’t producing that dish for the moment? That’s a huge disappointment and I’m sure you’d think twice before going back to that restaurant again.

 It’s because of these not-so-small details that are essential, of ultimate importance, that you deliver what you promise.

How offering good customer service makes an impact on your business

Loyal customers, longer lifetime value, increase in conversions, lower acquisition costs…is this enough for you, or do you still want more benefits for your company? I’m just naming some of the main advantages of improving your customer service strategy because let me tell you, THERE IS more to it.

For instance, people are always posting on social media about their likes and dislikes, and it’s easy to be noticed for either good or bad customer service. New customers will take into account what other people are saying about your brand, especially if they’re close friends, family, or influencers.

I’d also like to mention here that a bad experience is hard to come back from. If a customer gets poor service, he or she will talk about it and people will avoid buying from your brand. This way, the efforts you make to acquire new customers will most likely increase because of it.

Additionally, when you provide good customer service, you may be getting a great opportunity to increase your prices a little bit. In fact, most customers would rather pay more for better service, than to have lower prices and no help at all from the brand when they face a problem with the product.

Now, I could keep going and talk even more about the impacts on your business, but I’d still like to tell you more about what it takes to deliver the best customer service. So, carry on:

Everything you need to deliver great customer service

To know how to create an efficient customer service strategy, you need to first know what this is and what makes customer service stand out as excellence. So far, we have already got that covered for you so far. Then, you need to understand what attributes will help you provide in this matter.

For starters, you need to work with Customer Data, can’t get away from that these days. And why do you need it? To know who is your consumer. That’s another factor that you need to deliver the best customer service in the market.

When you know who you’re talking and selling to, it becomes easier to create content, offers, and promotions that will genuinely impact the customers.

One thing that will help you gather and organize customer data is the Customer Data Platform, it’s the most complete tool there is out there for this purpose. It gathers, selects, and stores all sorts of data. Even more, it can help you create a persona profile, segmentation groups, and so much more.

Finally, you need to hire a good Live Chat platform. As mentioned earlier, having this type of close and instant communication with the customer will give you lots of positive reviews. That way, you can hire the best Live Chat service around because there is no doubt it will give you a great return on investment.

Where to get the best tool, you ask?

Arena has thousands of clients all around the world that use our solutions, including companies like Fox Sports, Microsoft, and Sony Music. 

We are offering a FREE TRIAL PERIOD for our Live Chat. Did I get your attention? Well, then start using our tool and see for yourself your new results!

How to enhance Customer Experience with Live Chat

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Do you ever feel like your company could have an upgrade in Customer Service? Or that you could sell more and drive more engagement if Customer Experience was a little better on your website? Trust me, this feeling is more common than you would expect.

Companies might have good services and products, but the truth is “good” is not enough in today’s competitive scenario. Most brands rely on standardized approaches and interactions that are impersonal and time-consuming both for your customers and Customer Support agents.

Think about the “love brands” worldwide: Amazon, Apple…you name it. They all have great Customer Experience (CX) and go beyond the basics in customer support. Actually, most of them offer one thing in common: Live Chat. 

Live Chat can be used across many steps in the Customer Experience, whether to answer questions about products and services or to assist customers after a purchase. Another trend is to use Live Chat proactively to display personalized messages and offers while the customer is browsing. 

In this post, you will learn all about Live Chat and how to use it to drive customer loyalty and more business results.

What is Live Chat?

You probably might have bumped into Live Chat on websites before. Live Chat is a messaging tool strategically designed for Customer Experience in real-time. It is usually placed in the Customer Support section or as a discrete pop-up button that shows up while you’re browsing. 

Some people might confuse Live Chat with a Chatbot, but there is a slight difference between them. While Chatbots work only with automated answers, Live Chat is a tool used by human agents instead. 

Some Live Chat sessions can start with automated messages, like greetings and basic introductory questions, but then the customer is routed to an actual human professional. 

Live Chat can serve many purposes, from Customer Support to Sales and Marketing. The classic way of using it is in Customer Service, where the approach is mostly reactive. That means the Customer starts the conversation in order to solve some problem.

Live Chat can also be used for cross-selling and retargeting tactics in a proactive way – when your agents start the conversation, not the customer. 

Why should you pay attention to Live Chat software? 

Live Chat has become the new standard in Customer Service, and companies from all segments have relied on it to provide high-level engagement and humanized interactions with customers. From e-commerce to media brands, Live Chat offers the possibility to optimize companies’ communication channels and improve customer experience (CX) altogether.

Think about your company. It is likely your brand has multiple direct and indirect Customer Service touchpoints, from email to social media, for example. Sometimes it might be hard to manage requests coming from different places in a fast, efficient way. 

Live Chat can be a cure for this pain point and act as a hub for customers, allowing them to solve doubts and requests quickly without having to leave to other channels. From a business standpoint, Live Chat can help you give life to omnichannel strategies and optimize service costs.

Imagine answering (and solving!) customer requests in a single chat session with Live Chat, with no more back and forth emails and lengthy calls. Trust me, your support agents and customers will thank you!

What about the outcomes of adopting Live Chat? You can expect an increase in support team productivity and Net Promoter Score (NPS) —  which ultimately means more customer loyalty and good referrals. 

Other benefits of Live Chat include:

Non-intrusive communication

Live Chat allows your brand to be available 24/7 in a non-intrusive way, once the customer can call out for an agent whenever he needs without being flooded by emails and phone calls. 

Personalization

Personalized messages are key if you want to engage customers and surpass their expectations. With  Live Chat, you can serve a more personal approach instead of serving customers with standard and automated messages. In fact, research shows that people prefer to talk to real human agents instead of chatbots.

By integrating Live chat with other platforms, such as CRM and Customer Data Platforms, your support team can know the customer’s name, buying history, and more! With that type of information in mind, it gets much easier to personalize messages and fasten problem resolution.

Productivity

Do you want to offer top-notch customer support and still make customer service more efficient? Live Chat is the perfect tool for that. To get an idea, a Live Chat attendant can handle 6x more customers at once compared to a phone agent.

Some brands take this optimization to the next level and categorize Live Chat options for different types of customer issues, just so the customer is routed to the right agent before the conversation even starts. We’ll show you a few use cases later on in this post.

Customer Support and Live Chat: statistics behind this combination

If you are considering a Live Chat tool for your company, you probably want to quantify the type of results you can get from it. You will need to justify the investment to your boss, after all. 

We have gathered some data that clarifies the potential of Live Chat for your business and customer experience:

  • While e-mails get 61% of customers satisfied with Customer Service, and phone calls get 44%, Live Chat gets up to 73% of customers satisfied.
  • 63% of customers said they are more likely to return to a website if Live Chat is available.
  • 83.1% is the average customer satisfaction rate globally with Live Chat.
  • When asked about what made them happy in Live Chat support, 79% of customers said they like this type of support channel because of the real-time component, while 51% said it was because they can multitask while talking to the support agent.

Live Chat Examples

There are many examples of companies that are using Live Chat in a creative way. Some are more sophisticated and others are simpler, but all serve the same purpose: improve customer experience and customer service. Let’s look at a few successful cases below:

Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger’s plugin is perhaps one of the most common Live Chat integrations for businesses. It was launched in 2017 as a way to connect brands to their customers via Messenger, which is widely used by the audience. 

By opting in via their Facebook account, customers can ask questions and communicate with brands, without having to reach out via the company’s website. Facebook’s plugin, along with tools like WhatsApp Business, aligns with Facebook’s strategy to provide more and more services dedicated to corporate communication management.

Facebook Messenger’s integration can represent an important source of insights for companies, and even a good channel to start Customer Service procedures. The bad news is that the plugin’s interface is very basic and doesn’t allow much personalization from CX managers. 

Besides, your company cannot let multiple agents work from the same Facebook account, use response templates, or assign a conversation to the most suitable support agent in your team. While Facebook Messenger can be a great tool to start a conversation, you can take better advantage of it by combining it to more complete, integrated Live Chat tools.

Amazon’s Live Chat 

Amazon is certainly one of the global benchmarks when it comes to Customer Experience and Support. It embodies the “customer-centric” mindset, and Amazon’s Live Chat reflects that as well. It is no coincidence Amazon has one of the best customer service ratings in the industry.

The company offers a variety of support options: customers can browse through FAQs lists about popular topics, quick solutions, and a community forum. That is very helpful not to waste agents’ time with common questions that are easy to solve in a self-service model. 

Then, if customers can’t find the answer to their doubts in Amazon’s knowledge base, they can reach out to a real person via Live Chat. 

Users are routed to support specialists according to different request categories. How it works: 

the customer can choose the topic he wants to chat about (memberships and subscriptions, ordering and shopping preferences, Login & Security, etc) before being redirected to a specialized agent. 

By narrowing down the customer’s case, Amazon optimizes Live Chat sessions and agents can go straight to the point in the conversation, improving the overall customer experience. The combination of real-time service and FAQs provides a great balance, just so the customer can solve simple doubts on his own and reach out to human agents for more complex issues. 

Apple’s Live Chat

Known for its great service design, Apple is also on the list of companies that use Live Chat for Customer Service. On Apple’s Support Page, the user can choose the product or service he is having issues with.

From there, the customer can choose to talk via phone or Live Chat to an Apple expert who specializes in their exact area of request. Everything happens within Apple’s website, so the customer doesn’t have to send requests through other channels and wait too long to solve their problems.

That’s a great example of how intuitive and specific Live Chat can be, helping solve customers’ unique needs in a convenient way.

Arena’s Live Chat: why you should test it to enhance your Customer Experience strategy

After showing a few use cases to inspire you, let me introduce you to Arena’s Live Chat, one of the most complete tools in the market. It might be difficult to choose a Live Chat tool that best suits your needs, but Arena has a flexible and intuitive enough to help any company, no matter the size and complexity.

Let’s explore some of  Arena’s Live Chat features:

  1. Multifunctional Live Chat

Our Live Chat tool can be used in different formats to better suit your engagement strategy. Arena offers the classic one-on-one Live Chat tool, used in Customer Support and proactive Sales, but also a Live Group Chat tool that can be used for specific events or permanent discussions, like a community forum.

If your brand generates proprietary content, for instance, it can use Live Group Chat to engage audiences in blogs and Live Blog pages, for instance.

  1. Simple Setup

Setting up Arena a Live Chat tool is super simple, all you have to do is paste a line of code on your website to embed it to your page. Our tool also works both on desktop and mobile pages, including Google AMP, and supports more than 17 languages. 

  1. Scalable

Arena’s Live Chat can help you handle Customer Service no matter the scale of your company. Our enterprise-grade platform will handle chatrooms with thousands of hundreds of concurrent users, so your support team doesn’t have to worry about the stability and availability of the program. 

  1. Customizable

Our tool allows you to choose where you want the Live Chat to be displayed on your website, and also customize it to match your brand’s identity and design.

  1. Social Features

Unlike other cold Live Chat tools, Arena’s Live Chat tools are somewhat similar to messaging apps customers are used to.  It has social features to make communication between your agents and customers more dynamic and personal, such as emojis and avatars. 

  1. Control Dashboard

Our Live Chat tool offers a complete dashboard to help your team control chat rooms. With such a dashboard, your agents can see which customers are online, moderate, and delete messages if they need to. 

Try a free live chat now

If you think it is time to adopt Live Chat support in your company, why not start with Arena?  The best part is that you can try our Live Chat tool for free! Click here to access our free trial and upgrade Customer Service in your business.

How to build an eCommerce strategy with Live Chat

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The best retailers use Live Chat tools to inform and engage online shoppers. This post will show you how to use it on eCommerce and give examples of successful use cases.

Have you ever thought about what defines conversion on eCommerce? Most online retailers believe that the checkout process defines sales. However, many variables lead the customer to the purchase, so the conversion process involves much more than the checkout page.

Build an eCommerce strategy with Live Chat

In a messy and pulverized eCommerce market, where online brands are often competing for customers’ attention, it can be a struggle to lead users from research to purchase.

An excellent strategy to maximize sales and engagement could be through Live Chat. Look at the most successful online services – from marketplaces like Amazon to digital retailers. You’ll see that all of them have a Live Chat window in their webpages and applications, where they offer the possibility to talk to customer support or sales agents.

Beyond just a convenient button, Live Chat serves as an essential touchpoint with the customer across the decision-making process and after the purchase. It’s as if brands are transposing the classic tagline “How can I help you?”, the cliché of physical retail, to digital spaces (but in an organic, non-intrusive way). 

In the age of immediacy, digital marketers and salespeople need tools that help them quickly respond to customers and solve problems more dynamically. In that sense, Live Chat can be a great option for companies who want to professionalize their eCommerce operations.

In this post, we will explore:

  • The concept of Live Chat
  • Examples and use cases of Live Chat in eCommerce
  • Specific benefits of Live Chat for eCommerce
  • Using Live Chat beyond Customer Support

What is Live Chat?

Live Chat is a tool that allows customers to comment and interact via messages directly on a company’s website, usually while browsing products and viewing content. The Live Chat is generally presented as a window in the page’s corner or as a pop-up button. It can sometimes be hidden in the customer support section.

Live Chat makes communication between brands and their customers much quicker and organic as it emulates messaging platforms. That is crucial for brands that want to build more personal connections with clients. 

Also, Live Chat allows users to speak directly with companies, without having to reach them by email or phone, for instance.

One of the main benefits of Live Chat is that it allows multiple interactions in a single web interface, which is vital in the age of digital multitasking. According to a study from E-Consultancy, 51% of customers prefer Live Chat to other channels precisely because it allows them to multitask. 

Sales and customer success teams typically use live Chat to provide customers with support and personalized answers in real-time. It can be used by companies in different sectors, from marketplaces, online retailers, entertainment, and media companies. What varies is the person behind the live Chat.

If you run a media company, you might have editors commentating live events and sales reps behind the Chat offering subscription services. Now, if you run a fashion eCommerce, for example, you might have a customer support professional offering to help with product and shipping information, and so on.

Why using Live Chat in eCommerce

When it comes to the experience in eCommerce websites or marketplaces, customers want more than great products and a neat catalog curation. Interactivity has become a key element of shopping, and customers want the chance to have their problems and doubts solved all at once if they can. 

That’s where Live Chat comes to play. It can boost your eCommerce strategy, improve customer experience (CX), and give your teams more instruments to convert customers and gather business insights.

Let’s explore a few benefits of Live Chat for eCommerce and how it can enrich Customer Experience.

Fast customer support

Online retailers know that the longer they take to answer a customer, the less likely they are to convert and stay loyal to the brand. The truth is nobody likes waiting for replies through email, SMS, and other support channels.  

Because Live Chat is instantaneous, it’s a lot more attractive as a customer support tool. A recent research suggests that it takes only 42 seconds for a live chat support staff to solve a customer query, which makes the customer experience (CX) much better. 

Human touch

In the age of automation and chatbots, a human approach to customer experience might actually give you extra points in the relationship with customers. Even though automated emails and chatbots can be a blessing for optimizing customer support, studies show that users want to interact with humans whenever possible.

The 2019 CGS Customer Service Chatbots & Channels Survey found out that 86% of American customers prefer to talk to humans over chatbots. With Live Chat, you can give customers personalized, warm assistance in an easy, user-friendly way. Besides, much like at physical stores, consumers are more likely to buy when they are treated well.

Non-intrusive

Unlike other communication channels, Live Chat shows customers that the brand is available to help without disturbing customers’ attention. This non-intrusive approach is crucial for a customer-centric strategy and shows respect for customers’ time, which might help them reach a purchase decision.

Integrated shopping experience

If your company sells products online, you know how complex communication with customers might be. Let’s say a customer just checked out of your website and realized he registered an old shipping address. 

Traditionally, they would have to leave the website and reach out to the right customer support email address or phone to solve the problem, something that could take a couple of days to resolve.

Live Chat, however, can remove this type of friction by integrating the communication cycle in real-time, which is smarter and more effective than executing communication through different channels. 

Besides, E-consultancy shows that 29% of customers want to be in control of the conversation with brands, and Live Chat gives them that. 

Improve Conversion rates

While offering customers rapid solutions to their queries, Live Chat can speed up the decision-making process and improve conversion rates. A study by Emarketer found that more than 60% of consumers would return to a website that offers Live Chat, and more than 79% of consumers feel that having quick answers impacts their buying decisions.

Make personalized offers

While Live Chat is great for solving transactional problems in eCommerce (related to payment and orders, for instance), it can also be a great channel for offering product recommendations and special discounts. A study by ATG Global Consumer Trend found, for instance, that more than 90% of customers think Live Chat was helpful for them while shopping online.

By offering customers personalized recommendations or coupons, brands can use Live Chat to get them out of “research-mode” and convert them into actual buyers. Ecommerce players can also use it to upsell frequent customers. 

Optimize customer support costs

Live Chat represents a cheaper and effective way to communicate with customers from an operations standpoint if compared to call centers. With Live Chat, you don’t have to put your customers on hold, and a few representatives can talk to multiple customers at a time. 

Increase Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Every marketer’s goal is not just to convert customers, but to make them satisfied and loyal to your brand, so they always come back. Ultimately, customer satisfaction is related to customer convenience. 

An eDigital Research survey found that 73% of customers who used live chat support for online shopping were highly satisfied and willing to come back for future shopping. Another study by J. D. Power discovered that overall customer satisfaction was higher when customers used the Live Chat window than in other channels. 

Examples of Live Chat in eCommerce and digital platforms

If you look at the digital landscape, you will see that many highly regarded brands have used Live Chat to enhance their websites. 

Still having trouble visualizing how Live Chat can be incorporated into eCommerce? Let’s see how successful digital platforms and retailers are using it. 

Amazon

One of the global references when it comes to marketplace and eCommerce experience is Amazon. They offer Live Chat options that allow users to chat with customer support specialists about account details, orders, and shipping processes. 

The customer can choose the topic he wants to chat about (memberships and subscriptions, ordering and shopping preferences, Login & Security, etc.) before being redirected to a specialized support agent. 

PlayStation

Can you imagine how many customer queries PlayStation, from Sony, receives in its customer support channels everyday? Probably loads of them. In order to make communication with game players easier, the company has Live Chat rooms linked to its webpage, whereby customers can chat with support agents about things like account access, game purchases, and charge refunds. 

Apple

Among the companies that offer great user experience is also Apple, which has a real-time customer support team on Live Chat. Through the chat, customers can arrange a chat with an Apple expert who specializes in their exact question. Everything happens within Apple’s website, so the customer doesn’t have to worry about sending and waiting for emails and phone calls. 

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Shoply.tv

Shoply.tv is a project which was developed collaboratively with Arena, unifying a great live video solution with a powerful live chat tool. Even though some features are currently being developed, the results are already used by more than 2,600 clients around the world, and we’re still counting. Shoply used Arena Live Chat to develop a live video shopping solution that enhances customer experience by enabling the best sales and engagement tools.

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How to derive even more value from Live Chat in eCommerce

So you have learned that Live Chat has many benefits for your eCommerce operation. However, in order to effectively sustain its value, you have to manage it wisely. Here are a few tips to take advantage of Live Chat beyond customer support.

1) Share customer feedback with marketing teams

Insights from Live Chat can be useful for other departments, not just customer support and sales. Online stores can share customer feedback with marketing teams as well, just so they can make changes in their strategies according to what’s best for your audience. 

2) Integrate Live Chat leads to your CRM and Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Live Chat tools can also provide information to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and be integrated into Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).

You could choose to add CRM contact information to your Live Chat tool, integrating valuable customer information that can be used by support and sales professionals during sessions with customers. 

By having all customer information available, you can reduce friction and improve conversions. After all, your team should focus on answering your users’ needs, without spending too much time searching for customer information.

A CDP, on the other hand, can use Live Chat information to determine customer profiles, products bought by single customers, and the value generated by chat conversations. It can also integrate Chat information to data generated by other channels and customer platforms.  

That way, your teams can follow up with the created leads, having access to easy conversion reports and reducing the friction between different data platforms.

3) Understand where users come from

One of the challenges for eCommerce players is to understand how their marketing efforts connect to online conversions in a granular and accurate way.  Talking about Live Chat, how can they track what led to a conversion in the Chat?

Some Live Chat tools allow you to connect the dots between chat sessions and the marketing sources that led the customer to the chat – whether it was a campaign, a keyword, or landing page.  You could integrate your Live Chat to Google Analytics for instance, and see a bigger picture of chat conversions and Adword campaigns that led customers to chat sessions. 

Such data is important to determine if your marketing channels are actually bringing people to your page – and how they are connected to your Live Chat. That allows companies to optimize campaigns more accurately according to the insights.

Want to try Live Chat on your eCommerce?

If your company still hasn’t adopted Live Chat support, maybe it’s about time to change that!

Not sure where to start? Arena has one of the most robust Live Chat tools in the market, and the best part is that you can try it for free! Access our free trial and get the best out of the Arena Live Chat.

10 Tips to offer Powerful Black Friday Customer Experiences

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2020 has been historic for many reasons, reshaping business behavior for good. Learn how to create a powerful Black Friday customer experience and get more revenue.

An expressive slice of the market hasn’t been able to deal with all this properly, whether because they don’t know what to do or they’re not doing it right.

People were forced to develop new buyer habits, overloading the internet with demands, and even better services. That is why customer experience became a required foundation for every company right now. More than ever, there’s no more space for those businesses that don’t put their client first.

And with Black Friday just around the corner, your success and profits depend on how much you are taking into consideration in improving your customer experience. That is the only way to stand out among all competitors on this huge battlefield. 

The impact of COVID-19 on Black Friday 2020

The worldwide pandemic caused a rupture on why people are purchasing something, how, when, where, and many other question-points. And you are just moments away from finding out all the answers.

Since some of the commercial barriers were taken down, shopping seasons also had their frontiers extended. People are already thirsty to live better experiences. So, why not anticipate Black Friday opportunities? Create scalable strategies to start increasing revenue right now.

You don’t have to wait until Black Friday reaches its peak to put out their great deals and offers. By that, you may get more buyers and compete with a less stuffed market.

1. Make It Easy For Customers To Reach Out To Your Company

Regularly, an expressive amount of customers would rather drop off the buyer’s journey at any point than spend their time trying to figure out an issue by themselves, even if the answer is right in their faces.

On Black Friday, that amount reaches sky-rocket levels, proving how frustrating and financially damaging a poor customer experience can be. 

It is essential to keep in mind that customers try to reach out to the company most of the time because they need something, not because they simply want to. 

And when you are not available, or there is no clear path to communicate with you, what kind of image do you think you’re building for yourself? So, there is no other way. Be available to your audience wherever and whenever they need you. Provide easy points of access, quick responses, and pro customer service.

Regardless of the reason, they need to reach out to you, having multiple communication channels ensures they will be able to contact you in their most convenient way. Also, different entries of communication give you multiple perceptions of customer behavior. 

2. The importance of Being Omnichannel

Customers can be anywhere, literally! Having multiple entry points is vital to your brand. And since you can’t predict which channel they are choosing to contact you, you better provide excellence in all of them.

When you have multiple communication channels, you combine their features into your strategy, delivering a personalized customer experience. As we mentioned before, digital has no border. 

Crossing different touchpoints create a narrative for your campaigns, promoting better engagements wherever your prospect may be.

Take a look at these omnichannel features your customer could get:

  1. Buy a product online that isn’t available in-store 
  2. Purchase on e-commerce and collect at the store 
  3. While collecting, being introduced to products or services to increase their experience 
  4. After the customer abandons their shopping cart online, send an email with a special condition to get their purchase interest back
  5. Get a shipping notification via email and SMS

3. Live Chat for Black Friday

It is very likely Live Chat becomes the best and most efficient communication tool during 2020’s Black Friday. Due to its practicality, Live Chat allows customer service to be in-depth, making it easier to deliver tailored responses quickly, creating a greater customer experience. 

Live Chat provides a more reliable way to build a customer relationship, creating momentum to strategically approach them while they’re browsing on your website. By that, you add much more value to the experience itself and your product or service, increasing the chances of making more and better deals.

This ultimate marketing and sales tool only takes three simple steps to start working:

  1. Create and personalize your Live Chat room
  2. Paste a single line of code on your website
  3. Start chatting and converting new customers

4. Using Engagement and Interaction in Real-time

In 2019, 61%; of Black Friday’s transactions were via mobile. This year’s anticipation is a significantly larger number, mainly because physical stores will not be operating normally. The best way to serve prime services and delightful experiences is having Live Chat strategically imputed on your website pages.

Your marketing and sales teams will be able to track customers through every step of their buyer’s journey on your website. See in real-time what pages they are browsing on, what product or service they are looking for, make proactive approaches to add more value to their experience to make upsells or cross-sells.

You can get your Live Chat service right now for free! Click here, build your own, and start using within minutes.

The Importance of Being Available 24/7

You can use data analysis to understand the best hours your customers are more likely to make a purchase, but you can not predict for sure. A 9 to 5 open store is not enough anymore. And if you are not available when your audience wants you, they’ll certainly spend their money on your competitors.

Understand that when you are offline, you are losing opportunities. And you don’t need to spend on bigger investments or hire new team members. You just need to optimize your services with Live Chat. A Live Chat agent can handle 6 to 7 simultaneous conversations. 

By creating shifts or calls, you can have customer service available day and night, always ready whenever your customer decides to reach out to you. 

5. Live Blog for Black Friday

Keeping the audience engaged is a very common challenge on digital right now. The user’s navigation journey is quite fragmented, and even though there is interesting content available, there are not enough motivations to keep them browsing and spending time on the website. 

The reason why people are conditioned to go to their social media whenever they want to engage is that most websites don’t offer spaces for conversation. Interactivity and timing are the keys to customer retention. 

When you Live Blog, you open a space for discussions and ideas exchange. A Live Blog is sort of a live text that can be integrated into websites, providing real-time coverage of an event. “Liveblogging allows you to post regular updates to your blog as an event is taking place, rather than writing about it just afterward.” 

Imagine a product launch or a live event with an open chat to interaction. That creates a community sense, reinforcing you and your website as a reference when it comes to a specific topic or niche. 

To get better results with your Live Blog, design a plan to monetize interactions and set some prospection approaches. By that, your brand will be responsible to offer a powerful customer experience during Black Friday 2020, keeping the audience spending more time –– and, maybe, more money as well –– on you.

6. How to Enrich Data Using Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Black Friday is also a time to convert leads more rapidly without that obligatory need to walk them through every stage of the funnel. It is also a time to be discovered by customers who have never heard about your brand before. The way to succeed in both situations is knowing your customers better than they know themselves.

Building a customer profile during the interaction to understand their tastes and preferences is great. But what if you could know exactly what they want before the first contact is settled? How impressed do you think your customer will be when you anticipate their desires and needs?

Through Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can automatically gather information about your audience and transform them into a precise profile, just like a photograph. CDP is a single place that collects data from all your touchpoints, organizing them by similarity and relevance, providing you a complete background history about your most ideal audience.

During a shopping season like Black Friday, you can’t have small distractions or time-consuming demands. All eyes must be on your customer! CDP not only collects, analyzes, and executes data but also optimizes your work, increasing the chances of making higher profits.  

CDP spares you from manually gathering and decoding customer data to get insightful ideas. The answers you need will now be readily available on the Customer Data Platform. All you have to do is decide how to turn that into the best sale approach.

7. Paying close attention to different types of audiences

Customer experience is a 100% induced process. There must be no random decisions or actions. Everything should be data-based and built focused on your real audience. For Black Friday, you must know who are the ones more likely to look up for your products or services?

Each segmentation has particular characteristics that must be, more than ever, applied to the strategy. For example, early 20s to mid 30s prefer going mobile for their shopping experiences. By knowing that, you can open Live Chat rooms to translate the convenience, speed, and high-quality customer service they need.

8. Proactive approaches

But you should keep your current customers in mind as well. Do you know it is 5x easier to retain a customer than acquire a new one? That’s because they already know you and how good what you have to offer is. So, how about trying an upsell approach? Maybe a great deal for a lifetime subscription? Use their preferences to increase the value of the experience. 

9. Selling experiences, not products

The pandemic has repurposed the meaning of buying. It still has all those well-known reasons from before. Although, the strongest one, this time, is emotion.

Customers are now purchasing things looking for ways to improve their lives and take back some of the value that was lost during the 2020 issues. Products and services are craved to create a parallel reality to distract people from everything that’s going on in the real world.

And how can your brand touch that point? How to sell feelings and emotions combined with what you have to offer? You must deeply understand your audience and become the personification of what they need.

Excel that, and you may get lifetime customers who will carry gratitude for how you were responsible for bringing back meaning to their lives.

10. Best Free Tools To Create A Powerful Customer Experience

Now that you’ve got all the strategic panorama of creating a powerful Black Friday customer experience, it is time to supply your marketing and sales teams with the right tools!

  1. Live Chat: Within 3 simple steps, you can have as many Live Chat rooms as you want on your website. First, create and personalize your Live Chat; second, paste a single line code on your website; third, start chatting with your audience. 

Click here to get Arena’s Live Chat For Free.

  1. Social Stream: You can now monitor the social web and find the best user-generated content on social media. Engage with the right audience!

Click here to get Arena’s Social Stream for free.

  1. Live Blog: Empower your team to publish news as they happen, in real-time! It works on any website and you won’t need coding. 

Click here to get Arena’s Live Blog for free. 

  1. Customer Data Platform (CDP): Apply your efforts to convert new customers instead of wasting time analyzing a messy and disconnected data pile.

Click here to get Arena’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) for free.The solutions are not over yet! Arena has a complete platform to provide what you need to make 2020’s Black Friday the one to remember. Click here and learn more!

31 Live Chat Black Friday statistics you must see

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Live Chat is becoming one of the most powerful tools for online customer service. If your eCommerce is still not using it, you might want to take a closer look at your strategy.

With Black Friday right around the corner, businesses are looking for new methods to make them a crowd favorite. In other words, they want to get all the attention, increase their conversions, and make peers “eat dust.”

To make this happen, they are betting big on live chat tools. With them, communication becomes easier and more accessible to consumers. They can use it while also performing other tasks and the conversation with an actual person makes live chats a customer preference.

Of course, these are only two among many other aspects that make this type of chat so popular. However, even though it has grown over the years, most companies still use it mainly for customer support. However, it goes way beyond that. Live Chat can also be used for marketing and sales.

How Live Chat can impact your business

That being said, you can already imagine how it will impact your entire company. If you use it the right way, you’ll see results coming quickly.

Nonetheless, it’s more than increasing sales and revenue, a Live Chat is a tool to assist in building your brand in the market. For instance, you can add value to your product and brand by having a personalized conversation.

People don’t want scripted messages that make you sound like a robot. That’s the whole point of acquiring this tool: bring a human agent to the formula.

Moreover, a Live Chat will show you a wide variety of benefits and it can indeed improve your business outcomes. 

We can prove it:

Live Chat statistics you need to know

Is there something that makes us more convinced than numbers and facts? 

For this reason, we brought here some of the main Live Chat statistics that will show you just how important it is.

Customer support and satisfaction

Since customer support is one of the main reasons companies acquire this tool, let’s start by evaluating some data on it. In addition, we’ll be looking into customer satisfaction levels as well.

  • While emails get 61% of customer satisfied, and phone support 44%, the Live Chat gets up to 73% of customers satisfied.
  • 63% of customers said they are more likely to return to a website if Live Chat is available.
  • 83.1% is the average customer satisfaction rate globally with Live Chat.

Even more than that, when asked what about Live Chat that made them so pleased with the service

  • 79% of customers said they like this type of chat because of the instant messages
  • 51% said it was because they can multitask
  • 46% affirmed it’s the most efficient method for support and overall online services

Lead generation & Conversion rates

Brands can use live chats with the purpose of increasing their conversions. As a matter of fact, with Black Friday getting closer, it has been brought up as a strategy eCommerce should use to improve their businesses.

So, what do researchers say about the topic? First of all:

  • The dominant number here is 40%, which is the increase in conversions a brand can have by using Live Chat

Then, we have some info on lead generation that is super valuable:

  • Even if a customer doesn’t use the live chat feature right away, 63% of them are more likely to return to the website because of it
  • Proactive chats, initiated by the company, had an optimistic result of 94% of customers satisfied with the experience
  • From all consumers that had a live chat session, 38% of them purchased because of the conversation they had
  • In general, 85% is the average possibility of chatters becoming customers. This means that from each visitor that uses your Live Chat solution, they are 85% more likely to buy something than the ones who don’t have a session

Customer experience and engagement

When it comes to customer experience, we can imagine that it will be good once we’ve seen how satisfied most people are with the Live Chat feature. Still, there are numbers related to this matter that are quite impressive too:

  • In order to have a better CX, 80% of consumers said they would pay more for a product
  • On the same note, 49% of customers already experience bad CX and decided to change companies because of it

What about customer engagement? What does that even mean when we’re talking about live chat? Well, it’s mostly an expression to elucidate the expectation of the consumer regarding the relationship (and experience) they will have. 

For example:

  • You should always offer a service with sales reps since 40% of customers want the help of someone to attend their needs faster than they would do it alone

Moreover, some facts that you should know on the subject are that:

  • The main reason for customers to change brands while making a purchase is because of service-related problems
  • On average, when customers are pleased with your service, they share a positive experience with about 11 people 

Revenue stats

Obviously, while live chat increases conversions, it also has an impact on your business’s revenue. This is what we’re talking about:

  • A 48% increase in revenue can happen per chat hour
  • Companies that offer live chats are more likely to have returning customers, in fact, 51% of consumers said they would come back to repurchase when an eCommerce offers this feature

In addition, you should also have an idea of how many businesses are using live chat for sales purposes, and that is:

  • Most B2B businesses, a total of 85%, use this tool for sales
  • In a similar statistic, but regarding B2C businesses, 74% of these use live chat for sales

Furthermore, Live Chat is mainly used for customer support: 

  • 66% of B2B businesses use it for this reason
  • 67% of B2C companies have Live Chat for supporting customers

Response time

It’s common to see response time as a benefit and/or differential of the Live Chat, so we had to bring some statistics about this issue too. Curiously, response time is not the preference of most customers. Check this out:

  • While you might think that fast answers are a must, 95% of customers said they prefer high-quality service over speed
  • At the same time, 59% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when they get answered in under 1 minute

This information is really useful so you can come up with a Live Chat strategy for your company. And here are two more to complement your data:

  • Long waits make 24% of customers frustrated
  • There is a number of chats that end up unanswered when customer-initiated, a total of 16%, and the reasons for abandonment can vary from a long wait to a bad customer service

Live Chat vs. Chatbot

With the rise of live chats operated by human agents, a “war” seems to have started between this eCommerce feature and the already popular chatbots. Both tools are used for the same purposes. The main difference is the one we’re mentioning here: you talk directly to a real person in a live chat.

To help you make a decision between live chat and chatbot, here are some facts:

  • 67% of customers have already used a chatbot to get customer support in an eCommerce
  • Up to 80% of routine questions (that is, questions that are frequently asked by customers) can be answered by a chatbot

Additionally, some chatbots are built with AI technology. This means the more they attend clients, the more they will learn and perform better. They are also easily scalable, can answer multiple customers instantly and at once. Overall, they deliver a great customer experience.

On the other hand:

  • Many consumers prefer to be attended by live agents than by a chatbot, even if they are AI bots. The magic number: 70% of customers said they like a Live Chat better

That says a lot, right? Even though businesses can reduce their costs by around 30% with a chatbot, Live Chat is a tool that will give you a competitive advantage. Moreover, Live Chat is a low-cost solution and the ROI is excellent.

The future of Live Chat

According to these facts and statistics, it’s possible to notice some trends and understand how Live Chat will grow and be used from now on. In 2020, we can already see that:

  • 85% of customer support activity happens without a human agent, in other words, through chatbots
  • However, 71% of businesses believe that Live Chat will become the main channel of communication by 2021

Further on, an interesting fact is that:

  • 62% of customers expect live chat for mobile, which means that this feature will most likely be optimized for that

In addition, nowadays the results are great, proof of that is:

  • After one year of using Live Chat, 43% of businesses said they had a better understanding of their consumer
  • Meanwhile, 79% of businesses reported they had positive influences on sales, revenue, and customer loyalty because of the Live Chat tool

We can conclude that this tool is more than a simple feature, it’s a powerful weapon to make your eCommerce thrive by increasing conversions and revenue through live conversations.

Biggest trends for 2020 Black Friday

The year 2020 came with a huge impact on the business model of many retail stores. Because of the pandemic, eCommerce became even more popular, and not only people but several brands had to adapt to this “new normal” situation.

Now that Black Friday is near, everyone’s started to wonder how things would work this year.

All in all, there are some trends this year that might not have gained attention previously, but the truth is, eCommerce has been a huge hit on Black Friday for a few years. The difference now is that there are more people going online for their purchases, so there’s the need to offer better customer service and experience.

That’s why the first trend we’re talking about here is the attention to the customer journey. On average, people start to search for products and offers about 6 weeks before Black Friday day itself.

So, that’s also about the time you should start presenting campaigns and special offers to make the customer start their journey early and work their decision to purchase throughout this time.

Because of that, it’s also expected that sales will start earlier this year as well as they will last longer. Some brands are thinking about starting right after Halloween, but there are some planning to launch campaigns even prior to that. 

It’s really up to each strategy and how your company will work to achieve goals for the Black Friday event.

Still in that matter, stores are thinking about longer sales. But what does that mean?

Since retailers will have an early start, there’s no reason to end offers before the day of Black Friday, unless products go out of stock. Thus, we will see products on sale for a longer period of time.

However, something that is likely to happen a lot this year are flash sales. In other words, it’s a type of sale where companies offer a limited special offer for their consumers. A notification is sent a few days ahead and people can only buy during a shorter period of time.

Remember when we said 62% of customers expect Live Chat to be optimized for mobile?

Well, on the same note, customers mainly do their online shopping through mobile. For that reason, many brands are adopting mobile-only offers. That is, communicate offers and deals through SMS or notifications, for example, allowing consumers to buy straight from the link you sent.

An incentive some brands are working on this year is free shipping. Since many people suffered a negative economic impact due to the pandemic, it might be a necessary provocation to make them buy during the Black Friday period. Therefore, free shipping costs are being highly adopted this year.

Get ready for Black Friday with a Live Chat

All of Black Friday trends can do even better if you use a live chat tool on your website. You can use it to proactively answer customers’ questions, initiating the chat with an offer they can’t miss.

If you want to help your eCommerce achieve its goals, this is the way to go. Increase your conversions by acquiring the Arena Live Chat – you can try it for free NOW!

How Amazon boosted user engagement at Prime Day

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Amazon Prime Day is arguably the most profitable day of the year for eCommerce. In 2020, analysts believe sales rocket by 49 percent, hitting $10.6 billion and over 200 million products sold.

As Amazon keeps expanding its global reach – only this year, Prime Day happened simultaneously in 19 countries – some markets presented significant opportunities for affiliates that generate revenue from promoting Amazon’s products.

According to Amazon, Brazil is the country with the fastest growth in Prime subscriptions. Currently, the benefits plan already has active users in 95% of the country’s municipalities.

Tecmundo and Amazon Prime Day

Tecmundo, one of Brazil’s most popular websites for technology news, with over 20 million unique visitors, leveraged the Amazon Prime Day to boost its revenue and bring massive traffic to their website.

As I wrote before, Globo – the world’s second-largest TV Network – used the Arena Live Blog and Live Chat to cover the NBA finals and increase user engagement and revenue. 

Tecmundo went one step ahead and combined Arena’s products, Amazon Prime Day, and its own digital domains to create a unique environment – comparable to a real store on a Black Friday, with many customers interactions, conversations, and of course, sales.

To explore Amazon Prime Day as much as possible, Tecmundo created a hot site to cover all of Amazon’s best deals in real-time with continuous updates and ongoing discussions about the offers, products, and genuine customer reviews. The hot site basically consisted of Arena’s Live Blog and Live Chat.

Why Live Blog?

A live blog is, put simply, a curated news feed that can be integrated into websites, providing rolling coverage of any event in real-time. It combines content that is usually fragmented across the web, complementing articles and written stories with images, videos, tweets, polls, live group chats, and other digital assets that can be embedded in the feed.

Live blogs are widely used for breaking news coverage as they consolidate reported information to content pieces from outside the news organization, like user-generated content and inputs from social media. 

It’s a transparent format in which journalists can update and attach multiple formats in an easy-to-digest layout. 

What is a Live Chat?

A Live Chat is a communication platform that enables users to engage in relevant conversations with each other. Live Chats are commonly used to cover live events to provide an instant communication channel to users of a specific website, for instance. 

A Live Chat is the ideal option for companies that want to provide real-time interactions for customers who are browsing their website, learning about their products, and analyzing the brand’s reliability, for example.

Getting creative with Live Chat and Live Blog

On its hot site created exclusively for Amazon Prime Day, Tecmundo utilized a remodeled Arena Live Blog and Live Chat.

The Live Blog that usually displays conventional news updates in real-time, was configured only to show product offerings and hot deals from Prime Day. The Live Blog was automatically curating these deals from Amazon’s domains. 

The Arena Live Chat was also integrated into the same page. Potential buyers could talk between themselves, question the products’ quality, share personal experiences, reviews, and ask Tecmundo’s dedicated support team questions about the merchandise.

How Arena CDP can refine your sales strategy 

Today, marketing leaders need robust tools to optimize and personalize every interaction while engaging users to build significant and lasting relationships.

Arena offers the full solution to engage, understand, and turn your users into paying customers.

The Arena Data Platform enables publishers like Tecmundo to regain control of their user’s data. 

Our solution offers a unified 360-degree view of users, gathering data from different points of contact (multiple platforms) and enabling companies to find out who their potential customers are, how they behave, when they are ready to buy, and why.

The Arena Customer Data Platform consolidates all the customer data on a comprehensive dashboard to build an authentic unified profile.

Publishers can then analyze customer behavior in real-time to build unique customer experiences to increase engagement and sales on their platforms. 

You can also create experiences like Rogers Media, Fox Sports, Globo and many more. Start a free trial now and see for yourself.

How to use CDP to improve your conversion rates

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Customer Data Platforms can fuel your marketing efforts, help you improve customer experience, and maximize ROI. This post will teach you how to embrace CDPs on daily marketing activities to potentialize results.

Marketing leaders’ job has become more challenging year after year with the rise of new content channels, connected devices, and sales formats. In a competitive scenario, acquiring and retaining requires more than just a good strategy. We live in the age of tailor-made communication, where there is no room for basic and generic marketing anymore.

No wonder companies from all segments have searched for ways to make their marketing approach more personal and cost-effective at the same time, which requires the right tools and best practices for data management. 

A report from the CMO Council shows that marketers worldwide see the execution of a data-driven strategy as their primary challenge to have a unified view of customer experience (CX) across different touchpoints, according to 38% of marketers consulted for the study. 

According to 30% of respondents, another challenge is to abandon customer data silos, which make data inaccessible across the organization. Even though marketers can count on CRM and DMP platforms to understand some of the customers’ engagement and pain points, the problems above can only be truly solved through robust data management platforms. 

In that sense, digitally mature marketers have specifically reached out to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) in order to understand customers better and offer them a better customer experience.

Ultimately, a CDP can boost brands’ ROI and help them maximize conversion rates. This post will explore the concept of CDP, how it differs from other data platforms, and how marketers can use them to improve their results. 

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What is CDP?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software that centralizes customer data from different data systems and customer-facing platforms. It collects quantitative and qualitative information from diverse touchpoints with customers, offering a friendly interface that allows companies to access customer data from different departments easily. 

Customer Data Platforms combine customers’ demographic data, buying history, hobbies, transactional data, social media preferences, interactions with call centers, navigation data, and more. 

They work mostly with first-party data, crossing information from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Data Management Platforms (DMPs), and customers’ direct interactions with your brand through support channels, payment methods, social media, and different devices. 

The idea is to combine Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and build a unified view of individual customers – also called Unified Customer Profiles. Since the data match is consistent across different platforms, data is even more reliable than other platforms. 

A few examples of data collected by CDPs:

  • Purchases
  • Renewal dates
  • Customer and product value
  • Abandoned baskets
  • Stage in the conversion funnel
  • Products and categories searched and browsed
  • Store and website visits
  • Content and channel preferences
  • Social media interactions
  • Customer support interactions
  • Email opening rates
  • Lifestyle preferences
  • Contact information

These are just a few examples. The possibilities are endless! In reality, your company can choose to plug in any data system to the CDP. All data can then be stitched to the unique customer profile, allowing marketing teams to work on segmentation and personalization.

Typically, CDPs are used with five purposes in mind:

  1. Improving customer identity resolution
  2. Data cleansing and enrichment
  3. Data Centralization and integration
  4. Audience data analytics
  5. Marketing segmentation and optimization

CDP vs. CRM vs. DMP: beware of the difference

The marketing industry has long relied on acronyms to refer to metrics and tools. The data management realm is specifically pervaded by similar acronyms that comprehend entirely different things, such as CDP, DMP, and CRM.

Most marketers will agree that it is essential to manage data through one of these: Data Management Platforms (DMP), Customer Data Platforms (CDP), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). However, not all of them might understand how each of them works.

All three platforms share a list of common assets: they aim to establish a Single Customer View (SCV), use data for audience activation, and offer reporting, analysis, and optimization tools. Such platforms will often work side-by-side, but CDPs, DMPs, and CRM show many differences despite their similarities.

We have already explained how CDPs work, now let’s explore how DMPs and CRM systems compare.

Data Management Platforms

The DMP is mainly used to drive advertising campaigns, relying almost exclusively on anonymous data from cookies, devices, and IP addresses. It captures generic data such as when users visited your website and how long they spent on the page.

Then, such navigation information is used to target ads according to customer behavior to reach customers who match the brand’s target profiles – a process called probabilistic matching. A DMP can monitor campaign strategies, identify conversion points and personalize campaigns according to them. 

Main differences with CDP

  • CDPs work with both anonymous and known individuals, while DMPs work almost exclusively with anonymous entities and unknown customers
  • In CDPs, database updates happen in real-time, while DPMs only allow scheduled database updates
  • CDPs are based on historical integrated customer records, which means you can store customer data for however long. DMPs, however, store data for shorter periods, usually up to 90 days (a cookie’s lifespan) to target ads and build lookalike audiences
  • DMPs are used only for managing digital advertising, while CDPs can be used across an entire organization, including for sales and customer success

Customer Relationship Management

CRM systems are typically used by sales teams, storing personal information from known customers – such as contacts, demographics, transaction data, notes about customers made by sales, CRM, and customer success teams. 

Softwares alike are used to track leads, understand the sales pipeline, and for driving customer engagement. CRMs don’t store anonymous user behavior.

Mains differences with CDPs

  • CRMs aren’t built to ingest large volumes of data from different sources, like CDPs
  • CRMs only analyze personal data from known customers, such as name, age, and contacts, but not navigation behavior – something tracked by CDPs
  • CRMs do not connect customers’ actions through different channels and devices, and so is not able to follow the customer journey like a CDP

Using CDPs to improve marketing ROI

Successful marketing campaigns don’t embrace just a few channels, but a complex constellation of touchpoints with your audience. Acting over this constellation, however, can sometimes be challenging. A survey from the Harvard Business Review shows that only 3% of marketers believe they are able to act on all of the customer data they collect. Another 21% say they can act on very little of it. 

As we discussed earlier, CDPs can play a significant role in connecting customers’ fragmented journey. But beyond that, they can help you make smarter investment decisions, improve ROI, conversion rates, and Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). 

Also, CDPs can automate and eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks from marketing professionals’ routines, making daily marketing activities more agile.

A few ways a CDP can improve business results:

Accurate personalization

In the age of recommendation algorithms, customers expect personalized experiences everywhere. Marketers should avoid at all costs making wrongful recommendations or serve ads that are not relevant within the user’s journey. 

Because CDPs break data silos and integrate marketing efforts across different channels, they help brands to deliver the right messages, at the right time and in the right channels for customers. For instance, you could exclude users that recently bought your products or those who are not likely to engage with your ad campaigns from your targeting strategy, focusing on users who are likely to engage.

Better budget allocation equals better leads

CDPs allow brands to acknowledge what products customers show interest in, their purchase intent, and how likely they are to churn. They can also find out their favorite interaction channels and stage in the customer journey. From there, it gets easier to allocate ad dollars and improve content strategies on every channel.

As a result, CDPs help attract more qualified leads, optimize marketing budgets, reduce customers’ acquisition costs (CAC), and improve conversion rates.

More qualified data

Marketing leaders are shifting their attention from second and third-party data to first-party data. As privacy and compliance regulations become more consolidated, organizations increasingly seek to work with their own, integrated data – something Customer Data Platforms can help them with.

Driving data-driven sales

Customer Data Platforms can help sales teams upsell or cross-sell products based on customers’ recent purchases or search intent. By having access to enriched, accurate data, salespeople can better design retargeting and churn prevention campaigns through email, mobile, and other channels.

More autonomy and agility to marketing professionals

Depending on other departments for reports and insights can be time-consuming and unproductive for marketing teams, since not everyone is on the same page about marketing needs. CDPs are useful to many areas within a company, but every team can shape their use according to specific goals while having access to all kinds of company data. 

According to CMO Council, 67% of marketers believe speed is one of the primary benefits of data-driven marketing, resulting in quickly executing their campaigns. Through CDPs, teams can scale marketing efforts and get new processes started faster. 

Benefits from CDPs don’t stop there. In this post, you can check 20 ways CDPs can be used in marketing.

Integrations and key assets of CDPs

In a fragmented media and advertising landscape, marketers want tools to give them more control over events in their channels. CDPs allow companies to integrate different systems and deploy data with customers’ profiles to many marketing and customer relationship platforms. 

Most Customer Data Platforms typically offer connector marketplaces where marketers can set up integrations in just a few minutes. However, the depth and amount of possible integrations can vary according to the CDP you choose.

Areas of integration offered by CDPs usually include: 

  • Advertising: Integrations to DSPs, Facebook Ads Manager, Google Marketing Platform, and more
  • Analytics and AB Testing platforms: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Optimizely, MixPannel, etc
  • Email and marketing automation tools: MailChimp, Hubspot, Sendgrid, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, SMS tools, and others

When connected to other systems, CDPs can deploy customers’ profiles to marketing tools (also called delivery platforms), enabling the planning and distribution of campaigns and personalized messages.

The amount of tools companies will connect to their CDPs will depend on the specifics of their business. Large businesses are likely to connect more tools than small companies, for instance.

Before adopting a CDP, be prepared

Yes, a Customer Data Platform can do wonders for your marketing strategy, but you need to feed it for it to work properly. CDPs won’t effectively integrate customer touch points if they can’t truly access data about the whole customer’s journey.

If you want a seamless, functioning CDP, it has to be fueled with multiple data records from clients – not just a few sources. A Customer Data Platform should gather historical data and freshly-collected data about their interactions with your brand. 

That’s how it can create a satisfactory customer profile and identity resolution (when the system matches records from different data sources and connects them to single customers). But why do you need identity resolution?

A customer might interact with your brand through several channels and devices, but sometimes CDPs will interpret different data points as if belonging to other customers.

So, not having enough data or having insufficient data prevents you from having the perfect picture of single customers, resulting in wasted investments, bad customer experience (CX), and poor marketing results.

In a nutshell: the more data sources your CDP can gather, the better. If your company only provides a few data points, your unified customer view might not be so complete, resulting in gaps in customer experience and poor conversion and engagement results. 

Want to learn more about CDPs?

As we have seen, Customer Data Platforms are complex, and so is the process of choosing the best one for your company.

If you want to dig deeper into the benefits of CDPs for marketing, we recommend downloading Arena’s “Customer Data Platform 2022” ebook. In this complete ebook, you will find more valuable information about how CDPs work and how they can be incorporated through every step of marketing.

If you want to learn the specifics about Arena’s CDP, feel free to reach out to one of our consultants.

Customer Data Platform: where audience data and sales strategy meet

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Are you having trouble improving conversion rates and connecting customer insights from different touchpoints? A Customer Data Platform helps you understand your audience in a granular way and enables you to craft better campaigns and product offers.

Understanding customers always required brands to look at their audience through different lenses – whether through other marketing channels, relationship platforms, or customer segments. On the verge of Big Data culture, however, just having a fragmented view of your audience is not enough anymore. 

What drives sales is the ability brands have to deliver a cohesive customer experience (CX) across different channels, which is only possible by fully understanding channel correlations and cause and effect connectors along the audience’s touchpoints. 

These days, people interact with brands more often than ever before, and so making sense of different interactions is a lot more complicated than it once was.

Recent research by Ascend2 and Research Partners consulted more than a thousand marketers and found that 43% see data integration across different platforms as one of their main goals. In contrast, 37% wish to enrich data quality and completeness.

No wonder executives are investing more and more in their technology stacks: one-third of industry professionals believe it’s essential to have the right technologies for data collection and analysis, according to a study by Digital Doughnut. Currently, 44% of marketers say they already have data management platforms.

But amongst all data platforms available, the Customer Data Platform is undoubtedly the best you can have if your goal is to understand your audience better and drive more sales. We’ll show you why!

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What is CDP? And how does it work?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software that unifies customer data from different data systems and customer-facing platforms. It combines customer’s demographic data, buying history, social media and content preferences, call centers, and customer navigation data. 

Once implemented, the CDP acts as a 360º data solution: it collects, filters integrates, and analyzes customers’ data in real-time. 

CDPs can ingest structured and unstructured data from Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM), Data Management Platform (DMPs), customer support channels, eCommerce websites and apps, payment systems, social media, etc. They also track behavior across different devices.

By acting as a hub for many data sources, the Customer Data Platform allows marketers to build a holistic view of single customers and their pain points. 

But how exactly do they organize so much data? Well, CDPs rely mostly on first-party data so they can determine the so-called Unified Customer Profiles, which are profiles based on information from real customers and prospects.

That makes the data match consistent across different platforms, and hence the audience insights end up being much more reliable for marketers.

Check out some practical examples of data collected by customer data platforms:

  • Transactional data: order details, customer and product value, renewal dates, abandoned baskets, stage in the conversion funnel
  • Behavioral data from web and mobile: Products and categories browsed, clicks, store visits, interaction data, number of pages visited, etc
  • Profile data: Contact and opt-in data, psychographic data, details about channel and content preferences, lifestyle, etc
  • Brand Relationship Data: Email interactions with customer support, social listening insights, social media comments, etc

The end-to-end role of a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

In today’s competitive landscape, marketing executives are expected to keep track of all customer interactions and connect marketing efforts to other departments, such as sales and customer success, to provide customers with a satisfactory customer experience (CX).

The rush for data management optimization is seen clearly by the CDP industry’s growth in recent years. According to the Customer Data Platform Institute, the number of CDPs available in the market doubled from 2017 to 2018. Now, there are more than 50 CDPs in the industry worldwide.

The truth is that CDP can be an asset for every department within a company, working as an end-to-end solution to enrich customer experience. We’ll soon explore how brands can use CDPs to drive sales, but first, let’s explore CDPs’ overall benefits for companies. 

Breaking Data Silos

CDPs integrate data from multiple departments, which encourages different teams to collaborate and speeds operational routines. With a CDP, marketing, sales, customer experience, and support teams can be on the same page regarding customers’ needs.

Automating marketing workflow

Because they automate a lot of the data integration and analysis, CDPs make the lives of marketing professionals a lot easier, freeing them from repetitive work and allowing them to spend more time in strategic planning. 

Speeding up decision-making

As data processing happens in real-time in the CDP, it also makes it possible for companies to easily spot changes in customer behavior and act upon them while quickly sharing relevant insights with different teams.

The power of CDPs in driving sales

As we pointed out, CDPs are an excellent liaison point for different departments and can be at the heart of customer experience management. But to what extent can CDPs contribute to final sales? 

There are many ways CDPs can directly or indirectly improve conversion rates, drive customer loyalty, and decrease churn and bounce rates. In fact, a report from Forbes Insights highlighted that 44% of organization leaders believe the Customer Data Platform is helping them drive customer loyalty and increase ROI.

We have made a list of 11 ways CDPs can help you drive sales while also better understanding your customer base. 

1) Know your customers across multiple devices or channels

The mandatory philosophy among marketers is that they should reach their customers on the right channel, at the right moment, and with the right messages and products. To do that, they need to let go of assumptions and understand exactly how users interact with them across different channels and devices.

With all such information concentrated in the CDP, marketers can tailor better experiences and advertising segmentation across devices, increasing campaign success chances

2) Accurately track shopping events

A CDP is a great tool for retailers and eCommerce as it tracks customers’ buying behaviors and relevant transactional data in significant volume. CDPs allow them to keep a consistent record of the products customers added to the cart, the duration of checkout and order completion, abandoned carts, and other information that is crucial for online operations.

3) Improve pricing 

Collecting data from many sources – from your eCommerce website, app, or even physical stores – CDPs help you clarify how much customers are spending and how much they are willing to pay for your products according to their stage in the customer journey, search, and navigation patterns. 

CDPs can also be connected to your supply chain systems to help you adjust costs and manage the relationship with suppliers, which are aspects that often impact pricing. With such information updated in real-time, you can be more assertive in your pricing strategy.

4) Offer personalized discounts and product recommendations

Having a holistic customer profile at hand also allows brands to offer clients personalized discounts and product recommendations that ultimately can turn them into loyal customers.

A study by Salesforce shows that 57% of customers are willing to share their data to exchange personalized offers or discounts. In comparison, 52% will share their data in exchange for product recommendations that meet their needs.

While knowing customers in detail, companies’ teams can offer precisely what users need to advance in the sales funnel – whether it is a discount, a free trial, reviews from peers, or a personal approach from the support team.

5) Connect physical and digital shopping experiences

For retailers that also operate offline, a CDP can connect insights from online and offline systems, which is often a challenge for companies looking forward to addressing omnichannel experiences. A survey from the CMO Council found only 7% of respondents said they are always able to deliver real-time, data-driven experiences across physical and digital touchpoints.

With a CDP, brands can offer better customer experience from the website to the physical store – and vice-versa – increasing sales opportunities.

6) Be quick to react to customers interactions

Being quick to answer customer’s signals is also crucial for both customer acquisition and retention strategies. Still, many marketers struggle with the amount of real-time insights they can access and act upon. 

Research published by MediaPost, commissioned by technology consultancy Vanson Bourne, shows that only a minority of marketers feel they can immediately react to online customer interactions. According to the study, only 43% act quickly over customer behavior in the pre-purchase stage, 38% during purchase, and just 35% in the post-purchase phase.

By providing CRM, sales, and marketing teams with a continuous data stream, CDPs can make customer data more actionable. Isn’t that the point of having so much customer data? 

7) Prevent churn and cart abandonment 

Retail managers and online marketers are often investigating why customers abandon carts or churn after a few purchases. A CDP can give you deep insights into what stands in the way between your customers and the checkout.  

It helps you spot gaps throughout the entire customer journey (and not just in specific channels) that might be leading customers to give up purchases. Are there problems with website usability? Is your customer support too slow? 

By figuring out what is wrong, your team can work on fixing these gaps and segmenting churn prevention campaigns to attract customers back. 

8) Optimize Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Conversion Rates

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable. 

With the Customer Data Platform’s assertiveness, companies can better streamline marketing segmentation and customer success efforts, thus optimizing results related to Conversion Rates (CR), Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), and Customer Lifetime Value.

9) Qualify your leads

One of the best aspects of CDP for sales is that it allows you to qualify your leads better and nurture the relationship with customers across their entire lifecycle. Not only it supports marketers in optimizing strategies to attract qualified customers; it also gives you the necessary information to engage with customers who are ready to buy. 

A study by Forbes shows, for instance, that 53% of marketing executives are using CDPs to engage with existing customers’ needs, increasing the likelihood that they will become recurring clients and the chances of upselling them. 

10) Enhance predictive marketing

Predicting customer behavior and preferences are what helps giant retailers like Amazon to drive sales. This marketing technique, which determines the probability of success of different marketing strategies, is essentially fueled by high volumes of customer data, which only a CDP could support. 

Armed with a CDP, data scientists and marketing analysts can gather data from several sources and apply predictive models with a great accuracy level.

11) Improve attribution models

With so many touchpoints with the audience, it is often difficult for companies to determine accurate attribution models and discover which channels drive more sales. According to Google, almost 80% of all transaction value involves at least two marketing channel interactions – a number that can be much higher depending on your business’s complexity.

The Customer Data Platform can optimize the attribution framework since marketers can send attribution data to the CDP and have a more accurate view of campaign performance.

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Why CDPs are more complete than other data management platforms

So you have learned the many benefits that CDPs can bring to the table. Many leaders still ask themselves if they should ditch their existing data management tools for a CDP. What has to be clear for marketers and sales managers is that different data platforms don’t need to exclude each other. 

A Customer Data Platform can potentialize the outcomes of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and Data Management Platforms (DMPs).

In a survey by The Relevancy Group conducted in 2018 with US executive marketers, about 6 in 10 respondents said they were integrating CRM data into their CDP. 

From a digital advertising perspective, CDPs can make the work of Data Management Platforms a lot more precise as well – with at least 29% of marketers feeding CDPs with digital advertising response data.

Although CDPs, DMPs, and CRM systems share some similarities, they all have different purposes within a company, with CDP serving as a primary data hub to make your teams more confident in responding to customers’ needs. 

Want to become an expert in CDP?

If you plan to purchase a CDP for your company, the next step is to check out the platforms available in the market and consider which one is the best fit for your business goals.

If you feel like it is time to learn more about CDPs, we invite you to download our eBook Customer Data Platform: the future of marketing and sales.

The eBook will give you details about CDPs’ features, how they work, and how they can be incorporated into your marketing and sales strategies. We hope you enjoy it!

30 reasons to use Customer Data Platform for eCommerce

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Information is king, and businesses are constantly on the lookout for tools that can provide a richer understanding of their customers and the journey they embark upon. Customer Data Platforms (CDP) have emerged as crucial tools, particularly for the burgeoning realm of eCommerce.

30 Reasons To Use A CDP

Here’s a deep dive into why CDPs should be at the heart of your digital strategy:

1. Seamless Automation

Trust in a CDP to transform complex data streams into easily digestible and actionable insights, automating processes that would otherwise drain resources.

2. Eliminating Operational Silos

Facilitate efficient information-sharing across departments with a CDP, creating a unified vision for your business.

3. Enriching the Customer Journey

Harness CDPs to unlock a comprehensive understanding of your customer’s interactions, ensuring you’re always delivering value.

4. Intelligent Marketing Segmentation

Harness the power of AI to sift through varied data, empowering you to create precisely targeted marketing campaigns.

5. Tailored Communication

Today’s consumer demands personalization. With a CDP, ensure every touchpoint resonates and builds loyalty.

6. Crafting Memorable Experiences

Use data-driven insights to craft seamless experiences, both online and offline, enhancing customer satisfaction.

7. Metrics that Matter

Deploy CDPs to get an eagle’s eye view on the efficacy of your eCommerce strategies, refining them as you grow.

8. Real-time Relevance

In an ever-changing market landscape, CDPs ensure you’re always a step ahead, thanks to real-time data updates.

9. 360-Degree Customer View

Break down the barriers between online and offline data to truly understand your customer’s journey.

10. Unified Customer Profiles

Leverage a CDP to get an in-depth understanding of your audience personas, refining your marketing strategies.

11. Stand Out from the Crowd

Responsive data-driven strategies ensure you’re always ahead of the curve, a must in today’s competitive marketplace.

12. Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value

Invest in understanding your current customers’ needs and behaviors, ensuring they remain loyal advocates.

13. Merging Digital and Physical

Achieve true omnichannel success by merging online and offline data streams.

14. Refining Offerings

Listen to your customers. Let their feedback guide improvements in your products and services.

15. Attracting Ready Buyers

Precision-target your messaging to capture those on the cusp of purchase.

16. Deep Customer Engagement

Leverage CDP insights to truly engage customers across every touchpoint, building loyalty and trust.

17. Enhancing Marketing Tools

Amplify the efficiency of your current marketing tools by integrating them with a powerful CDP.

18. Spotting and Addressing Anomalies

Ensure your strategy is always on track by identifying and rectifying any anomalies.

19. Anticipating Customer Behavior

Predict future customer actions and behaviors, refining your strategies for maximum impact.

20. Optimized Operational Efficiency

Drive efficiency by streamlining data processes, freeing up resources for strategic action.

21. Strategic Pricing

Ensure your pricing remains competitive and appealing by gauging customer sentiment and market trends.

22. Effective Supplier Negotiations

Utilize historical data to drive better deals and collaborations with suppliers.

23. Never Miss Feedback

Continuous monitoring ensures you’re always in the loop, adjusting strategies based on real-time feedback.

24. Minimize Cart Abandonment

Dive deep into the reasons behind cart abandonment, ensuring your checkout process is as smooth as possible.

25. Addressing Checkout Drop-offs

Investigate and rectify factors causing customers to abandon checkouts, maximizing conversions.

26. Tackling Churn Rates

Unearth the reasons behind dwindling customer loyalty and rectify them, building a lasting relationship.

27. Boosting Conversion Rates

Harness data insights to optimize your site’s usability and messaging, driving higher conversions.

28. Driving Organic Traffic

Strategically leverage live content and social media to naturally increase site visitors.

29. Elevating Social Media Engagement

Deepen customer relationships by engaging them on social platforms, turning followers into loyal customers.

30. Embrace the Future

Data is the future of marketing and sales. Integrate a CDP into your strategy and ensure your brand remains at the forefront.

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For a comprehensive understanding of the transformative power of CDPs, delve into Arena’s ebook Diving Into The Customer Journey In Live Ecommerce. The insights within can be the key to unlocking the full potential of your eCommerce strategy.

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